New York Times, Thursday, September 25, 2014

I don't remember when and how I found out that there were ten three-letter body parts, but once it came to my attention, I knew that it could be a theme for a New York Times crossword.

Before starting to construct the puzzle, however, I noticed a Patrick Blindauer Wednesday from 2006 in which he hid all ten of them as diagonals, with a central revealer. Had that puzzle been more recent, I might have given up on the project, but then I realized that a different way to implement the concept would be to place the body parts symmetrically and circle them. I thus targeted this idea for a Monday, and received plenty of valuable input from George Barany and his team.

With only 30 squares absolutely locked in, I was able to keep the word count to 74 and include quite a few entries I liked, like SPOCK, ON KP, PEACE OUT, EZEKIEL, JA RULE, MOZART, MASHUP, ESPOSITO, BEIJING, and SPALKO. Only one letter in the fill ended up being changed, and that was the crossing of 5A and 8D, originally a P. Cluing to Monday difficulty proved harder for me, as I went through several iterations of them, but Will, by deciding to move this to Thursday by removing the circles, cut this Gordian Knot.

In terms of theme answers, I was very happy to have GUMP at 1-Across, as Forrest is my favorite fictional character, and Will's new clue for SACAJAWEA is just awesome. Among the many other new clues are those for 19A, 21A, 27A, 53A, 56A, 65A, 7D, 12D, 21D, 30D, 38D, and 56D. On the other hand, I am glad that Will kept my clues for 22A, 40A, 47A, 18D, 39D, and 42D. I lost my original clue for SEIZER, which played on it and "Caesar" sounding the same, but overall I hope that this "Three-Body Problem" is both stimulating and enjoyable to solvers.

Thank you, Will, for believing in me and mentoring my development as a constructor.

One of the new generation of young constructors, Alex has come a long way with his gridwork skills. Over the past few years, he's sent me some grids to evaluate, and they've improved immensely. It's great to see how little glue he uses today even in the face of ten quasi-themers, really only SEIZER, SSR, SEG, and UNA. It's nice work.

I hadn't heard this trivia question until very recently, in a Matt Gaffney Weekly Crossword Contest. I'm not wild about word searching after the puzzle is done (the satisfaction of completing every box is tarnished a bit when I realize I'm not actually done yet), but I can see how others might really enjoy figuring out where the ten body parts are. I've highlighted them in blue in case you missed any. It would have been really neat to hide the theme more sneakily, not so transparent with the overt note to start the puzzle, but I'm not sure how to do that unless it was in the vein of a contest like Matt's meta-puzzle or perhaps the NYT puzzle Alex referred to.

I like how Alex was able to fairly seamlessly incorporate the ten body parts into other words — I wouldn't even noticed a majority of them if the note hadn't been there. The little GUM hiding in GUMP took me forever to find, it was that well-hidden. The one exception I had was in SACAGAWEA. SACAJAWEA looks so odd to me, always reading about her with the G spelling. And not being totally familiar with JA RULE, I didn't think twice to even question GA RULE. Granted, I really should have at least recognized JA RULE as he's reasonably famous rapper, but I would have much preferred JAW to be hidden in something like NINJA WARRIOR or even JAWAHARLAL NEHRU (which is the magic 15 letter length!). Personal preference of course, as the "proper" spelling of SACAGAWEA is controversial.

A lot of nice fill today, PEACE OUT and MASHUP my favorites, along with a really cool clue for MOZART. Sometimes I get turned off by trivia clues, but to learn that Mozart supposedly identified the pitch of a pig's squeal was a real treat.