New York Times, Wednesday, February 5, 2014

The inspiration for this puzzle came two years ago while I was eating my breakfast cereal. My original concept was to find phrases that contained the letters W, H, E, A, T with separation between these letters as though they were "shredded" or "torn apart." The individual WHEAT letters would then be circled to identify them. I ran the idea past my mentor, Nancy Salomon, who liked the Shredded Wheat theme revealer but was not a fan of the circled letters. She felt that I was being too literal minded and suggested that I find phrases that included contiguous, scrambled WHEAT letters that also spanned two words. I initially balked at her idea as I did not feel that this format justified the use of the word "shredded" in the theme revealer, but after a few days I decided to take her advice. By putting in every scrambled variation of *WHEAT* in the databases, I was able to come up with a lot of great phrases. I originally had OFF THE WALL but replaced it with GREAT WHITE so as not to have the repeated use of the word "the" with the entry THE WALTONS.

With the publishing of this puzzle, my sixth with the NYT, I wanted to take this opportunity to give a big shout out of thanks to my mentor, Nancy Salomon. Like so many other constructors before me, I have truly appreciated her expert guidance and knowledge, her unselfish generosity with her time, and her enduring patience in responding to my many questions and crazy ideas over the past few years. Thank you again, Nancy!

What nice theme entries today. HELL OR HIGH WATER, THE WALTONS, GREAT WHITE, and especially SO WHAT ELSE IS NEW. Some fine material, all held together by SHREDDED WHEAT (the letters WHEAT anagrammed in various orders).

I've highlighted the WHEAT sequences to make them stand out. Ideally, they'd be easy to pick out, either as standalone words, or all at the beginning of phrases or something, but that may not have been possible. To me, it felt a little inelegant to have sequences placed in random positions. But then again, Tracy did such a nice job picking out theme entries that I think it's an okay trade-off.

Five theme entries and a central 13 makes construction tough. Notice how the NW and SE corners are 6x3 as a result? Anything requiring stacked sixes running through a themer can be tricky, but Tracy does well in these areas, even working some nice entries in, SKEWER and the really nice REHABS/OCELOT/ALL FOR.

Where some issues do occur are in the NE and SW, where two themers overlap each other in a big way. In particular, the SW: ACTA is fine by itself, but coupled with in the esoteric ALAE it feels slightly rickety. I really like HIDEAWAY down there, but I'm not sure if it was worth the price of the esoterica. The NW is well done given the constraints, although I think I would have personally gone with ODE instead of OBE, since I can't keep all those British three-letter distinctions straight.

SHHHH is either extremely bold or unfortunate. But what else are you going to do with a ??H?H pattern? UH HUH might work, but that's the only other option I see. This more than anything demonstrates the difficulty of using five themers — with all the crossings needed, one of them is bound to be problematic.

It would have been great for those WHEAT sequences to stand out better, but overall I quite enjoyed today's long entries.