CASCADING MENU is such an evocative term, making for a great marquee for the central stair stack. ALL-TIME GREATS is great too, and ...
read moreCASCADING MENU is such an evocative term, making for a great marquee for the central stair stack. ALL-TIME GREATS is great too, and although it's been ages since I've read any ISABEL ALLENDE, I've enjoyed her work.
Interesting twist on a stair stack pattern — I appreciate the innovation, especially given how common the middle stair stack has become. It's rare to see four Across entries stacked atop each other like IS THAT IT, WIRELESS, OPERETTA, and SPIN SERVE, and to do with when there's already a middle stair stack is audacious. Connecting it all with yet another long entry like TETE-A-TETE is shooting for the stars!
One of the risks of this type of layout is that it's difficult to fill each of those long slots with something amazing. Perhaps Bluetooth-connected singers could argue that WIRELESS and OPERETTA are indeed amazing, but we'd still have to have a tete-a-tete about how many times TETE-A-TETE has been used through the decades because of its common letters and perfect vowel-consonant symmetry. BEERAMID and NEST EGGS shine things up in the opposite corner, though.
Given that it's a 70-word construction, I'd prefer to have less CSA EDT ENE IST. (Some folks will immediately recognize a community supported agriculture box, but if you've never heard the term before, there's no way to figure it out through etymology.)
Solid stair stack construction overall, though, especially given that additional constraint of stacking so many long Across entries above each other in the lower-left and upper-right corrners.