Eric Bornstein author page

A new constructor got in touch with me a few months ago, asking about a puzzle based on DROP DOWN MENU, where themers ending in various drop-down menus literally drop down. Although it was a fine concept, I cautioned that Will Shortz is taking very few "turning" puzzles because they've become incredibly overdone.

Once again, it shows what I know!

Solid execution of the idea, Anne Marie and Eric choosing three colorful phrases. I'd happily give pluses to HIGH PROFILE, SCHOLARLY REVIEW, and STORE CREDIT if they were in a themeless I was evaluating. It's not easy to fill around intersecting themers, and wise deployment of black squares helped keep each of the three regions small enough to fill relatively smoothly. There's a tough piece of French vocab in MAI around the second themer's bend, but SPIDER-MAN's presence more than makes up for it.

Better yet, SPIDER-MAN's clue lends so much humor. [Noted web developer], indeed! I love that it didn't require a telltale question mark, so innocently pointing you to some JavaScript coder.

Same goes for [Hanging out, say]. Devilish way to describe clothes DRYING on a line.

It's odd to place the revealer as the third of four themers, though I can understand the rationale — shoving STORECRE/EDIT into a corner means that you can fill around it with less interconnection to the rest of the puzzle. That did allow for more bonus fill — VETO POWER, BIG GAME, DART GUN, even PARK IT — so I didn't mind the weirdness of an early revealer as much as I usually would.

There's not enough to distinguish this from the large body of turning puzzles, but the deft cluing touches and extras in the grid helped keep up my interest.

ATTACHÉ is a perfect revealer for this theme, which attaches an É for comic results. It's rare that I laugh at every kooky phrase in an add-a-letter theme, but every one of them did it for me. TOUCHÉ TYPES amused — funny to picture a dog who's too fancy to go on anything but the LAMÉ. I'm sure many people think I have PASSÉ JUDGMENT. PATÉ is not my thing, so I'd struggle to get it down, indeed.

I appreciated the tightness of the concept, too. It's too easy to simply add an E to create another word — a whole ‘nother story to add an É. There are a few more possibilities, but only a few. You can sift through a rhyming site to see for yourself.

Great gridwork. It's tough to execute on adjacent long Downs like LETS PARTY / AVALANCHE without relying on a couple of dabs of short glue. It's incredibly difficult to get a pair of sizzlers with perfectly clean fill, but INCOME TAX and CHAPERONE are both solid.

"Add-a-letter" themes rarely catch my attention, but the tightness and the humor of the resulting phrases made this one stand out.

PARTING WORDS, literally parted by a black square. So delightfully self-referential! Great way to make a "hidden words" theme stand out.

I also appreciated that Eric straddled the border between "hidden words" and broken elements (think: LYCHEE / RIOT GEAR). He could easily have presented RADIO STATION in a single, extended entry, leaving the solver to interpret "parting" as "splitting across the phrase's two words." Using the black square puts emphasis on the concept — a delightful parting gift, if you will.

You won't?

Sigh, NOBODY listens to me (great clue referring to how Odysseus tricked the cyclops!).

The black square divisions also elevated the solve for us, technically-oriented constructors — finding symmetrically paired chunks is much more difficult than finding symmetrical phrases, lending elegance. RADIO STATION 5 / 7 mirroring PARTING / WORDS 7 / 5 is neat!

It was odd to encounter HEADSTAND first and finish with PASSED OUT, in what look like typical themer placements. The concept would have struck me more strongly without those Across bonuses muddying the waters, although it is challenging to grid around broken themers.

Why?

Glad you asked! When your theme entries are short, something else in the grid has to be long, so you can adhere to Will Shortz's 78-word maximum. Eric already wove in six long Downs, so there's not much room for another pair. In this case, I'd have allowed him to go to 80 words to avoid theme muddling.

