Daniel Landman author page

It may surprise some to hear that I have fond memories of high school geometry. But I hope that even solvers who don't share my appreciation for the subject matter will pick up on the fact that this is more than just a connect-the-dots puzzle; the clues to the theme entries invoke the standard labeling convention for POLYGONs (starting at one VERTEX and going either clockwise or counterclockwise).

My goal when thinking up this puzzle was to create a grid featuring multiple images created by connecting common nodes. To maintain clarity, I kept it simple and went with basic shapes. This made for a pretty blah set of theme answers, taken at face value, but I think the conceit of the cluing redeems this.

I imagine there may be some geometrical nitpicking about the RIGHT TRIANGLE outlier — it's the only non-quadrilateral, and it's more specific than any of the other polygons (the TRAPEZOID in the grid is technically a "right trapezoid" too). But I think the right triangle has enough of its own identity as a basic shape to merit inclusion. Also, every RECTANGLE is technically a PARALLELOGRAM as well, but I decided to go with the casual name for each polygon, so this didn't really concern me — no one in their right mind would see a rectangle and immediately think "parallelogram."

I hope you all enjoy the puzzle. I'm especially looking forward to seeing the XWord Info guys work their color-coding/animation magic on all the polygons — I always get a kick out of that stuff!

The impetus for this puzzle was a desire to break something. I looked through the archive and discovered that hearts and promises had been broken before, in several different ways, and even "bad" had been broken multiple times (in other venues). So I settled on RECORD.

Almost immediately after I mailed this puzzle in, about a year ago, I experienced a severe case of constructor's remorse; I regretting submitting a puzzle with so much short ugliness and crosswordese, especially in the "theme rows" (all of my more recent puzzles are cleaner than this). But when I was notified that the puzzle was accepted, it was very instructive: Will didn't comment at all on the bad fill, but rather on how he liked some of the long Downs. It made me think, "Hey — I liked those long Downs too!" but I had forgotten that as I was brooding over the fill.

So I guess the point is that there are different ways to assess a crossword puzzle. (I think that was my point...) Anyway, enjoy!

Though this isn't my debut, I'll take this opportunity to introduce myself — I'm a 28-year old rabbinical student and part-time special ed teacher living with my wife and two sons in Alon Shevut, a town on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

On to the puzzle: I got the idea after seeing Byron Walden and Robin Schulman's "wedding puzzle," which featured nine I DO rebus squares, including the central "IDO IDO IDO IDO IDO." I wanted to do something similar, and came up with "IT'S A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD." This was late 2011, and only my second attempt at constructing (the first attempt being what eventually became my debut puzzle), and I was not aware at the time that having a 13-square central answer would make gridding such a challenge. I ended up submitting a grid that had way too many 3-letter words (many of them ugly), obscure names and a 6-letter partial (!). Will rejected it, but indicated that he liked the idea and the central answer. Thankfully, I realized that I needed to scrap the whole grid and start over, and the result is what you see here. I hope you all enjoy it!