New York Times, Monday, July 6, 2015

I think it was WALK AROUND that got this one started, when I somehow saw the phrase as walking a round of golf. Then came the realization that there are quite a few adverbs of this sort starting with the letter "a" that can be parsed as "a something-or-other." So I was off and running. Some puzzles almost create themselves — without brain-twisting efforts to come up with theme answers — and this was one of them.

Definitely Will's biggest change was in the clue for 25A. I never once thought of a lav connection. My clue was [Sketch some ideas for one's self-portrait?]. And for 51A, I was thinking along the lines of moving a product in the sense of selling it. So my clue for that one was [Sell lots of fries?].

As I've said here before, I know I tend toward Tuesday clueing in Monday puzzles. Easy is fine and I do aim for it, but I rebel against blatantly dead giveaways. So for HOUR at 16A, I submitted the simple and admittedly boring [Happy ___], which Will changed to "One of 24 in a day." Otherwise, this was probably a typical mix of my clues and Will's.

The puzzle was submitted exactly a year ago. I hope you've enjoyed it.

A fun theme that can appeal to young and old; executed with skill, achieving both smooth and colorful fill. Top notch work.

I don't expect much out of Monday puzzles, and when I filled in WALK AROUND without even reading the clue (I had most of the crossings), I shrugged. But it was a great a-ha moment when I realized it was actually WALK A ROUND. And my pleasure skyrocketed when discovering PLAN AHEAD was the hilarious PLAN A HEAD!

Clever wordplay is a pleasure to see, and it's especially nice when it's done at a level that almost all solvers can appreciate. I really enjoyed Joel's recent Twitter wordplay, but I did get some shrugs from people who couldn't relate because they didn't know or care about Twitter. Today's puzzle does such a nice job of playing to a wide audience.

Lynn is so tight with her consistency. Five common phrases, with the second word's A broken out. They're all in the same verb tense, and each themer is two words becoming three. Perfect.

Lynn is so careful about avoiding the ugly gluey bits, too. I'm always so impressed at how she manages to keep the number of liabilities down to well under five, and she never uses an egregious one. I have a feeling she stops and resets many a time in order to achieve such silky work.

The four 7x3 stacks in the corners can be difficult to fill with color and smoothness, but Lynn does a nice job of deploying her black squares to make each section manageable. I love that NW corner, with BEWITCH / ALA MODE / ILL PASS — and with all the crossings astonishingly smooth.

The SW corner contains my favorite entry, JAVA MAN, but cramming in COMCAST and APOSTLE does come with a slight compromise in CSA and SGT. CSA is more iffy to me than SGT, since SGT is so common, but CSA is still pretty minor. I also like how Lynn's glue is usually in the three-letter length. A five-letter ugly — ITS NO or SSTAR, for example — is so much more noticeable.

Loved this one.