Finn Vigeland author page

MISDIRECTED is a fun bit of wordplay, hinting at directors who did things totally wrong. "My Left Foot" becomes MY RIGHT FOOT, "Knives Out" the much less interesting KNIVES IN, etc. I enjoyed how the simple OUT to IN flip made me imagine an incredibly dull script about a painfully shy assassin.

I wonder if the fill will be divisive today. I love RAPA NUI, another name for Easter Island (or its indigenous peoples), but the last time it was in a crossword, man, did I hear a lot of grumbling.

HANGUL might be similar. I recognize this term because one of my next-door neighbors is Korean, and she mentioned it the other day. I probably should have known it before then, but my obliviousness in many things Asian makes my mom wring her hands. Crossing it with a pop star, even one of SHAKIRA's fame, might create a trap for some.

Speaking of traps, I enjoy walking around with my identical twin brother, waiting for someone to comment that we look alike WHAT, YOU THINK ALL ASIANS LOOK ALIKE, DO YOU?

I tend to prefer entries that won't cause as much conflict (I'm an inveterate conflict avoider, except when I'm with my troublemaking brother) like BLANK CD, STYMIE, and BIOPICS, but there's an argument to be made that mine is a non-descript pablum approach, whereas including HANGUL will absolutely elate some solvers.

Enjoyable wordplay with MISDIRECTED, although the opposites were too easy to uncover and didn't produce enough of a comedic effect.

I've seen a lot of FRUIT-filled crosswords, from top to bottom, but I enjoyed Finn's additional layer, BEAR FRUIT = parents bearing children with FRUIT last names. Playful way to elevate a theme. It's a shame that THE FRUIT OF ONE'S LABORS wouldn't fit. I imagine this theme category will continue to be fruitful and multiply—

Okay, I'll stop!

I couldn't remember who wrote "Heidi," so I was relieved to uncover the theme so quickly. HALLE BERRE looked vaguely correct, but as soon as I saw PROFESSOR PLUM, my crossword brain kicked into gear. Of course, I knew it was Johanna SPYRI; only a moron would think it was BERRE and SPERI, haha!

Stop snickering, you.

I liked that Finn wove in something for everyone, hitting the oldies with the Time WARP, 80s AXL ROSE, contemporary DUA LIPA. If you don't like pop music, how about some FIGARO?

I wonder how controversial CRAPPY will be. I heard some grousing and even shock about last week's NO FRIGGIN WAY. I personally loved it, which as always, shows how much I friggin know (including what score I should assign for CRAPPY). I doubt all editors will be as willing to allow it as Will Shortz.

Great bonuses in the southwest corner, I REPENT so vivid and GI TRACT looking so oddly like GIT RACT (a division of GitHub?). And in the opposite corner, the TAQUITO TRUMPET is a cousin of the piccolo.

(Not really, but it should be.)

I've seen too many of these to have much PASSIONforFRUIT, but I did enjoy Finn's spin, cluing these characters to their parents having BORE FRUIT.

Americans love us some dogs. Less than three months ago, we had another dog command puzzle, and I bet solvers would be fine with still another one around the holidays. I mean, who doesn't love those Youtube videos where they put lolcat words over the dog's head? Hilarious!

No?

Right, I totally don't spend hours watching those idiotic videos either. Da hekk are you thinking?

My big question today: why dog orders? There's nothing else in the grid dog-oriented. No dog visuals, no dog title, no dog theme phrases, not even some doggie treats spread through the grid.

GIB ME CHIKMEN, LINDA!!!

Those concerns aside (am I missing something?), I did enjoy most of Finn's themers. It's not hard to find phrases hiding short words, but PLINY THE ELDER and JALISCO MEXICO are great discoveries.

Not as hot on COLOR WHEELS and SEX COMEDIES, which don't break the word across the phrase. Will often points out that these leave solvers with a feeling that the other word is superfluous, COLOR and SEX playing no part in the themer.

