New York Times, Thursday, May 7, 2015

Thank you bloggers for the inspiration for this puzzle which came to me in the summer of 2012 after reading one of your posts complaining about the overuse of certain 3 and 4-letter words in puzzles! I remember looking at the list of words and thinking it would be fun and a bit rebellious to take one of those words and include it as many times as possible in one puzzle — as a rebus. I figured, if a certain word had been used 800+ times in the past, then what's another 14 times more?!

I zeroed in on the overused prefix ECO from the list when I saw how many interesting words and phrases had imbedded ECO letters. (Yes, even KATI(ECO)URIC!). I also thought I could tie in the ECO words to some kind of an Earth Day-related revealer. It was only when I was writing my cover letter to Will, however, that I had the sick realization that Earth Day 2013 was going to fall on a Monday — not exactly a rebus friendly day! After my puzzle was accepted in January 2013, I looked ahead on a calendar to see when Earth Day would fall on a Thursday and was dismayed to see that Thursday got skipped altogether due to Leap Year in 2016 — so I wasn't really sure when I would see my puzzle published.

I was thrilled to get the email last week saying that my puzzle would be published today — not Earth Day — but just a typical Thursday in May. After all, "Going Green" is a practice we all should be adopting on a daily basis, not just on one day. Enjoy!

Rebus today, the green ECO trigram getting "reduced" into single squares. And if you squint, the ECO squares almost look like they're in the shape of a footprint. The heel on the right side, the instep in the middle, the toes on the left? No? Squint harder!

I'm glad Will held onto this one for a while, as once I uncovered GOING GREEN, it made me think back to Liz Gorski's CARBON FOOTPRINT puzzle. Multiple constructors coming up with similar ideas happens all the time, so it was interesting to me to see how differently Tracy and Liz's implementations were.

I enjoyed how Tracy worked ECO into some of the longest entries. SECOND NATURE, DEUCE COUPE, and especially WILE E COYOTE are wonderful. Might have been nice to have the center ECO be similarly integrated into long answers, but 1.) that would make the construction much harder (not being able to separate the middle into a little pocket of its own) and 2.) ICE COLD is a pretty nice entry in itself.

[AA rival] was a head-scratcher for me. What sort of rival would Alcoholics Anonymous have? Is there such a group as Sots ‘R Us? Even when I filled in UA?, I wondered what issues the UAE (or the UAR) could possibly have against tee-totaling. Fun to finally uncover UAL — United Airlines, commonly known as UAL.

And EOLIC made squirm a bit at first, but looking up the word led to thousands of websites about wind power. "Applied eolics" is a neat term to learn.

I felt like the revealer was somewhat of a stretch, as I felt like the link from "reduce one's carbon footprint" to "squish the ECO trigram into a single square" was a bit too indirect for me. And I would have liked a slightly more wide-open grid for a Thursday puzzle. But all in all, some fantastic entries. Any time I get a WILE E COYOTE crossing the Ruy LOPEZ chess opening, I'm going to be pretty happy.