Kurt Mengel author page

TO DO LIST hinting at "phrases that start with TO* and DO*." I was glad to get that revealer — as I was solving, I thought there might be a football theme going on, with six TDs. It's much harder to get TO* DO* phrases than T* D* phrases, so I liked the extra effort.

I also liked the big thinking, with those chunky upper right and lower left corners. Those roughly 6x6 areas are so tough to fill smoothly for a Monday puzzle. Some solvers/constructors are going to detest the black cheater squares at the very NE / SW of the puzzle, saying those are visually inelegant and/or too much of a crutch, but I don't mind them. If they allow a constructor to generate a more colorful, smooth section, I say by all means! (Just as long as not too many are used.)

And what great results in the NE. Nothing is a standout answer, but the entire region has nary a hitch. I wonder if some solvers will complain about RENOWN, but I'm a big fan of LESTER Brown and His Band of RENOWN, so it seems perfectly fine to me. Getting an OTTER and a DOMINO is pretty fun, too.

And even though this area is more sectioned off from the rest of the puzzle than I like — if you blacked out the H in TOOTHPASTE, you'd completely isolate the corner — at least there are two answers connecting it to the rest of the puzzle in TOOTHPASTE and TOUCHDOWN. Much better to me than one answer-type choke-offs.

The SW didn't turn out as nice. I'd expect to see a minor gluey bit or two in a big corner like this, so SNO is perfectly reasonable. So is RTE. DATER feels a bit made-up, and NOT EAT even more so. I especially didn't care for the latter since ATE is also in the grid. (This is a common dupe that drives constructors crazy, since EAT / ATE phrases are so useful, but you can't easily catch a duplication because the letter strings aren't identical.)

Darn it, now I'm thinking about eating chips while watching football. TOUCHDOWN!

If only the themers had been run vertically. Then it could have been [The ailing crossword writer was …] FEELING DOWN.

*rim shot*

I had heard some of them before, but I still got a laugh out of the trash collector being IN THE DUMPS and the postal worker being OUT OF SORTS. Yes, the latter is kind of a stretch, since postal employees don't have a fixed supply of sorts (do they?), but given the wacky theme concept, it worked for me.

I hadn't heard of FEELING PUNK before. Googling the phrase in quotes doesn't get many hits. Several dictionaries list PUNK in that sense though, some even with "feeling punk" as an example. Generally that would make it fine in my book if it were a piece of fill, but given that it's a theme entry, I would have liked a phrase more solidly in everyday use.

Very impressive to work in two sets of long downs along with the five themers. Typically, five themers make it hard to work in even one pair, so to get two is a nice bonus. So many of them are vivid, too. ASTEROIDS gives me pleasant childhood memories, and SHOOT EM UP is beauty.

STEEL (DRUM) BANDS feels a little incomplete without DRUM, but that's minor (plus, Wikipedia disagrees with me). And I usually have no problems with plurals, but I agree with Kurt and Jan-Michele that HOME PLATES feels a little odd. No doubt it's "correct" in that you could say "there are HOME PLATES in every ballpark," but it's tough for me to think of a sentence I'd actually hear in actual life.

An enjoyable solve, made even more so by the minimal amount of gluey fill — given five themers and four long downs, I would expect to see much more. Some might complain about WYTHE being too difficult or esoteric for a Tuesday puzzle, but I enjoyed reading about him. First American law professor and an early opponent of slavery? Heck yeah, worth learning about.