Inventive way to start the week, the meta-ness elevating this puzzle from run-of-the-mill "hidden words" concepts. Setting it a-PART, if you —

(Fear not, Poseidon is currently punishing Jeff)

I love PERSONAL FINANCE. I help some friends and family manage their finances, taking delight in freeing them from 1% annual asset management fees. Sometimes it's comforting to pay a professional to assume responsibility, but 1% annually — often, upwards of 2%! — is such a burden on long-term returns.

Great theme idea, highlighting people whose names involve an asset class. BONDS, definitely. CASH, yes. A shame that John STOCKton doesn't quite work.

Also, a shame that SILVER is rarely seen in PERSONAL FINANCE discussions. It's a reasonable idea to allocate a small percentage of assets to "alternatives," which include real estate, private equity, hedge funds, collectibles, commodities. And if someone's insistent on allocating a portion to commodities, it's almost always gold.

Eric's point is well-taken. Would ARI GOLD have been a good addition? ANDREW GOLD, the guy who wrote the "Golden Girls" theme song? Probably no and no.

If you have to accept a trade-off in themers, relaxing consistency might have been interesting. (Get it? Interest-ing? As in, interest on an investment ... fine, I'll stop.) Jeff GOLDblum? Singular James BOND? Brian CASHman? Feels like there's some solution.

I'd have also loved the revealer lower in the puzzle, to not give away the game so early. While some folks adore themer interlock, generating a bigger a-ha moment is more important. This could have been achieved by putting all the people at the top of the puzzle, and PERSONAL FINANCE in row 12.

Smooth grid, though, which can be difficult given the interlocking themers.

Some light snacks today, non-food phrases interpreted as edibles. The phrase TOUGH COOKIES always amuses me; sounds like something either my great-grandmother or my kids would say. Or literally, what my kids made the other day. Yum, of course these improvised snickerdoodles are delicious! Now hold on while I go call my dentist ...

Reinterpretation themes work best when there's a drastic and/or surprising change in meaning. I've heard CHIPS changed from their poker to food form hundreds of times, so that didn't do much for me. FIRECRACKERS was more interesting, imagining them as the official sponsor of the Fahrenheit 451 burn crew. And I would go to my ophthalmologist way more often if there were eyeball-shaped candy involved.

I appreciated the PLETHORA of bonuses, way to work those mid-length entries! Such care in selecting so much interesting material, AFL CIO, INTERN, LIBIDO, SENECA, TOBAGO, TOE-TAP, VANISH, VAULTS enhancing my solve. I generally prefer long bonuses to shorter ones, since they stand out more, but I'd take such an infusion of great mid-range material any day.

There's no secret to achieving this. It's a matter of putting in the time — for example, evaluating dozens if not hundreds of possibilities in the flexible southeast corner.

The theme didn't hit me as strongly as I wanted, since the grammar felt twisted. When would I ever say JEFF NUTS, for example?

Don't answer that.

I love entries like I IMAGINE SO. I stared at its beginning, sure that I'd made a mistake. IIM? WTF starts with IIM? I IMAGINE SO! It's so neat when a strong phrase contains a bizarre — shall we say, unimaginable? — sequence of letters.

What a dark puzzle. ADULTERER, NARCOTICS, HOOKAH (literally dark, what with the smoky atmosphere of HOOKAH bars), POLICE TAPE ... in just the top half. I'm picturing Eric careening from "The Sopranos" to "The Wire" to "Medium" to "Gotham." I keep my binge-watching to lighter fare — "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" is more my jam — to take my mind off the woes of the world. I can see why people might be drawn to these types of shows, though.

I've never had a GRASSHOPPER, but crème de menthe, crème de cacao, and cream? Appropriate that Eric worked in both I NEED A NAP and COME AND GO (out of consciousness).

Absolutely genius clue in [Result of multiple paper cuts?]. Even after figuring out that the entry must be FINAL DRAFT, I couldn't figure out why. Ah, that's paper "cuts," as in edits! As in painful edits that your agent asks you to perform, like roughly 90% of your working draft. Sigh.

