New York Times, Tuesday, June 10, 2014

What a cool find, to discover that certain famous people's names can be anagrammed to form PASSING NOTES, i.e. obits. I have to admit it took me a while to cotton to what was going on, but it was a neat a-ha moment when it came. MONROE NO MORE, NEWTON WENT ON, EDISON IS DONE... it's even neater now that I look back on it. Very cool to have a more complex theme than on an average Tuesday.

Really interesting grid design today. Instead of putting long fill in the down direction, Pam puts two long across answers into the grid, SIDESADDLE and CLOSE TO YOU. The reason we usually don't see this is that it can be much harder to incorporate these long across fillers without compromises in the short fill. Adding two extra ten-letter answers is effectively like upping the theme density. Not as hard of course, since you can change whatever those long fillers to whatever you want them to be. And Pam does a bang-up job with it, keeping all her crossings clean through those long fill entries, even giving us LEAN IN, the Sheryl Sandberg best seller. Very nice!

Those two long acrosses do produce the only offender to my own personal tastes, MDLI, though. The layout at that location results in the ?D?I pattern, which is awfully tough to fill. There's really nothing else but random Roman numerals possible, is there? I would have liked to seen black squares shifted around to avoid that dreaded pattern. I know it's just a single entry, but with only four theme entries, my OCD constructor's brain tells me that it could have been avoided. The CLOSE TO YOU entry makes that very difficult, however.

I really liked 1.) the anagramming find as well as 2.) the repurposing of the PASSING NOTES to tie the themers together. Ultimately, I felt those two ideas didn't quite mesh well enough for my taste to give it the POW, though. It could be telling that the clue for PASSING NOTES had to be super long as to almost be unreadable? Unfortunately, I can't think of a better way to weave these two ideas together. I might have preferred to see each of these ideas in a separate puzzle. Maybe one with a fourth anagram, and another with famous newspaper obit headlines?

Finally, the fill is pretty good today. Besides MDLI, there's only really SST, AER, EMS, OCTO, and WIS. None of those is bad, really. But it seems to me those isolated sections could be cleaned up, so as to have almost no glue-type entries. (I'll leave that as an exercise to the budding constructors out there. And yes, if for some reason SHANE is important to leave in, SST and AER are likely necessary.) I know it's me being picky and many solvers will gloss right over this point, but I find it difficult not to strive for absolute perfection.

Overall, two very nice theme ideas, perhaps not meshing quite as much to their potential as possible, but still producing a very enjoyable solve.