New York Times, Tuesday, April 25, 2023

One night back in high school, I was at a concert, and I went to the concession stand to get a Dr Pepper. Looking at the hand-lettered menu on the wall, I confusedly asked what "special ties" were. In my defense, the gap between the "L" and the "T" was quite excessive. And that very minor embarrassment survived in my memory long enough to become the basis for a crossword puzzle theme 20 years later.

I would have preferred to use some longer theme answers, but the pool of words that fit the formula was somewhat limited. I think short theme answers are more constraining on the grid structure than long ones, because all the fill is supposed to be shorter than the shortest theme entry in that same direction, which limits block placement options in the rest of the grid. But I liked having CAMPINESS and MOUSETRAP together, TAMPA on the OCEAN, and PARSECS and INERTIA representing the science category in symmetrical spots. Special thanks to my mom Metah Boroughs for being my test solver!

One of my other hobbies is making music. If you're interested, you can find my albums "Under the Farthest Skies" and "An Incandescent Christmas" on Spotify and most other music streaming services. Thanks!

Parsing long words into shorter ones for kooky results is a tough genre. There have been so many in the history of crosswords — one just a month ago — that you have to do something special to get noticed. I appreciated Grant's effort here, always separating out words that rhyme with "rise" but are spelled like "skies" — both words so appropriate when you're trying to elevate above the pack.

I admired the tightness of the theme set. What other -IES words could you play on? Although there are CRIES, FLIES, FRIES, SKIES, and SPIES, I could make only one of them work, with BEL / FRIES. And by "work," I mean "generate idiocy." [Mesopotamian god gets cooking?] supplies many cries.

CAMPINESS next to MOUSETRAP is such a vivid pairing. My son has the board game, and we look like we're in the cringe-worthy '80s commercials when we play. Are these adjacent long Downs worth the price of CMS (and SEPT / USD / AMOI in the opposite corner)? I'm on the fence, like that plastic guy waiting for the Ball of Damocles to fall and send him flipping out.

It's not an easy adjustment to clean things up, though, since the grid is already at the maximum of 78 words. Using fewer black squares in the middle of the grid would have freed up a pair to redeploy around those two big corners, but that's a huge change.

It's tough to make a tried-and-true genre noticeable, but I appreciated Grant's effort to tighten things up with an extra layer.