New York Times, Tuesday, August 16, 2016

After coming up with the idea for this one, I found acceptable examples surprisingly hard to find. There were plenty of phrases with two R's and two D's, but I was being picky here: the first word had to have exactly two R's and no D's; and the second word had to have exactly two D's with no R's.

This was one of the rare puzzles I had to redo. The deal-breaker was the theme entry BROTHER ODD, the title of a Dean Koontz book and a recurring character in his novels. I hadn't been real happy with that, but clued it with reference to a "strange" name, hoping to give a major hint to the "odd" part. But Will thought it was too obscure…and it was back to the drawing board. I can't find the original puzzle, but the change to this version was the inclusion of NARROWLY DEFINED in the middle, which I wasn't exactly thrilled with either.

I will have to get busy because I'm pretty sure this is my last puzzle in the NYT hopper. I need a big influx of both ideas and time!

Everyone's favorite / most annoying sci-fi bot, R2D2 inspiring today's puzzle, each theme phrase containing a word with two Ds + another with two Rs. Growing up in California and thinking of myself as a surfer (I'm barely passable even on a long board), I loved SURFER DUDE. The rest of the themers were solid, although to Lynn's point, NARROWLY DEFINED felt more dry; like something out of one of my b school textbooks.

Some beautiful long fill today, the conversational DO YOU MIND my favorite — it brings up some interesting imagery. CAR DEALER is a nice two-word phrase too.

People ask me sometimes why I prefer multi-word phrases (as opposed to one-worders) when it comes to long fill. Generally, I find that multi-word phrases tend to be more colorful — putting words together in interesting ways can produce great effect — plus it's fun as a solver to figure out where words break within a phrase.

Contrast DO YOU MIND with ABANDONED, which to me is an everyday piece of language, serving as sort of a nail or screw holding the English language together.

But no doubt, there are definitely great one-word answers. CRUSADERS for example is beautiful, laden with all sorts of historical context and stories about Richard the Lionheart. What a nickname! During my solve, I stopped to admire the answer, wanting to go read up on this subject. To me, that's one mark of what can make for a great piece of long fill.

As usual, a smooth offering from the master of the early-week puzzle. There's just a tad of glue — SDAK, ACCT, SRTA, PERI — which isn't surprising since Lynn uses the "parallel downs" structure in DO YOU MIND / ABANDONED. It's so tough to put two long downs right next to each other like that and come out squeaky clean. Notice where three of the four gluey bits (SDAK, ACCT, PERI) are …

My initial reaction was that I wanted a tighter theme — or more snazzy themers in general — since there are a ton of two-word phrases that fit this D D + R R theme pattern. So it was really nice to hear from Lynn; her self-imposed constraint about having no Ds in the first word or Rs in the second is not something I ever would have thought of. Much tougher than I had thought!