New York Times, Tuesday, April 21, 2015

This puzzle was accepted in July 2013. It was my first NY Times acceptance.

I looked through a list of theme types and thought that combining alliteration and a vowel shift would be an interesting twist. Since then I've seen a few others that used the same basic theme type, but at the time the idea was original to me. The theme came together rather smoothly, though I did play with the positions of SESAMESEED and SOLIDSOUTH, looking for the smoothest fill.

As I look at the fill now, USTEN is my least favorite since the highway would normally be written US-10. However, I'm pretty pleased overall. As usual, Will changed a lot of the clues — about half. He also changed the letter in square 1 from S to G, a change with which I disagree. I think the two abbreviations GPAS and SAS are roughly equal in goodness/badness, but using GPAS as 1-Across means starting with a weakish entry. Starting with SPAS means starting with a real thing. To me that's preferable.

I hope that the solvers enjoyed this puzzle.

To me, GPA'S is a fine entry, since the letters are spoken, and it's a common term besides. For the record, I'm less enthused about abbreviations that are only written — like JCT or APPT.

SPAS/SAS was OK, but a little bland. I think GPA'S/GAS has more pizzazz. Personal taste, of course.

At first I was underwhelmed by the S S concept. Super easy to find two-word phrases that fit this pattern, right? But I've been down this road before, missing the additional layer. I had to really scratch my head before realizing that Gerry incorporates a second level, the second vowel of each theme pair being A E I O U, in that order. Much harder to do.

But really, is it THAT hard? I was curious, so I searched for possible alternates for the middle SI* SI* entry. After 15 minutes of searching, the only other good ones I could find were SIX SIGMA and SINGLE SIDED. I love SIX SIGMA because it relates to so many things that interest me: statistics, quality control, and manufacturing. But it doesn't work as a central answer, because of its even-numbered length. You could enlarge the grid from 15 to 16 columns in order to accommodate, but I think enlarging a grid ought to be reserved for must-need cases only.

I liked much of the longer fill. Although I didn't remember who he was, Bronko NAGURSKI is an interesting figure in football history with a colorful name. Sheryl Sandberg's LEAN IN was on the non-fiction bestseller list. I CHING and ARTISTES are nice too.

Very difficult construction, a low word count (72) featuring a lot of mid-length material. Cleanliness does not come easily on this type of layout. Been a long time since I've seen EXC … except? Exceptional? Exchequer? But aside from a handful of gluey bits, I liked a lot of the MOTT ST / BOLERO / OUTGUN fill.

It's too bad there's not a more explicit way of pointing out how the theme combines initialisms AND a vowel progression. Generally, I like giving solvers the opportunity to discover the cleverness in a puzzle themselves, but this is an example where I fear that many people will never see it.