New York Times, Tuesday, June 2, 2015

First of all, I'd like to give a shout-out to the "fan club" that coalesced briefly to lambast the fill on my "Eight Letter" puzzle of 4/14/15. I affectionately refer to them as the ... (drumroll) ... H8ers (rimshot).

Moving quickly along, I've often thought that hidden-word puzzles are a bit like "word sandwiches," so this was my attempt to capitalize on that notion. HAM SANDWICH, with 11 letters, would have allowed another theme entry, but a three letter word sandwich didn't seem kosher to me. I wasn't very optimistic about this puzzle since BEACH EROSION seemed less than heroic and my submitted puzzle had an awful section of dreck fill in the middle. I actually had AEDES crossing AIDER — a real bad neighborhood. However, much to my surprise, the puzzle got the green light from Will on the first go-round.

Later I tried to talk Will into "THE OLD SWITCHEROO" as an additional 16-letter theme entry thru the middle but he was not interested in that tricky little transformation. Also, I suggested adding blocks to the middle to improve the fill, but I found out Will had already had Frank Longo clean that up. He did it by moving two blocks instead of adding two blocks- much more elegant. Frank is an ace solver and does a lot of NYT puzzle work behind the scenes with little or no recognition — thank You Frank Longo (and Will and Joel), for making some of us constructors look smarter than we really are!

HERO SANDWICH interpreted as "phrases with HERO sandwiched within." For this theme type, I like it when an additional step is layered in, i.e. FIREMAN or EL CID or RUTH BADER GINSBERG (aka The Notorious RBG) is hidden within the themers instead of just HERO. Seeing HERO over and over gets a bit repetitive. But I did like the phrases PITCHER OF BEER and LEARN THE ROPES, both vivid and lively.

The 12/13/13/12 lengths of themers is a very difficult arrangement. Notice how HERO SANDWICH is in row 12, not the usual row 13? It has to be, otherwise you'd get a set of two-letter words in the lower left. This compression of themers means there's not as much breathing room as usual.

And those 13-letter entries are so awkward to integrate. Bruce does well to weave CHEESE PIZZA and URBAN SPRAWL through three themers each. It's a tough task to find strong entries when you have so many constraints.

Those Zs at the end of PIZZA sure make filling the bottom right tough. Not a lot of options when you have ?Z?? right on top of another ?Z?? pattern. Nearly impossible to avoid two gluey bits down there. EZIO and EZER are of course fine names of famous people, but they sure make it a tough early-week solve.

Given the fact that you already have a gluey bottom right corner, I would have liked to see the AERO/RUER/AGRO confluence removed. As much as I like the Z and the kookiness of the AZERA name brand, changing that to ADELE (BAEZ to BRED or BLED) would have cleaned up that corner quite a bit.

Overall, I enjoyed going back to see what the top three themers had in common, finding HERO sandwiched in. I think in the future though, this theme type is going to go the way of the "words than can follow X" — it'll need to have some extra element to keep it interesting. Who knows what that extra layer will be — crazy Scrabbly words hidden, specific HEROes as listed above ... or something completely different? I'm looking forward to finding out.

The NYT published this amusing correction: The crossword puzzle on Tuesday provided an erroneous clue for 1-Down, seeking the answer "Baa Baa." The clue should have read, "Salutatory cry to a black sheep, in a nursery rhyme" — not "Black sheep's cry, in a nursery rhyme" — because it is the unnamed speaker of the rhyme (not the sheep, of course) who says, "Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool?"