Richard F. Mausser author page

Quip puzzle, riffing on taking something for kleptomania. Amusing one-liner.

With entries of length 14 13 14, you can only really place them in rows 4, 8, 12. (You could put them in 3, 8, 13 to give yourself better spacing, but that produces unsightly black bars like in yesterday's grid.) Sometimes as a constructor, you find a single option that fortuitously works, and you count your lucky stars!

I found it a bit odd that the 5-letter entries bracketing the quote — I HAVE and FOR IT — were in row 2, not more elegantly in row 1. But I imagine it facilitated better fill, so I'm perfectly fine with that trade-off.

With quip puzzles, it's so important to add in zazz through strong long bonuses. Otherwise, the puzzle can feel thin if the solver doesn't find the one-liner that funny. I loved WHOVILLE, OJIBWA, SUBURBIA, IDITAROD, even COIN-OP, US NAVY. Wow, that's a lot!

I didn't love ROBO, ELL, OSIS, OSA, OTRO, ANS, SPYS. Yikes, that's a lot!

Usually, I'd heavily lean toward cleaning up the puzzle at the price of taking away some of the good long fill. But 1.) there's not a lot Richard could have done, as he's already at 78 words, 2.) the themer lengths are SO constraining, and 3.) quip puzzles really, really, really need bonuses.

Perhaps a couple of minor fixups could have helped — cheater squares at the S of YAMS and first S of SPYS could have stricken out ROBO, ELL, OSA, SPYS. Or maybe at the Y of YAMS and last S of SPYS.

It takes an amazing one-liner to carry a puzzle. This one wasn't there for me, but I did appreciate some of the bonuses.

Who would have guessed that there are 12 phrases having DIRTY as a first word? Some cool finds like (dirty) RAT, (dirty) LIAR, (dirty) MARTINI helping to play on THE DIRTY DOZEN. I've highlighted the twelve "dirty" entries below to help them stand out. Neat that they're symmetrical!

Some of the theme answers worked better than others for me. (dirty) JOB, yes! (dirty) WORD, hmm ... passable. (dirty) LAUNDRY, yes! (dirty) MONEY … okay, but not as great as (dirty) HARRY. Granted that Richard needed 12 phrases to pull this one off, I thought he did well overall with the theme, especially considering that he found 12 that could be worked in symmetrically.

So much inflexibility in the grid. I had a feeling something odd was going on when I started the puzzle with OPE crossing OPEL. Not a great result, but also not unexpected, considering JOKE and JOB were fixed firmly into place.

SLYS and RIRE quickly followed. Hmm.

And those two lower corners. With THE DIRTY DOZEN creating an inflexible ceiling, and WORD and LOOK creating inflexible floors, it wasn't a surprise to get TOJO (I like seeing him in crosswords about as much as I do NAZI), OJAI, HOAR, and then SZELL crossing LPNS, which doesn't seem fair to me. No bueno for the poor solvers who don't know their former conductors (and shouldn't have to).

I bet changing the placements of WORD and LOOK could have helped; moving them up one row, switching them, etc. A tough set of constraints to work with, but also a lot of possibilities in where those 12 short answers could go.

But I did appreciate some nice fill in INSTANT WIN and KELLY GREEN, even LORETTA SWIT (although I did wonder for a second if (dirty) LORETTA SWIT was a thing). Helped to make up for some of the flaws in the short fill.

Overall, a nice idea that would have played better earlier in the week — I like something more tricky out of a Thursday puzzle.