Parker Lewis author page

It's a lot of fun living near puzzle people. The ideas Parker and I pass back and forth don't always go anywhere, but when he showed me how beautifully TEMPERAMENTALLY broke into TEMPE RAMEN TALLY, it felt like the seed of a nice idea. However, after a quick scan through my list of 15-letter entries, I couldn't find anything that worked nearly as nicely.

Both of us are recreational programmers (me much hackier than Parker, who actually works in the field). It occurred to me that his TEMPE/RAMEN/TALLY seed idea might be a fun project to expand my coding skills, and after a few attempts, I figured out a way to pare down my list into a subset that might be reasonably human-scannable. Et voila, the other two popped out! (After about 10 hours of line-by-line searching.) HYPER CRITIC ALLY was also a possibility, but it wasn't nearly as nice, as it didn't change the "critic" meaning at all.

To the credit of Parker's programming skills, he came up with these ... and a bunch of others (mentioned above). Shows you what I know!

I thought THE SPLITS was so clever, such a neat way to sum up this idea! Parker wasn't convinced, but he reluctantly agreed to go along. We went back and forth with the tough construction, a mirror symmetry 15/15/15/9, and came up with something we really liked. It had so many great pieces of fill like I, ASIMOV, CAT TOYS, SO SORRY, BARTEND, etc.!

Will and Joel liked the general idea ... but felt like THE SPLITS wasn't apt. I wrote to Parker, asking what sort of idiotic ninny would come up with such a ridiculous revealer. (Again, shows you what I know.)

So, it was a complete redo, but we saw it as an opportunity to create something we liked even more — a 15/15/15 with a themeless word count. Not easy to do, but it was a fun challenge to see how many colorful long answers we could work into the grid while keeping the gluey short answers to a minimum. I always like to feature long fill, so hopefully things like Superman getting a SPRAY TAN in a BLIND ALLEY behind the DAILY PLANET while drinking a WET MARTINI enhanced the quality of your solve.

★ I have the good fortune of living near Parker, so we meet up every other month or so. Nice to be in an area with many fellow puzzle people! Parker showed me an earlier version of this puzzle, and I remember being impressed by the idea. It's so fun to see FIFTH, FOURTH, THIRD … and then not get SECOND and FIRST! Cool to have another completely natural sequence-completer in HALF and WHOLE; one which was unexpected.

I also remember feeling like there were too many gluey bits in his earlier grid, so it was a relief to see Parker's final product. Not only is the crunchy stuff limited to the very minor LIRE, STS, SGTS, but Parker also worked in quite a bit of long fill. This is important, since the larger-than-normal grid (16x15), must captive the solver for that much longer. Uncovering bonus entries like NICE ONE, ALOHA STATE, STILL LIFES, EDIT MENU, ICE CREAM (yum!), AIRLIFT, even OCULUS Rift (one of the leading virtual reality headset companies) kept me entertained. Quite a nice construction, especially considering just having five themers is hard enough.

As Parker and I discussed his redo, I mentioned that the FIFTH ELEMENT was the weakest themer, since 1.) it omits "The" from the title and 2.) my guess is that it won't reach "classic" status. I thought there had to be something better. Could have been FIFTH WHEEL, FIFTH AVENUE, FIFTH COLUMN, but finding a "WHOLE ___" phrase with a matching length made it tricky. I liked WHOLE FOODS paired with FIFTH WHEEL, but WHOLE SHEBANG does make for a great final themer.

Nice to get a few insider's nods, with MASAI (Parker did Peace Corps in Africa a few years ago) and APP (he recently got a job as an ioS app developer).

A theme that cleverly misdirects + is accessible to novices + a smooth and meaty grid = a beauty of a Monday puzzle.