New York Times, Thursday, May 8, 2014

I've been constructing puzzles since high school (30+ years ago), and treasure a handwritten rejection letter from Eugene Maleska that says "Not bad for a neophyte." (That puzzle never saw the light of day, and rightly so.) About 10 of my puzzles have appeared in major publications.

My background is in math and physics, so I've been exposed to and intrigued by paradoxes for a long time. It wasn't anything academic, though, that prompted the puzzle, but a t-shirt I saw that had a playful take on a classic paradox. On the front was written "The back of this shirt is true," and on the back it showed "The front of this shirt is false." It wasn't a major leap to the puzzle concept.

Coming up with the 15-letter entries was fun, and surprisingly easy once I got over an initial hurdle. I had first wanted the two long entries to cross each other in the center square, one vertical and one horizontal, but it soon became clear that this would be a dead end. Well, almost a dead end. I dabbled briefly with having the answer to 32-across be NINEDOWNISTRUE, and the answer to 9-down be THIRTYTWOACROSS, with the additional two words ISFALSE living elsewhere in the puzzle, being placed symmetrically with PARADOX. A rather nice looking grid resulted, but it was such an ungraceful approach to have one of these theme entries be broken into two parts, that I abandoned this path before it got too far along. Every constructor has false starts.

That meant that the 15-letter entries would have to be either both horizontal or both vertical. There weren't many options. Since they each had to total 15 letters, including ISFALSE (7) AND ISTRUE (6), that leaves 8 and 9 letters. With four more letters for the word DOWN, you've got 4 and 5 letters respectively for the clue numbers. For these entries to be located symmetrically in the grid, you're left with NINE and THREE. It rather wrote itself.

All that was left was to find a nice place for the theme word PARADOX and fill the grid.

I'm pretty sure the "Jerry Maguire" line "You had me at hello" should have been "You had me a logic problem." Matthew indeed earns the POW with a nice implementation of a typical paradox. Usually seen as THIS STATEMENT IS FALSE, it's made into a crossword-appropriate set of statements, cross-referencing each other. I really like how he got the lengths to work out perfectly, without having to make the statements sound tortured. NINE DOWN IS FALSE and THREE DOWN IS TRUE, that's beautiful stuff.

With just three theme entries today (and one of them only 7 letters long), the puzzle did feel a little light. I was glad then to see Matthew utilize his long answer slots wisely. Check out COWGIRL, UNDERDOG, PA SYSTEM, LOST SOUL, SO AND SO, even X AND Y. It went a long way to making me feel like I was getting my money's worth from the puzzle. I also appreciated that Matthew took care in his fill, leaving us with few enough glue entries that I didn't particularly notice an excess. Now that I look at grid again, I do notice NCO and CTR straight across the top which is unfortunate, but there's really very little ugliness here. He even throws us two X's and a Z without torturing those areas. Nice.

I would complain about SNORERS, but 50% of my household is a SNORER. Ahem. It might be me; not saying. Throw in that my favorite Pokemon is the Snorlax (or as my poor wife calls me, "The Snormax")...

I probably have said too much.

One item that caught my attention is probably something no one else would even consider, so I feel a little silly for bringing it up. A puzzle like this, involving logic and symmetry, to me begs for left-right symmetry. Especially considering all the black squares on the perimeter are already set up that way, just a few blocks could have been switched around to make a mirror symmetry arrangement. Granted, I'm partial to that type of symmetry in the first place, but it felt to me like it would have been spot-on for this exercise in logic.

Another thought that cropped up was that it would have been nice to have this puzzle a bit more complicated, as are many logic puzzles. Then again, the best paradoxes are those that are simply stated.

Finally, I'll end with a great clue: [Places for mobiles] made me think about where people need cell phones, and it took me the longest time to figure out that it wasn't referring to mobile phones but actual mobiles (hanging over many cribs).

Nice fill, really fun theme, a winner in my book. That last statement is indeed not false.