New York Times, Tuesday, September 16, 2014

The website www.onelook.com was invaluable in pulling this one off. I kept moving three ONs around until I came up with the three themers. Will kept most of my clues. The original submission for 26-Down was "What a student takes notes on."

My app, "Gary Cee's Crosswords," is almost done. I ran into a bit of snag in uploading all 61 puzzles — one freebie and three puzzle-packs of 20 each — but I should be in the App Store soon!

Today's puzzle, along with those for Monday, Wednesday and Thursday this week, were used last Saturday at the 7th annual Bay Area Crossword Tournament, in Oakland, Calif. The event was run by Andrew Laurence to benefit the Families of Spinal Muscular Atrophy.

Nice straightforward early-week puzzle today, phrases containing three instances of ON. Great revealer, repurposing ON AND ON AND ON (yadda yadda yadda) to tie the theme together. FYI, a search string to use for something like this is *ON?*ON?*ON*, where the question marks represent "any single letter" and the asterisks are "any set of letters with length greater than or equal to 0." If you didn't mind two consecutive ONs, *ON*ON*ON* would be even simpler.

Gary utilizes a great arrangement for long fill today. Check out how TRANSLUCENT, PINE NUTS, TEXT BOOK, and WRITING DESK are both spaced out and alternating, top bottom top bottom. Just as with themers, proper spacing for long fill is key. For any puzzle with less than five themers, I do expect at least two pieces of nice long fill, but four is much better (six is fantastic if you can pull it off cleanly!). This type of layout works so well.

With a simple-ish theme like today's, it's important to pick out strong themers. I love TONY TONI TONE — I don't know their music but what a fun and memorable name — and MONSOON SEASON reminds me of Malaysia, getting caught in a sudden torrential downpour. LONDON ONTARIO doesn't feel as strong to me (plus it's the only one with two consecutive ONs), but perhaps Gary was aiming for more of a "famous city in an unexpected place" clue. For example, PARIS has all sort of fun cluing potential, given that there's a PARIS, Texas. It would have been really fun to have something akin to this here.

I appreciate Gary's short fill today too. Generally not much stuck out me, which is short fill's job. ELEMI I've seen before, and I would prefer not to see it much again, especially in early-week puzzles. Why does it appear, you might ask? Well, one drawback to incorporating a lot of long fill is that it makes short fill harder to get clean. The holy grail of any construction is to get both great fill plus absolutely zero glue. It's easier said than done, though, usually requiring dozens of iterations, trying word after word after word in the TRANSLUCENT slot.

I wonder what it says about me that I plunked in SEVENTHS for [Another round at the buffet, say].