Lewis Rothlein author page

As if I didn't feel old enough, I had hernia repair surgery last year. Whether it was caused by genetics and/or carrying my kids around, it was clearly the latter, and I was thus due some quiet, kid-free recovery time. I should have known better — I hate quiet recovery time. Sure, the first couple hours were nice, but I quickly go batsh*t stir-crazy if I don't have something interesting to keep my mind occupied. So when Lewis emailed me the day after my surgery, I yelled at him to stop casting Unforgivable Curses at me through his Multiverse of Madness.

There may have been some heavy pain meds and Netflix involved.

After I came to, the next few days passed so blissfully, what with the programming optimization challenges, the grid skeleton development, and the process of making the dozens of trade-offs to arrive at a 140-word product that we both liked.

It was all such a treat. Nothing like a complex problem to tackle, to take the edge off stabbing groin pains.

Rest in peace, Chester. I've had the privilege of working with Lewis on several puzzles now, and there have been so many times when one of his breakthroughs came after a long walk with his dear friend.

What a great find in BLAREDOUT to BUT (BUT "skipping" the town of LAREDO)! Most themes involving "deletions creating another valid entry" use short strings of letters. I don't remember seeing a six-letter one before. Impressive!

I like the big-thinking approach in using longer town names. BUTTE, LAREDO, PROVO are especially nice. MESA and ERIE work too, although four-letter finds aren't as interesting, especially when they contain mostly common letters.

As longtime readers would expect, I couldn't stop myself from investigating what else was possible. With the help of our Replacement Finder, half an hour of scanning through a list of towns turned up some fun multi-worders:

PERE NOEL to PEEL

MA CHERIE to MACH

SALT AIR to SIR

NO REMORSE to NORSE

I would have loved more multi-word themers, since single-word to single-word transformations aren't that eye-popping. There's something so fascinating about a space changing location or getting deleted.

There are many ways to present a theme like this, and today's is one of the hardest implementations to solve. Without circles to tell you where the towns are and without a clue for the base phrase, I struggled mightily to finish.

Will Shortz has said that all he wants out of Thursdays is that they're harder than Wednesdays. Circling the towns would have made the concept much easier, but still challenging — and more importantly, more fun to solve. Alternately, cluing both the base phrase and the resulting entry would have allowed for more fun entries like MA CHERIE (which doesn't work with today's presentation, since MACHERIE appears nonsensical without a hint to help the solver figure out that it's MA CHERIE).

Some neat finds, and certainly a hard Thursday workout for this OLDMAN!

Lewis and I are both musicians, so I loved his idea of presenting these repeated letter strings as if they were within repeated measures of a score. Choosing ones that are four letters long — to mirror four quarter notes in 4/4 time — seemed perfect!

Then I waffled. Would non-musicians figure out what those dots were all about? I imagined non-musicians trying to erase what they thought were printing errors, flecks of ink that had dripped onto their crossword. I talked Lewis out of it, seeing if we could come up with a different, non-musical revealer.

After a few days, Lewis convinced me back to the repeat signs. That is, until I thought about the poor electronic solvers, forced to read a note to the effect of [The grayed squares are meant to have pairs of dots on their ends as if repeat signs in a musical score]. Blech!

Thus, I persuaded Lewis away from the concept again. It took some doing, but we agreed it was for the best.

Until Lewis convinced me back!

Shows who's the brains in this operation.

Finally, we agreed to a compromise: incorporating a revealer that would make things clear, even if you didn't see the pairs of dots or had never picked up an instrument. REPEAT isn't the most cunning revealer, but it at least gets the point — or points, get it?* — across for non-musicians.

Jim Horne probably thinks that Jeff, the former trombone player, should be sackbutted for that dotty pun.

I enjoy having a crunchy problem to wrap my brain around. This one wasn't as hard as others — it's a simple matter to search for palindromic letter patterns buried within phrases — but it was still a fun diversion. I doubted we were going to find anything of interest, and I didn't think the strings would be long enough to be worthwhile discoveries, but I was pleasantly surprised.

As usual, shows what I know!

We even had the option of using only long(ish) strings that happened to be words in their own right (like PLAN and OMEN). We debated the merits of that approach, but eventually decided to pick the longest strings that were buried within the most colorful base phrases.

The grid was a bear, as crossing pairs of theme entries are notoriously difficult to grid around. Some of the palindromic strings weren't friendly, either. I struggled getting the skeleton together — all those crossing themers taking up so much real estate — until finally landing on a fortuitous overlap, COURSE CREDIT enabling a workable grid backbone.