On a par was [Speak in a husky voice?]. I immediately put in RASPS, and even when I convinced myself that the grid entry had to be BARK, I questioned it. This, coming from a guy who lives roughly five minutes away from UW — home of the Washington Huskies. Ahem.

A lot of fun moments today, and the puzzle did have some elements of the escape from reality I seek from ten minutes of crosswording. More Escape from Alcatraz than relaxing, though.

★ Such a regal theme, WHITE CASTLE, DAIRY QUEEN, and BURGER KING all members of a FOOD COURT! I'm kicking myself, having never noticed this connection. I haven't had such a strong feeling of being outWITTed in ages. (Wish I'd Thought of That)

Neat gridwork, too. You don't even have to squint that hard to see castle shapes in the grid. Imagine the top of a rook (castle) in chess — don't the top five rows evoke that? I can also imagine a main gate in the south, with crenels above FOOD COURT.

There is a bit of a moat, with ANGE mucking around with ADIN, TENN, RKO. I had a long moment of hesitation before giving this the POW! because there are so many trouble spots that could turn away newer solvers.

Pinching DAIRY QUEEN and BURGER KING inward one column might have helped (then placing black squares at the Y of YALE and E of URGE). Filling cleanly around two adjacent long downs can be such a bear.

However, I did enjoy the bonuses of JANE AUSTEN and ROSE GARDEN. They didn't offset all the hitches I experienced through the short fill, but they did make up for some of it.

All in all, a fantastic theme — so fun, elegantly wrapped up with a perfect revealer.

I'm friends with one of my b-school econ profs, who also happens to be a novice crossword solver. Not only SUPPLY and DEMAND crossing in the iconic pattern, but PRICE on the Y-axis and QUANTITY on the X-axis? Perfect for him!

Throw in ECONOMICS and ADAM SMITH, and this is the puzzle the economist in me has wanted to make for ages. Several constructors over the years have proposed various SUPPLY / DEMAND concepts, but none of them has felt nearly as strong as this one. Bravo, Eric!

(For non-economists, the SUPPLY line shows that at higher prices, producers want to produce more. The DEMAND line demonstrates that at higher prices, there's less purchasing interest (excepting luxury goods). The intersection of these two lines is the equilibrium point at which the market settles.)

Eric deployed a huge number of black squares in the middle so he could make everything smooth around those fixed SUPPLY and DEMAND letters. Smart thinking. Even with UTOPIA as a bonus, the center is beautiful — with a fantastic repurposing of California's "Golden State" moniker!

I'm impressed at how well he executed on the giant SW and NE corners. Not only are they huge regions, but they both have a themer plus two fixed letters apiece.

Twelve fixed letters cause so many constraints that there have to be trade-offs. Today, that was an excess of proper names. I vaguely recognize Philip AHN from "Kung Fu," but crossing him with CHOPRA could be a minefield for newer solvers. I'll be curious to see if my old econ prof can solve this one or not. He's not a sci-fi fan, so SMAUG may cause him to give up as well, but those crossings feel fairer.

I imagine this puzzle could generate some pushback on ADAM SMITH being featured — the "invisible hand" is ideologically divisive, to say the least — but as a believer that capitalism is the worst of all systems, except for all the rest, I thoroughly enjoyed this offering.

When the uniclue first hit the crossworld, it was mind-blowing. I remember leafing through a book of Will Shortz's favorite crosswords, stopping when I hit one that had a single list of clues. Stupid reprint publishers, you left out the Down clues! Writing an angry email: Dear morons, how could you be so idiotic to leave out an entire set of clues? Are you so uneducated that such a simple thing as Across and Down … oh. Wait, what? WHAT?! It felt brilliant.

It's a more mature category now, enough so that we have a full page dedicated to it, so uniclues need something to help them stand out. One from a few years ago had a nice twist, employing ENGLISH and ESPANOL. Neat to see the creativity in the variations.

Using X AND Y phrases is a solid approach. It didn't give me that much of an a-ha moment, though, since once I cracked STOP (AND) STARE, all the other instances became too easy.

