Mark Bickham author page
2 puzzles by Mark Bickham
with Jeff Chen comments
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| G | E | O | D | E | N | T | E | S | T | S | L | O | ||
| I | N | S | A | N | E | A | S | Y | L | U | M | S | ||
| E | T | C | A | U | S | T | ||||||||
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| A | R | N | O | R | E | D | O | S | E | Z | I | O | ||
| W | I | C | K | E | D | W | I | T | C | H | E | F | T | |
| T | U | R | N | A | A | A | ||||||||
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| B | O | A | W | A | H | O | O | R | I | D | E | R | ||
| I | S | T | H | I | S | G | O | O | D | A | I | R | E | |
| F | L | E | A | S | O | L | I | O | N | O | V | A | ||
| F | O | S | S | E | D | A | L | I | S | T | E | T |
Ah! It took me a while to figure out what the theme really meant, and it was a nice moment when I realized each phrase started with a slang synonym for "good". I like the overall concept and the huge theme density, although the clue for the revealer was so long I didn't bother reading it. I wonder if the impact would have been stronger if that had been concatenated. Or if the revealer had simply been GOOD?
Puzzles, especially early-week ones, often don't need a revealer to explain the theme. But ones like this, where the theme isn't overtly clear, definitely benefit. IS THIS GOOD feels a touch arbitrary to me however, not really a lexical chunk to my ear. I sometimes pull sniff-test duty in my household, and I think OH GOD THIS IS BURNING MY NOSE is more accurate. Seriously though, IS THIS STILL ALL RIGHT or IS THIS BAD feels more correct to me.
I'm fully agreed with Will that IT RIP is likely the worst piece of fill today. I'm also not a fan of several other entries though, especially A SCAR, OOOLA, and OLIO. A SCAR bugs me because I have a personal preference against five-letter partials (see IT RIP). OLIO is on my personal Do Not Call list, just like ELOI yesterday, because it's 1.) seen heavily in xws but not in real life and 2.) composed of common letters. None of these entries are BAD per se, but they're not BAD. Er, GOOD.
I do appreciate the effort to incorporate more long fill (DRESS SIZE and INCUBATES are both nice) but can't help wondering if it would have been worth it to break up ENDWISE and VIRTUAL to achieve a smoother solve. Any time you leave a five-letter word space (NTEST and WAHOO) right in between two themers, fill is going to be rough around the edges, because of all the parallel constraints you impose on the grid. VIRTUAL is a pretty good answer, but sacrificing it to get rid of some of the shorter ugly stuff would have been sick.
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