New York Times, Saturday, October 26, 2013

PIZZA CRUST was my seed entry for this puzzle. At the time I constructed this puzzle at the end of 2011, PIZZA CRUST, MAN CAVE, HOCKEY MOM, BATTERY BOX, BACKLIT, SIN BIN, SOLAR ARRAY and PHONE BOOTH had not yet been used in puzzles (as far as I could tell). I thought they would make good fill for a themeless puzzle. I was quite lucky to be able to fit them all in one puzzle! Usually, getting more than 2-3 new entries in a puzzle is a challenge.

When constructing a themeless, I try to fill it with:

• new "interesting" words/phrases
• as many compound words and phrases as possible
• high-scrabble letter content

I'm always on the lookout for good fresh fill for puzzles. Whenever I come across a new word/phrase that sounds interesting, I write it down and then add it to my wordlist the next time I update it. However, it turns out that much of the "fresh fill" that I choose to use in puzzles winds up being the reason for the puzzle being rejected. "It doesn't get enough google hits" seems to be a reason for rejection. Thankfully, in this case, all the fresh fill was acceptable!

Lots of nice vocabulary here. Besides 1A, my favorite entries are CIPHERTEXT, MAN CAVE, HOCKEY MOM, HOT POTATO, LOOK AT THAT, BATTERY BOX, and PHONE BOOTH. In fact, all the corners are pretty handsome.

Barry Silk is one of the most published themeless constructors in the Shortz era, and there's a reason for that: he consistently delivers challenging puzzles containing a mixture of fun answers and good trivia from a wide range of areas. His name always brings a combination of excitement and nerves tingling through my fingers, as I know I'm going to get a tough but fair solve.

Some great stuff in today's puzzle, headlined by a clue/answer pair I found immensely challenging but providing one of the best aha moments I've had in a while: PHONE BOOTH clued by "DC transformation location". What a perfect example of a misdirectional clue! It took me forever to change my mindset (thinking about DC politics) even after ??????OOTH was in place, and I beamed when I realized the clue referred to DC Comics and Superman's preferred choice of changing room. Perfect late-week clue, in my mind. I also really liked the clue for HOCKEY MOM and CLEAT. Great stuff.

I had an interesting conversation with Frank Longo, who helps Will with fact-checking and general proofing. Although there is no hard and fast rule about duplicating a word from an answer inside another clue, the BATTERY BOX and "Penalty box..." clue at 47D made me pause. Apparently Frank and Will had a discussion about that, but ultimately decided anything but "penalty box" was too oblique to use in cluing (unfair to non-hockey fans). And since "box" is a short word, the dupe was passable. I think they made a good decision, especially since as a non-hockey fan, I was mystified by SIN BIN.

Each of the four corners contains a triple-stack of 10's, with good results. Each corner has its pluses and its minuses, for example, the SW has the beautiful PHONE BOOTH and SOLAR ARRAY but with OLEN and ERICAS in the way. The NE corner is relatively clean, save FORA, but ARRIVE LATE feels like a less elegant form of FASHIONABLY LATE, and I wasn't totally sure what a BATTERY BOX was. Each corner is very reasonable though. All over, we see example upon example of the quintessential constructor's dilemma: what trade-offs are worth it in order to work in great entries?

Nice Saturday challenge with some fantastic entries and clues.