New York Times, Thursday, March 27, 2014

This puzzle began at Positive Pie, a restaurant in the very small town of Hardwick, Vermont. It's known for its delicious pizza served from a wood-fired oven and for its selection of craft beers. While anticipating both of these pleasures, and studying the menu decorated with its design of +'s and π's, my husband started the discussion of pizza/pie/pi theme ideas. The pizza pie piece eventually fell by the wayside, except for its circular shape.

The puzzle went through some revisions of the fill, during which FULL got moved around a lot. I hadn't realized what a hard word it was to "fill" around! I have to thank Will for livening up my clues. I was glad to see two of my favorites still there (for SERENADE and HOEDOWNS), but I can't take any credit for "It wraps around a chest at the beach"!

Hope you enjoy the π.

(warning, nerd alert) Ah, a math puzzle! Even better, a geometry puzzle! It's a shame that this didn't run on Pi Day (3/14), but a person can only dream. Jean uses the famous formula for area of a circle, pi*r^2 (or "PI R SQUARED"), and for circumference, 2*pi*r, where r is the circle's radius. It took me a while to figure out what was going on with 2 PI R because I always think of it as PI D (d = diameter), but sure enough, 2 PI R is totally legit.

And to top it off, Jean's incorporated FULL / CIRCLE into the grid, a nice revealer hinting at the two formulas. I like that it doesn't hit you over the head like some revealers do; rather, it hints at what's going on, leaving the rest up to the solver's imagination. I would have liked to seen FULL / CIRCLE not split up, or at least placed in closer proximity, since I don't like jumping all over the grid for cross-referenced clues. Placing those answers both in the SE corner would have achieved that, plus would have given the added bonus of not having the revealer appear until the solver is near the end of the puzzle. But that might have been quite difficult to achieve, given the grid layout.

Rebus squares can be tricky, and typically I like to see them kept to four letters squished in or less. SQUARED obviously can be much better represented by a superscript "2" in print, but plenty of solvers will prefer to write in SQUARED since SQUARED AWAY looks so much more correct than ² AWAY. I did like the variety of it all, in that experienced solvers aren't used to having a mix of rebus squares, regular ones, and numbers. Neat mix.

Because the theme is squeezed into compacted areas, the rest of the grid is fairly wide open. Jean does a nice job of incorporating other long fill, such as BIKINI TOP (my favorite, of course), BANISTER with its neat misdirectional clue (flight of stairs, not airplane flight), and TAX EVADER with a great clue, "duties" meaning "levies," not "responsibilities." Great to get a healthy dose of wordplay. There are some compromises like OR IN, ORO, WE SAY, but I sure liked getting all the great long stuff. Not a bad trade-off.

Finally, for those of you wondering, FOURH is good old 4-H. It's strange to me since I never see 4-H written FOUR-H, but it's almost kooky-looking enough for me to I like it.

Jeff asks why 2 π R instead of π D. One reason is it makes the math easier when dealing with circles and spheres. Note that if you differentiate the area of a circle, π R², you get the circumference, 2 π R. Integrate and quadruple to get the volume of a sphere, 4/3 π R³.

Or, there might be one other reason. π D is too short for a crossword answer. :)