Michael Paleos author page

LETTER … STAMP … ADDRESS … the winner of "Name That Theme" today? The ENVELOPE, please …

Michael!

*Jeff sitting down in embarrassment*

Winning revealer in MAIL IT IN, helping to elevate this theme from the first and second times it was done in the NYT crossword.

While not an innovative or fresh take, it does provide a great example of how this type of theme can work. LOWERCASE LETTER and a written letter have similarities, but they're different enough to opacify what's going on. TERM OF ADDRESS is even better since addressing someone verbally is far away from the written address on an ENVELOPE. Newbs who haven't seen this concept before could get a nice a-ha.

It would have been great to keep MAIL / IT IN together, placing it at the bottom of the puzzle. Perhaps it could have been elongated to MAILING IT IN to match RUBBER STAMP.

No long bonus fill, but this Godzilla enthusiast enjoyed uncovering MOTHRA's attack on the upper right corner. GO AHEAD, make Godzilla's day! TIKTOK, ART DECO, and ARABIAN nights helped spice things up a bit, too.

AMOI AMAT is fill that should not have been STETted. TIKTOK is fun, but it's not that fun. Said the 51-year-old who still resists joining Instagram.

Although there were some execution problems, I still enjoyed some of the bonuses and especially the fun revealer helping to create some distinction from the prior art.

Ah, those marketing folks and their splashy displays, replete with TOTES eye-catching intentional misspellings. May you be damned to a lifetime of taking my kids shopping—followed by ruler-slaps from their elementary school teachers who demand to know who taught them that FROOT is more correct (and tastier) than FRUIT.

I spent an embarrassingly long stretch wondering what was wrong with BOSTON RED SOX. Besides the fact that they're dirty rotten cheaters, of course. The word cox comes to mind. Referring to the cox of the boat who spearheaded the foul play, of course!

I appreciated that Michael drew from various areas: food, baseball, horse racing, video games, music. Melancholy reminder that marketers are everywhere. Incredibly evocative brands / names, too — I'd be happy to see any of them in a themeless.

The MORTAL KOMBAT / ALEK crossing fascinated me. What a genius idea: potentially ambiguous crossings made unambiguous by the theme. Without today's SIC concept, I would have had to guess at ALEC or ALEK. I would have loved five crossings like this.

That nugget sparked my interest more than the loose collection of purposeful misspellings since you could list hundreds of them. I would have loved some form of tightening, like in a 2015 puzzle based around music.

The final Across entry is an optimal place for a revealer, delaying the curtain until the last moment. It's not as crucial in today's case since you're already cross-referencing to it, so it might have been better to move it up one row for cleaner filling of that PEI DREI corner. Or you could move FROOT LOOPS to the last themer position and orient SIC vertically off its S.

Still, I enjoyed the assortment of vivid names, as well as the societal statement about marketing placing its sic-ly fingerprints over all walks of life.

Jim Horne and I have met up a few times during pandemic lulls, and every time it involves the DRUNKEN CHICKEN at my local Asian fusion restaurant. Those lunches aren't quite as hopping as today's theme, what with the HORSE ROCKING out, the TURKEY going WILD, and the BULL full-out RAGING to the beat. But considering that Jim and I have both become underground molemen during the pandemic, meeting outside, ten feet apart from each other, talking to each other through written placards, is our version of being PARTY ANIMALS.

I'll take that drink now.

Amazing that Michael was able to find so many (adjective) + (animal) phrases that describe PARTY ANIMALS! ROCKING HORSE is especially great, since the shift from literal front-to-back rocking to out-and-out rocking out is fantastic change in meaning.

There's a lot to enjoy in the grid, the big NW / SE corners filled with so many goodies. No one grid entry is mind-blowing, but BLOWS IT and LEGREST are great ways to bookend a solve.

SST is one of those crosswordese entries editors are trying to squash, but those common letters are so useful in terminal positions. Although I'd usually do anything to get rid of it, eating it as the cost of doing ESCALATES KOALA BLAST SENATES business feels like a reasonable exchange.

