Alex Bajcz author page

This puzzle arose in the usual way (for me, anyway): 1) "What is a common theme type I haven't tried recently?" I ponder. "Oh, phrases including words common to a beloved pastime/hobby. Ok. I like those. Which pastime to use?" My first thought: curling. Still a good idea — I'll come back to it!

Second thought: PINBALL! "Has there been one already? Hmm...no. Can I find any such phrases? Yes!" I arrived at the themers pretty quickly. What I couldn't find was a revealer (or even space for one). "How can I get PINBALL or something in here?!" I just happened to notice that PINBALL's letters were IN the themers I had found. So I circled them in my program just to see if I could somehow work with that fact. When I did, it kinda looked like a pinball was now bouncing around my puzzle. Huzzah! I thought this would be too squishy a justification/gimmick for the NYT, but I guess not!

It shows that relatively simple workflows, ideas, and executions can still yield paydirt. Also — I love that I was able to build a grid with long paired down non-themers in the NW/SE (warts they create and all)!

This puzzle idea came to me in a very meta way — from solving an NYT puzzle! Specifically, Friday, July 3rd, 2020, by Hal Moore, which featured ROMA TOMATO at 18-Across. As I filled in that entry, I was struck by how off it felt because of that string of letters (OMAT) repeating in the middle, even as it was split between two words of (presumably) distinct origins.

My favorite puzzles highlight and exploit quirks of the English language, and this felt like just such a quirk, so I went hunting for more variations on it. I have no idea, now, how I found as many as I did (they are, as you'd imagine, rare, so far as I can tell!), let alone four matching pairs, but I remember finding the RegEx features of XWord Info to be very helpful. I'd love to hear if anyone can think of others!

On the constructing side of things, I think the main issues came in the NE/SW, specifically 33- and 61-Down. As soon as I had answers that worked in those tricky spots, I think the rest of the fill clicked pretty quickly. With this puzzle, I embraced a mantra of "cheater squares as needed" from the outset in a way I had really never done before — consider me a convert because they definitely helped clean up the fill here, especially in the N/S central areas.

The other thing this puzzle has taught me — to score proper nouns a little lower in my word list than I might otherwise. It is not lost on me how many of them there are in here! They creep in, one by one until you step back and realize you're inundated with them! Lesson learned there.

The thing I'm most proud of with this puzzle is the title — it came to me immediately and still makes me laugh!

This puzzle is a blast from my past — I wrote and submitted this puzzle back in Summer 2013! Why it's running so long after the fact is something hardcore fans of the puzzle might be able to suss out... How I came up with the theme is a bit of a blur now, as you might imagine, but I *think* the revealer came up in some trivia thing I was doing at the time, and then the center answer became the germ around which the rest of the theme quickly emerged.

Because the puzzle has been resting for so long, I asked Will and the gang for permission to refill and reclue it since my skills have improved since then. Still, it was hard to find a good new shape for the grid — this one still feels a little inelegant to me somehow, especially in the SE, but I like the lack of three-letter words despite the expanded grid size, and answers like 6-D, 66-A, and 35-Down feel gratifying to have gotten in here.

At 18-Across, I originally had GREEN FLAG, but upon revisiting the puzzle, I felt that GREEN DAY was too unlike the other themers to pass muster — I really like HOLYFIELD as a nice last-minute save for that spot! Incidentally, I had a very different clue for 1-Across that I'm not surprised to see didn't make it to press!

FWIW, I also didn't know that 32-A was an alternate spelling, or I'd have replaced it... oh well.

I feel like I wrote this puzzle a long time ago, even though it was only last year. I only have vague memories of constructing it. I think I somehow noticed that DETROIT and I DOTTER (a meticulous person) were anagrams, so I went hunting for other major cities with some kind of consistent anagram to play off of. The challenge was finding a mix of cities that felt sufficiently well-known that would anagram in the same way. And then there was balancing them in the grid, coupled with finding some neat way of cluing the set...I remember there being some pain in coming up with a final set of entries, but I feel good about the set I managed. I'd be curious if anyone can think up others I missed!

Filling the puzzle was a bit of a challenge with this grid. Maybe I was too stubborn; I could have introduced a cheater square or two to make things smoother in some spots, but I like the long entries I was able to get in here despite the openness. Getting a final grid was complicated by having not one but two misspellings in the grid at different points in time (sorry about that Will and company)! My only major regret with the final grid, though, is with the three government agencies (NOAA, NASA, USDA). I would have certainly preferred for those three entries to be words rather than acronyms, but at least they are all well known.