I usually advise sticking to 140 words to achieve a strong balance of color and cleanliness, but taking out a black square at the first S of CLASS SIZE bizarrely seemed to help. It made sense after studying the area — four letters ending in O gives more choices than three letters ending in O — but I wasn't wild about ENIAC. We kept banging away at that section, and couldn't come up with anything better at 140 words, so it was what it was. Ah well, hopefully nerds everywhere are okay with it. Beep boop.

Thursday tricksiness, OFFSIDES indicating that six answers are to be interpreted without their first and last letters:

BALONEY

SKETCHY

I FORGET

TANGELO

UP EARLY

SO THERE

Some good findings, SO THERE -> OTHER my favorite. SO THERE is a fun phrase in itself, and the reparsing required to make O THER into OTHER made it even more interesting. UP EARLY was good too, although UP EARLY isn't as snazzy as a saucy SO THERE.

Two stuck out to me as not as good: KETCH in SKETCHY and ANGEL in TANGELO. Neither KETCH nor TANGELO registered in my head as real words, at least not as quickly as ALONE / BALONEY.

It's easy enough to find entries that become other entries when the first and last letters are lopped off — a quick python script of about 10 lines does the trick. So I'd have liked something extra to elevate the theme more. Some possibilities:

• Longer entries (which would have helped them stand out better in the grid, too)
• Every one of them requiring re-parsing
• The same letters being lopped off the front and/or end
• Lopped-off letters spell out something appropriate

That last one would likely have been tough if you used all the lopped-off letter, but you could certainly spell out something with the first letters.

As it was, I kept wondering what BY / SY / IT / TO / UY / SE might lead to. Seemed too random, not tight enough, if you allow for the first and last letters to be anything whatsoever.

Some fun clues helped to entertain. ANTS as creatures on every continent except ANTartica. A light YEAR going a long way. And what the heck might [Verses versus verses events] be? Ah, poetry SLAMS! That's clever.

The gridwork was good, nothing that slowed me down too much, just some SEL STET NEURO AS YOU. Considering the constraints of having seven themers — shortish, but still seven — it's a decent result.

Some solid themer finds, but with an extra element as listed above, this could have been a real standout.

★ My admiration for this puzzle grew as I studied it. (And as Jim politely nudged me.)

At first, it didn't seem to have enough of a reason to be a rebus. There have been so many of them over the years that you need a great raison d'etre. Couldn't you do the same concept with single letters?

(Well, no. SQUARE ONE is a single square. So if you're going to use repeated words, not letters …)

Ah. Well then. Why those particular phrases? Granted, they are all colorful; jazzy. But there are dozens of them out there.

(Besides the ones Lewis mentioned, what other ones can you think of?)

Huh? LOTS OF THEM! Like … uh … TIME AFTER TIME! Take that, Canadia!

(Okay. What else?)

I have MANY others. I just don't feel like revealing them. What others do YOU have?

(I didn't say I had any.)

BAH, NO WONDER WE'RE BUILDING A WALL!

(You know that Canada is to the north of America, and—)

Double bah, back to the puzzle! I appreciate when rebuses introduce fresh phrases that aren't usually seen in 15x15 grids. Awesome use of a 20-letter one, YOU CANT TAKE IT WITH YOU, to match BACK TO SQUARE ONE. DO AS I SAY NOT AS I DO is something I tell newer constructors all the time. And BOND … JAMES BOND is so evocative.

And great bonuses. SNAKE OIL matching ANACONDA, plus CONEHEAD, ON SILENT, BAIL BOND, YES WE CAN, TWO TERM. I had reservations about the JAMES BOND / BAIL BOND dupe, but they're different enough meanings that I let it slide.

As for KOPF NGO ONEA SALA TRE, they collectively made for not as elegant a solve as I like, but it's a reasonable trade-off for all that sparkling long fill.

A wealth of clever wordplay clues, too. [House rules may not apply here] for the SENATE? So innocent, so wickedly smart.

It's rare that I give a POW! to a rebus puzzle, as rebuses generally feel a bit lazy to me; constructors not able to come up with good single-letter ideas. So it's high praise for Lewis. Strong idea and entertaining solve.

X MARKS THE SPOT has been mined for crossword plunder many a time, but I don't remember this exact implementation. Some colorful phrases in OUT DAMNED (SPOT), the X working as a regular X in the down direction, and SPOT in the horizontal. (SPOT) OF TEA was another snazzy phrase. GUEST (SPOT) was pretty good, too.

I wasn't as hot on IN A (SPOT) and (SPOT) ON, as those are a bit too easy to incorporate. (SPOT)IFY (a streaming music service) to a lesser extent, too.

Tough to cram in seven of those special squares. It is true that in the vertical direction, the X is free to be a normal X, but working Xs into a grid can be challenging. Seven of them is a bear — that's not anywhere near the record of 13, but it does get this puzzle on our list.