Not easy to build a 140-word grid around stacked pairs of themers. I was wowed by so much OLD SCORE, AMY RYAN, HOI POLLOI, IRON MAN … running through themer pairs!

Not so much by ENJAMBMENT.

MIC CHECK, BOOK REC, HIT JOBS, yes!

GLUTENIN, ACTAEON, POSTBAC … maybe?

If you're going to go dog, you ought to go whole dog, so today's puzzle wasn't nearly as strong as it could have been. Interesting idea to stretch those key words though, making literal "tall orders."

Finn is one of the more avant-garde constructors out there. I especially like how he adds in color with mid-length or even short fill. Today, it was BRATZ, SNARKY, BIONICS, PANEM (fictional place in "The Hunger Games") — BADASS, indeed!

I'd feel sympathetic though, to those who got the PANEM / EGAN crossing wrong. As much as I admire Jennifer Egan as an author — she's earned her crossworthiness — I think she's still in a place where her crossings must be fair and gettable.

Just as Finn mentioned, I was also torn on VADUZ / CAR DIB, both new words to me. Er, CARDI B. Perhaps she's wildly famous, to the point where even this badass — er, bad ass — shouldn't even be bringing this up. World capitals are fair game, after all. (I sadly admit that I wasn't even sure that Liechtenstein was a country, much less had a capital city.)

(NOLITA? It derives from "North of Little Italy"? Huh. Probably much more familiar to New Yorkers.)

The theme felt too familiar at first, but it's kind of novel. Each one creates a kooky phrase by adding the word DOWN, with each base phrase appearing as is in the grid. Aye, THERE'S THE RUB (down). I like how Finn implied that final (down) by orienting all his themers in the vertical direction.

It gave Jim and me a dilemma. Do we fix up the answers so that they appear in our database as THERE'S THE RUBDOWN? And then mark them as bogus, never to be reused? We can't mark them bogus as is. But if we leave them as is, the clues won't match their entries. I enjoy it when constructors make us work!

PUPPET SHOW (down) was my favorite — so apt for Punch and Judy. It'd have been more fun with a clue about Bert and Ernie in an MMA cage match. I'd bet it all on Bert.

Most all the themers were pretty good, although I wish more of them had given me the same laugh as PUPPET SHOW (down). It's hard to make magic with just adding the word (down).

★ Will has said that he's taking fewer "turning" puzzles these days (puzzles where theme entries take 90 degree turns) because they've become overdone. I appreciate that constant drive to cut out stale theme concepts. I even more appreciate the willingness to accept a few here and there, when they stand out as something a little different. I had to spend some time forming my opinion on this one, but ultimately, I thought it was really good.

What's going on with weird entries like MEGATS at 26-Across? It's actually MEGAT(SUN)AMI, with the entry turning at SUN, thus FOLLOWING THE SUN.

I scratched my head at why the answer wouldn't just keep on going down, though — why turn back to its original direction after running through SUN?

A-ha! Maybe it's like plants that follow the sun when the SUN goes behind a cloud (we have a few of those here in Seattle). Therefore, the answer SHOULD keep going in its original direction after running through the available SUN?

I think that makes sense. No?

And why do the themers on the right-hand side go up? That felt bizarre to me … until I realized that Finn was representing the SUN rising in the east (right side of puzzle) and setting in the west (left side)! Clever, made perfect sense and gave me a neat a-ha moment indeed.

Why three suns on each side? It must have been … the "three-body problem"? (A famous, intractable math/physics problem speaking to the effects of initial conditions.)

Sure, why not.

Slight theme reservations aside, such a pleasurable grid to run through. SO much great bonus fill, I almost appreciated it more as a themeless than a themed puzzle. All the ones Finn mentioned, plus more? (Some may not know the SUNK COST dilemma in economics, but it's fascinating.) Yes, yes, yes!

Even though I had initial reservations about the concept, I enjoyed that "rising in the east, setting in the west" a-ha moment so much. Along with such a delightful grid replete with fantastic fill, this puzzle ended up being a SUNny delight.

