Mike Knobler author page

The concept of taking idiomatic expressions literally as clues to their location in the grid didn't originate with me, but it's fun, and it hasn't been used in the Times for a while. 17 across was the seed entry; it appears today for the first time in the Will Shortz era (and for the first time in the Times crossword in more than 40 years). And 62 across is making its Times debut.

I played around with variations on this theme (over the moon, beside oneself, next to nothing, right of return, left to rot) and non-grid-spanners (Orion above "below the belt") before deciding three grid-spanners that sit one row down from their inside-the-grid references would give me a tighter, more elegant theme.

Having 62 theme squares, 34 of them stacked, puts constraints on a grid. I hope that having to fill in four abbreviations (one of them four letters) doesn't leave you feeling 39 across, with an 11 down.

I also hope you got a smile out of my clues for 61 across and 41 down. Thanks to Will, Sam Ezersky, and the team for great editing, especially the clues to 25 and 47 across.

Shhh! Please don't tell my dad I constructed today's puzzle. I don't think he reads the bylines, and I'd like to get his unbiased opinion before he finds out. We've been daily solvers for decades and often compare notes when we're done, such as the time my friend, Bobby, and I asked Dad about a four-letter entry, clued "Flat," that we got entirely from crosses but couldn't understand. I pronounced it over the phone as if it rhymed with plod, shod and trod. How else would you pronounce TWOD? Dad explained it, TWO-D, we all laughed, and Bobby and I still laugh about it 19 years later.

This is a long way of saying I apologize if you were tripped up by the hyphenated mini-theme, two entries I hope were much easier for you to parse than TWOD was for me. And here's hoping the puzzle didn't fall TWOD for Dad or for you. Previous versions of this grid featured crossed themers TIFFS and TOFFS at the center, but that put too much pressure on the fill. My favorite themers are FUTZ, such a wonderful word, TOFFS, because they do SNEER, and the iconic, but reportedly coincidental, 2001: A Space Odyssey letter shift of IBM/HAL.

Thanks to Will and his crew for selecting my puzzle, redoing the northwest corner, and retaining some of my clues. Although this is my constructing debut in any publication, it represents a return for me to newspapers. I was a sports writer and editor for 28 years for dailies in Cambridge, Mass., Savannah, Ga., Jackson, Miss., and Atlanta, although never for THESUN. Nowadays, I'm a tax lawyer in Silicon Valley.