Daniel Landman author page

★ Great concept. Jim and I often debate what's important in a crossword — he usually argues that the theme is by far and away the most important aspect, while I prefer a balance of theme and smooth execution. Today though, I agree with him. The theme tickled me so much that the few slight dings rolled off my back.

Great idea to lay out a set of letters such that certain groupings form certain shapes — and regular words to boot! Geometry was my gateway drug into math and math puzzles, so seeing GEAR laid out as a PARALLELOGRAM and LEAK as the only RECTANGLE was really cool.

It would have been absolutely perfect if the letter set was a little tighter, for instance if ELK were the only RIGHT TRIANGLE that spelled a real word, or even if all RIGHT TRIANGLES (like ARK and LEG and GEL) had been pointed out. POLYGON is a neat catch-all, but it would have been even neater if it pointed out only the shapes which didn't fall into the other classes. Kind of strange that ELK was pointed out in two places, while KEG was ignored.

Loved these clues:

• [Find (out)] makes FERRET such a fun entry. The animal itself is cute and interesting, but FERRET OUT is a vivid term.
• LOB is slang for an [Easy question]. GRAPEFRUIT is even better, but I still like getting a LOB.
• [Jet setting] confused the heck out of me, obscuring that NW corner. Beautiful a-ha to figure out that a HANGAR is a setting for many jets.

I could do without the creepy NECRO prefix in my puzzle, but getting DOGGONE and the bonus themer of VERTEX was worth it.

This puzzle interested me so much that it made me curious to dig deeper and study its execution. I love when that happens.

RECORD gets "broken" across multiple entries today, with a BROKEN / RECORD revealer. I can see why Will pointed out the long down entries he liked — with HORSE CAR, BAT AN EYE punnily placed next to ROD CAREW, CHEERIO, TURN RED, VIAGRA with its fun Hef-related clue, that's a lot of added bonus material.

I liked the diversity in how Daniel broke up RECORD, too: RE / CORD, RE / COR (although I don't care much for this little bit of glue) / D, R / ECO / RD, REC / ORD. I can see how it would have been a challenge to figure out how to do this, and I appreciated the difficulty of the task. Some of the "theme answers" are pretty good, too: GRANDMERE was fun even though it reminded me of my five grueling years of high school French, of which I remember rien. It would have been nice to get a few sizzling "theme entries" though — perhaps something like CORD BLOOD or BUSH V GORE.

Sometimes I wonder if my stupid memory spoils puzzles for me. Around the time I first started dong puzzles, I ran into this tricky Thursday puzzle and was just blown away. It made me realize how clever crossword themes could be; how they could be a true expression of creativity, and how I badly wanted to become a part it. This puzzle unfortunately comes to mind every time I see a theme type with words broken across multiple entries, separated with a black square. It's completely unfair to today's puzzle, but it is what it is.

There are a lot of constraints Daniel had to work with. Five themers is hard enough. But when you split four of those themers and fix black squares into place like this (between EIRE COR DESERT, for example), you deplete your allotment of black squares much earlier than usual. Makes for big, wide-open spaces in the four corners. It's good to hear Daniel say he perseverated (my wife had to tell me what that meant) over the short fill, as I definitely noticed the globs of glue during my solve. I don't mind A BONE here (hey, ULNA is A BONE!), ORAMA there, etc. but it felt to me like there was quite a bit. And the partial TAKE ME… most editors these days disallow 6+ letter partials (Merl Reagle being the only one I can think of who's okay with them), so I was surprised to see the exception.

Nice to hear constructors aim for higher and higher standards. I love that type of continual quest to make oneself better.

Rebus puzzle today, MAD squished into eight different squares, with the marquee answer ITS A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD. That's one of the first movies I ever saw (in school, too — no wonder I didn't learn anything) and I can never remember how many MADs to use. It makes me mad mad.

Will has said he has too many rebus puzzles in the queue, so he's trying to space them out to stave off "rebus fatigue." I'll admit, I had a case of that a few months back, feeling like there was no real point to many rebus puzzles. But I think Will's tactic has helped, because I found this one to be a nice challenge. It took me a while to uncover the MAD in MADELINE/ARMADILLO (I plugged ELOISE in at first, drat!), but I found it very satisfying when I did. Extra challenge, overcome!

Daniel does a nice job segmenting his grid, making it easier to fill by placing a single MAD in each quadrant. I tend to like when rebus squares are within long answers, so ARMADILLO really did it for me, while AMADEUS/MADAM, not as much. It is much easier to incorporate rebus squares into shorter answers though, so I can see why he did that. The MADE WAVES/LADY MADONNA entries are quite nice, but there is the price to pay of AS WAS, an awkward five-letter partial, right below SEIS and UNI. A pretty typical trade-off of longer, colorful phrases at the price of a couple of no-so-great entries.

The overall construction is quite a challenge — the fact that there's a central 13 effectively splits the grid vertically in half (Daniel could have split the word SESTETS in half at the T, but that would have created many more three-letter words and also caused a ripple effect in black square placement). With such big chunks of white in each of the four corners, you're almost definitely going to see signs of stress. I really like themeless-quality fill like ED ONEILL (who will always be Al Bundy to me) and even the wacky SORE ARM. Are they worth the price of SERE and SE RI? I think so, but some will disagree. Perhaps trying a less audacious 74 words (instead of the current 72) could have cleaned things up.

All in all, a fun workout, made extra challenging by those free-floating MADs.