★ Loved it! I'm always nervous when I see a triple-stack — way too much crossword glue usually needed, destroying elegance — but this one was a delight. I mean, ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE! I admit that "28 Days Later" scared the bejeezus out of me, and let's not even mention "World War Z," but ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE is a feature entry I would have loved to debut.

Plus LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA, the guy behind "Hamilton"? IN ALL PROBABILITY, this might be one of my favorite triple-stacks of all time. Especially considering Finn pulled it off with just an INO and the DTS.

Okay, I admit I didn't know Miranda until people made fun of me for that at the ACPT a few years ago. But now I know him! Prolific writer, even hosting SNL. Amazing guy.

And Finn kept the rest of the grid wide open, running the awesome MLB DRAFT, GOLDEN PEN (didn't know it, but what a great award name!), LIBATIONS, THESSALY through the stack. Such flowing grid design, never bottlenecking.

Heck, even the NW and SE corners have some sizzle, especially that SE with SWIFFER, SOLO CUP, and D LIST. The NW didn't have much sparkle, but the clue for ORGAN was awesome — [Player in a baseball stadium] is so innocently misdirectional.

The one sticking point I had was LATE APRIL. We recently had MID MARCH, and I didn't like the arbitrary feel of that either. But if LATE APRIL (or APRIL SECOND or END OF APRIL or THIRD WEEK OF APRIL) was required to make the flowing grid keep flowing, I think it's an okay price to pay.

This is one of my favorite themelesses in recent memory. Elegant to solve, visually stunning, and a technical marvel from a construction standpoint. I give it a Miranda-worthy Standing O.

The JASA class is back! With a standard themeless layout — four sets of triple-stacks, one in each corner — you have to make every one of those long entries count. So many colorful assets, from SHE LOVES ME (she loves me not) to ARREST HIM! to ENEMY LINES to SHARK TANK (I love me some Mr. Wonderful!). High conversion rate, making good use of those 12 long slots.

But that's not all! They could have gone the easy route by doing a 72-word puzzle — perhaps by putting black squares at the Rs of EMERGEN-C and of ATTORNEY. A 70-word puzzle allows for a couple more juicy long entries, in this case allowing for some PANIC BAR goodness.

The stretching did come at a price, though. See how EMERGEN-C and RHEOSTAT (a boring term, even for this mechanical engineer) extend in toward the middle of the grid? That makes the NE corner much less flexible. As a result, in order to get the GO IN PEACE / SID CAESAR type goodness, they had to dab in some ERTES, TROI, MER.

Those three are fairly ignorable (although ERTES is tougher to swallow, taking up slightly more real estate), but those types of trade-offs occurred in other places too, notably the SE. TTY is … tele … typewriter? Huh. GOL attempted to be cute by misdirecting toward the much more common OLE, but it's not a good entry. Along with the mysterious CHAYOTE in that region and the groan-worthy A-TESTS, it felt like the weak part of the grid.

Speaking of that, POTATO RACE? Again, huh. Wikipedia says it's basically a race involving potatoes. Go figure.

But overall, kudos to the class for producing a mostly solid grid with a good number of feature entries. Also, a nice wink to get MEEMAW, from the senior-aged class!

★ The Jewish Association Serving the Aging (JASA) Crossword Class is back, with a theme involving words that seem like they should rhyme — each pair of words is identical, except for the first letter — but they don't. Neat finds in KOSHER NOSHER, GARDEN WARDEN, HATCH WATCH. And not only is BASELINE VASELINE a cool discovery, but the image of a baserunner slipping 'n sliding into second — and right past it — amused me to no end.

There are many, many pairs of words that display this property, so I appreciated the extra effort to work in faux-rhymes to the clues as well. At first I wondered why the theme clues were so long — I actually skipped them at first, tl;dr — but then I got a smile when I realized what was going on.

