TO-DO LIST (ABRIDGED)

I originally titled this puzzle "Multitasking" because certain words serve more than one purpose and the individual tasks would overlap — much as they seem to do when one is multitasking. But alas, not everything survives the edit.

At any rate, it's a complex theme idea today ... one which took many more hours to flesh out than a simple rebus or letter subtraction would. (Just try to create your own string of three overlapping tasks: PUSH A BUTTON, BUTTON A SHIRT ... oops I'm stuck). Plus, I don't particularly enjoy solving those "conventional" forms I mentioned — and that's just me — so I never make them. Instead, I push really hard for something new and unexpected — the sort of theme I myself would most enjoy solving. Lets hope that's what solvers got today.

I appreciate the innovation Joe has been bringing to Sunday puzzles. Today's title was spot-on perfect — ABRIDGED should be read as A-BRIDGED, i.e. the phrases are bridged by connecting As.

Neat how Joe found so many "X a Y" phrases that are both in the language and are linkable. RUN A LIGHT A FIRE A SHOT was especially colorful, each one of the three "to-do list tasks" strong phrases in their own right.

The only one I paused at was MAKE A CATCH, as its clue felt off. [Play baseball] is so generic; something like [Field a fly] would have been better (although, see Will's very valid point below — super difficult to clue this phrase!). The bigger issue is that I debated for a long time whether or not MAKE A CATCH is actually in-the-language or not. "The outfielder is going to make the catch!" feels fine. "The outfielder is going to make a catch!" … not so much.

Loved the start of the puzzle, two clever clues kicking off the upper left corner. [Group of companies] had me thinking about big business and corporate takeovers, but it meant military companies in the MARINE CORPS. And [Pod part, perhaps] threw me off, entering OKRA. Clever, a "pod" being a group of ORCAs.

On that MARINE CORPS note, I also appreciated Joe adding to the solving experience by giving us some big corners, with such snappy entries like TV ANTENNA and KARATE KICKS. Getting down to 138 words is awfully difficult to do cleanly — I didn't care for seeing two plural names so close to each other (MARCS and KARENS) — but that's a very small price that I'm willing to accept in order to get those big corners. And there are enough KARENS in the world; not like it was a plural EZIOS or something.

I would have liked the clues amped up in difficulty, as for most of the themers I was able to drop them in without a single crossing answer. But overall, I enjoyed seeing something completely different in my Sunday puzzle.