Neat interlock, with OUT DAMNED (SPOT) intersecting X MARKS THE SPOT. Love it when those things can happen.

Some compromises to make this grid work. I've heard complaints about Jean AUEL but considering she's sold millions of books, I think she's more than fair game. What does bug me are variants like SHWA, never-written-this-way-in-real-life I-TEN, odd TYE, dir. NNE, partial IS UP, weird UNTUNE ("go out of tune" is more like it), abbr. ATTY.

I do like that Lewis went out of his way not to load up any one category of crossword glue. Next time I'd like to see fewer categories represented, though. I might have tried a less ambitious construction. I don't think the theme density is the issue since the blips aren't around the short (SPOT) themers. Going up to a 76-word grid could have helped, maybe by breaking up GAG REEL at the R. As much as I love that term — and AMBIENT is good too — rejiggering those two corners could have made the puzzle feel smoother overall.

I didn't mind the asymmetry of the theme answers that much, as it made finding those Xs unpredictable. Still, there's something so pleasing about themer symmetry.

Overall, nice take on a tried and true theme concept.

Solvers must drop the trigram MIC from words so the entry makes sense with the clue. I particularly enjoyed BALSAMIC to BALSA, and FORMICA to FORA.

I was all ready to grouse about the random placements of the themers (highlighted them below); how that goes against crossword symmetry. But I softened after reading Lewis's note. I still prefer adhering to crossword symmetry, but I appreciate Lewis's line of thinking. I did have some nice surprises during my solve in that way.

Lewis worked in some nice fill into those big corners. EL GRECO and CD PLAYER framing the bottom left were particularly snazzy, especially with a great clue for the latter. [Turner of music] is usually TINA or IKE, yeah? This time it's a literal turn-er of CDs. Fantastic!

A couple of tough entries and crossings — I had to think for a while if I considered them all "fair," i.e. most educated solvers could (or should) figure out the right letters. MBABANE was unfamiliar to me, but not knowing your world capitals = shame on me. One could argue that people shouldn't have to know what a NENE is, but again, world capitals should be a part of every NYT solver's repertoire. (MANAMA, Bahrain was in last year's ACPT final puzzle!)

ZABAR'S crossing ZENER ... good engineers can identify a ZENER diode, but ZENER cards do feel esoteric for the general population. ZABAR'S may be a big deal in upscale restaurants, but this crossing leans over to the unfair-ish side to me, especially to non-New Yorkers.

Some unsavory gluey bits in ECCE, YEE, OBLA, IMA (I wondered about KO'ED … but is KO'D better? KAYOED looks even stranger). But overall, not so bad given the tough construction requiring big open corners, along with a themeless-esque word count of 70. It had a bit of a themeless feel to it, which I liked.

I would have liked more examples of MIC taken out of the middle of words — FOR(MIC)A is more interesting to me than POLE(MIC), for instance — and even better would be some examples using snazzy phrases instead of regular words. But Lewis did discover some good words that have this MIC DROP property.

Debut! Neat arrangement of six themers, five of which contain a HIDDEN GEM, i.e. the word GEM is split across two words. Cool to see a rare grid pattern, with two of the theme answers flipped vertically and incorporated into a triple-stack of nine-letter words. Some great material in those stacks, INDULGE ME / TEA LEAVES / LAY TO REST = a great start to the puzzle.

Lewis uses a Z-pattern in his grid, which helps immensely in filling. Note how you can almost isolate the lower right corner, not having to worry much about how it connects into the rest of the grid.

The drawback is that it's all too easy for solvers to get stuck in one of the corners. Even flipping two pairs of squares in the stairstep — shifting the block after EVENS to the left, and the block after MESA to the right — would have helped puzzle flow immensely. Would have made construction much harder, though.

Speaking of hard constructions, LARGE MOUTH over DODGE MONACO is a rough arrangement. You have to find two words at 21-A and 22-A that facilitate smooth fill in that region — very tough. Not surprising to require DEREG / ERG and CAPT / ETHNO to hold those sections together. As much as I like low-word-count puzzles, breaking up BEDMATE might have helped smooth things out.

Loved the clue for EARS: [Ones catching some waves] referring to sound waves. Beautiful!

Will has mentioned that all he's looking for in a Thursday puzzle is something that's harder than a Wednesday. I can see where he's coming from, but I personally like to have a bigger bang for my buck, an a-ha moment that's worthy of the struggle in battling through the grid. Even having different GEMs hidden in the themers — OPAL, ONYX, RUBY, whatever — would have been a nice touch toward Thursday-worthy-ness.

Incredibly difficult to come up with something innovative every Thursday, but I think that's what many people have come to expect.