Bucket list item achieved—I've got my first NYT Sunday puzzle! Yay!

I don't know about other constructors, but I can't "force" a good theme out of me. I have to be lucky enough for one to "come to me," and thankfully this one did. It was inspired by WALK ON WATER, which felt worthy of building a puzzle around. After batting around some ideas, I somehow noticed that WALK ON could become WALK-ON, which changes its meaning in a way I liked. So, I hunted for other, similar phrases, and when I realized I had found at least nine, I had to make the scary decision: whittle, or go for a Sunday puzzle? I guess I chose correctly!

Because my themers were short and easy to arrange, the grid design and filling went (for a Sunday) pretty smoothly. The SW fought with me, but I ultimately won out. MISSES A CUE was a big help--I got it from XWord Info, I think!

By far the biggest challenge was the NE corner. Originally, I had EAT SUPPER at 13-D, which allowed that corner to fill easily. Will didn't enjoy this phrase though, so I had to try doing without it. That proved tricky; the first several fills all introduced dupes—sometimes, even three or more! The dupe Gods seemed determined to get me. I'm bummed the final fill has TRISTE, BAL, AT A, and APEAK in the NE, since that is more "glue" than I would normally allow myself, but I'm still pleased with the zippiness I was able to get into the long fill overall. I hope everyone has fun with this one!

PS. See if you can think up any good theme entries like mine with these phrases I couldn't use: TIE-IN, LIE-IN, COME-ON, MAKE-UP, TAKE-IN.

This puzzle was the product of a moment of clarity while watching a football game: "Wow, saying FALSE START is hard!" You should try it--try to say "false start" at normal speaking pace while ensuring that the S sound in "false" is really distinct from the ST sound in "start." It's hard to do without making the ST sound into more of a D sound, at least for me. A linguist might be able to explain why, but since I'm not one, I won't try :).

I decided I'd try to find some other examples of two-word phrases that had that same kind of sound combination. Turns out, they're pretty rare--the six I include here are very nearly the only ones I was able to come up with (although STANDS DILL/STAND STILL and LAS VEGAS DRIP/LAS VEGAS STRIP were other ones I liked a lot). It's as if phrases that are hard to enunciate are uncommon or something! I guess I got lucky that these six are not only pretty amusing, but that they also are of symmetrical lengths. Good fortune for me!

One other thing of note here: the astute among us might notice that PLEASE and NOSE have Z sounds instead of S sounds, strictly speaking. I fretted something fierce about this--are S and Z sounds "close enough?" However, I happened to read a note by Will on XWord Info for another puzzle that also did some wordplay on S sounds, and, to heavily paraphrase, Will essentially said that the difference between S and Z didn't bother him in that case because they largely worked equally well to accomplish the wordplay. So, I decided it was worth the risk, and I guess he thought so too. So not every "inconsistency" in a theme is one that dooms it, which is a point well-remembered for us constructors!

Debut puzzle, woo! This is my fifth published puzzle, but my first in the Times — I'm very excited! It only took me the better part of 5 years, I think! I wrote this puzzle a couple of summers ago, well before I purchased Crossfire. As such, I was still writing puzzles like this one "by hand" in an Excel spreadsheet, using only XWord Info and maybe Onelook as helpers. My filling skills have no doubt improved considerably since then, but I'm still pretty happy with this product.

I guess what fascinated me about this theme idea was just how few things PICK UP can precede; without a THE, PICK UP STEAM/SPEED is the only other one I can think of right now.

I'll admit, TRIVIA GAME was not my first choice for that spot. Even by my novice reckoning, I identified at least two dozen acceptable choices to satisfy ??????GAME. However, 36- and 41-Down just would not play nice with most of them, if I remember correctly. I probably could have rearranged the grid to fix that issue, but I think I had filled most of the rest of the puzzle by that point and was pretty reluctant to do that much ripping.

Will really improved many of my clues (and corrected some blatantly inaccurate ones). Incidentally, pad see ew is my favorite THAI dish, so I was especially happy with that clue. But I was sad to see my original clue for SWIZZLE STICKS go: "Manhattan or Long Island features." Too obtuse for a Tuesday, I guess! Anyhow, I'm very honored to join this most select of groups. Hopefully, this will be the first of many!