It's impossible for me to not appreciate anything featuring DRUNKEN CHICKEN front and center. The theme set is not as amazing a discovery as Alina's version of PARTY ANIMALS, but it's still a rocking quartet.

I have an unfortunate quality (here's where the smart-asses (accurately) ask, just one?): I'm unable to forget prior art. Upon uncovering ONION and SESAME, my mind flew to Andrea Carla Michaels. Hadn't she done a puzzle similar to this a few years ago? Turns out, it was almost a decade ago!

Imagine what I could achieve if my brain used its memory units more wisely.

I enjoyed the gridwork, goodies like CLOWN CAR and GANYMEDE tickling me. I admire the audacity, too, taking on a lower-word count challenge, accomplishing it well, with only a bit of PREV. Impressive result, done with such care. The west and east regions are particularly difficult; no surprise that that's where PREV showed up.

The mismatch of easy theme and tougher grid created a dissonance, though. It's like writing a kids' picture book about three-dimensional Newtonian motion. You struggle to understand the vectors and units associated with gravity and translational/rotational movement … only to find out that Jack and Jill rolled down the hill. It's a lot of work to plug through, with not as much payoff as you deserve.

There's nothing wrong with doing a similar theme, especially almost a decade later, but I'd have enjoyed this more if the grid had been dialed back, and the puzzle run on a Monday. Still, I did enjoy the colorful theme phrases — hard to argue with OPEN SESAME, and I'm a big Roald Dahl / VERUCA SALT fan — and the lovely bonus entries.

Neat visual, CANDY STRIPEs throughout the puzzle. I hope the NYT prints the background of the theme squares in red — the Sunday Magazine has such potential to employ color.

I liked that Michael

1. arranged his themers so neatly, and
2. chose candies that can be clued in non-candy ways (try that with M&Ms or ALMOND JOY).

Solid gridwork, too. Filling around six grid-spanning themers is hard enough, but when you break them up, forcing black square placements right off the bat, it becomes even harder. I didn't care for the aggregation of ERI LAE NEU ACI — too much of one type of gluey bit becomes noticeable — but overall, the result was better than I imagined. Ending with about an average amount of crossword glue for a NYT Sunday is an accomplishment when the constraints are stringent.

Hard-core solvers like myself might find it to be a boring solve, but sometimes we have to suck it up and recognize that occasionally the wider solving audience could use a softball; a "hey, I finished the Sunday NYT!" victory dance. I challenged myself to solve the themers without the benefit of a single cross, which turned out to be a fun experience.

Debut! Fun play on POP UP ADs, the letters A and D "rising" over black squares. A perfect find for our favorite CAN AD IAN, Jim! I'm curious how many neighbors up north ever noticed that curious parsing find.

I also like how the ADs were so smoothly integrated into solid long entries: AVOCADO, SIDE ROAD, BREADED — NOT SO BAD, indeed!

A lot of constraints to work with, given the parallel structure of paired themers like AVOCADO / ROPE A DOPE. Michael went big, with wide-open, tough-to-fill corners. Some LOONIER fill resulted, with the tough ORINOCO and the bizarre ZAMUNDA. I've seen "Coming to America" maybe half a dozen times, but I still had to stare at the finished entry to make sure it seemed like it could be a word. I waffled between that and ZEMUNDA (ELO seemed as realistic as ALO as a phone greeting). Relieved that I guessed right!

Fully agreed with Michael, that the revealer at the top wasn't great. At first, I thought it ought to be easy to place at the bottom right. Not with MILL fixed into place, though! I do think 56-Across could have been a better possibility.

Interesting theme idea overall. I do wish more of the themers had been 1.) more interesting base phrases, like ROPE A DOPE, and 2.) the chunks resulting from parsing had all been as solid as CAN and IAN (OPE and TRE, I see you).

Maybe ... CAR RADIOS to CARR AD IOS? MORTADELLA to MORT AD ELLA? POMPADOUR to POMP AD OUR? I bet there are more.

Heading down a rabbit hole ...