Maybe if the first letters had spelled out something … that would have been mind-blowing, but that's also too much to ask since incorporating seven pairs of crossing answers is already tough — some will necessarily cross, like SANDALS and TRIED.

You might think, what's the problem since you can sort of separate the pairs of answers? Not true! (Unless you use many fewer pairs, of course, but having three themers would make for a terribly thin puzzle.) Any time you have two crossing answers, a constructor's job gets tougher, and when you start forcing these regions to interact, it can get ugly, quick.

It's even hard to predict where the problems will crop up. WASA is more typical, as are TROI/ROI, because they're in directly constrained areas. However, something like FOMO crossing UOMO is only an indirect result of the constraints.

Not a standout uniclue, but it's a solid one to add to the list.

During our weekly chat, Jim Horne and I had a fun exchange on this puzzle.

Me: I love this theme genre, seemingly disparate things connected in an unexpected way. It's a shame that two of them worked much better than the third.

Jim: Fully agreed. Who tells a CHIROPRACTOR to GET CRACKING?

Me: (meekly) … me?

Jim: Excellent humor. Perhaps you're the one who should GET CRACKING with your comedic career.

Me: No, no, no! You might tell a STAND-UP COMIC to crack jokes or make wisecracks, but you'd never use "cracking" by itself. Never. Never! Jeff is getting angry!

Jim: (pause) Another definition of "cracking" is "losing one's composure."

Me: There you go again, the comedian always cracking.

Jim: Didn't you say that when it comes to comedy, you'd never use "cracking" by itself?

Me: Time to crack some heads.

I enjoyed thinking about what other meanings of "crack" could have been used. All of them were terribly inappropriate, though. Even LION TAMER, which I probably wouldn't have balked at twenty years ago, seems cruel these days.

Fantastic gridwork from a newer constructor! I enjoyed all the bonuses, SLY AS A FOX, MUCHACHO, HOODLUM, TRASH CAN, BITTER END. In total, it felt a bit dark, but no doubt, it's all colorful.

The one nit I'll pick: I normally don't care about duplications of short words like "I," but IM COLD I HOPE I AGREE … a bit of an I sore.

With just four themers, every constructor should aim to have this much bonus material while keeping glue to a minimal NES, SKEE, TARE. Solid layout, spacing out his themers as well as his long downs. Great start to the week, definitely some POW! consideration.

★ The unabashed physics dork in me loved JUST A PHASE as a punny way of summing up SOLID, LIQUID, GAS, PLASMA. The father in me also loved it, but for a different reason. One day, far, far, away, there will come a time when I don't have to yell at my kids that GASes and LIQUIDs are fine, but they have to flush the toilet after depositing SOLIDs.

It's been a long phase.

I've seen many a crossword including SOLID, LIQUID, and GAS, but PLASMA is a great bonus. Well, at least for those of us who delight in teaching our 5-year-olds about force diagrams and the concepts required to predict projectile motion.

No wonder my kids throw so many things at me.

I'd love an ordering, with PLASMA to GAS to LIQUID to SOLID, but I'm okay with mixing them up so LIQUID ASSET could be featured. What a great entry! I (unsurprisingly) spent an hour coming up with a couple of ways to get the themers in order, but (surprisingly), I didn't like them as much as what we see today. PLASMA SCREEN TVS is so much more solid (groan) than PLASMA SCREENS, which would have balanced out ITS JUST A PHASE nicely.

And what fine gridwork, in a debut! I'd usually recommend newbs to avoid long acrosses, but ALARM BELLS and DAISY CHAIN are well worth a bit of AMT and SSE. Elsewhere, I appreciated that Eric stuck to lesser offenders like OTRO.

There's something amusing about the doubles inside OHHI and NAAN next to each other, too. HA HA!

All in all, an entertaining Monday puzzle that might appeal to my dork friends more than the general solving population, but I appreciate that it's still accessible to most.