Where I thought this puzzle shined was in its grid execution. Most Sunday 140-word puzzles have globs of crossword glue in them, stuff that most constructors need to stick everything together. But I hardly paused at anything throughout my solve. Even upon a post-solve scan, I could only find an OTRO. An old NEHI. LBOS (leveraged buyouts, which are 100% fine to this MBA).

Beautiful work to keep it to just a few short, minor offenders. Not sure how much rework Natan had to go through in revisions, but it was well worth it.

And great bonus fill. PRO SURFER (I lurve surfing), IM SHOCKED, ACTUAL SIZE, GO TO PRESS, COUGH DROPS, ESCAPISTS, made my solve even more enjoyable.

Intersecting pairs of theme answers (MODEL YODEL and KOSHER NOSHER, HATCH WATCH and GARDEN WARDEN was really smart — if HATCH WATCH had to be worked in horizontally, it would have infringed upon one of the other themers in the bottom half of the puzzle. It's not often possible to get themers to cross like this, but when it is, it often makes the construction so much easier. Does wonders for good spacing.

I did stumble on two entries. MOOC is apparently a "massive open online course." Thank goodness all the crossings were gettable. (And Finn has been working for Columbia University.) SWOLE … that's modern lingo for "bulked up"? Huh. Kids these days.

Fun, interesting theme, with top-notch execution.

★ Great puzzle. Finn gives us a twist in the "definitional" theme type, i.e. a single word with multiple meanings. Entertaining to think about Queen or Queens in four different ways.

Will doesn't run this theme type often, since the grid entries tend to sound forced, as if from a dictionary. Finn does well to choose themers that can stand alone — CHESSBOARD, NEW YORK CITY, RUPAULS DRAG RACE, and ROCK AND ROLL / HALL OF FAME are all great entries. Much better than PIECE IN CHESS or FEMALE MONARCH or something.

Fantastic that Finn was able to divide up ROCK AND ROLL / HALL OF FAME in the most natural place. Cross-referenced answers are a pet peeve of mine since they break up my solving flow, but if you have to, do it this way. If Finn had required a 7 and a 14-letter themer and needed to pair them with ROCK AND / ROLL HALL OF FAME (7/14), that would have worked, but it would have been inelegant.

I enjoyed ARROWHEAD and BRUNO MARS (I didn't know who the latter is, but I've at least heard his name in the news). I'd have loved to get one more pair of bonus entries, perhaps by shifting NEW YORK CITY to the left and then trying for a nine-letter entry where MEAT and JOAD are. I'm sure it would have caused some problems, but a guy can wish.

This might have also solved the Y??U issue — a shame to have the one odd entry in an otherwise stellar grid. I did like the attempt to save it with a clue relating to the more recognizable YALE, but "random rivers" is one of those categories most constructors try hard to avoid.

There was one other spot I hitched on: the SXSW x NSFW crossing. I (mostly) knew these — South by Southwest and not safe for work — but there's no way for someone to infer these. I likely would have asked for a revision in this corner.

But these are minor issues. Overall, I dug the spin Finn put on the "definitional" theme type. Smooth, enjoyable solve.

Too bad this puzzle wasn't published around Jan 1^st, otherwise it could help to ring in the new year!

(groan)

So cool that Natan and Finn have continued with the Jewish Association Serving the Aging's crossword class — it was really fun to see Finn leading them through a live construction session at the end of the ACPT!

Today, they give us a progressive sequence of Os, representing rings. THE HOBBIT made for a great a-ha moment, as "the one ring" is a phrase within that book. Just perfect! CIRCUS TENT was also spot-on, since "three-ring circus" is a very common saying. And the OLYMPIC FLAG made for a great example of five rings.

VENN DIAGRAM for two rings felt off though, since VENN DIAGRAMs can have however many circles as are needed. And the AUDI logo has four rings, but an AUDI DEALER … wouldn't it have hundreds of rings, what with all the cars it has in stock? I wondered if having just the 1, 3, and 5 ring examples would have been better.

With such a densely packed puzzle — six themers are tough to pull off — it's no surprise to get some NOI, GEOG, ANO / ENERO (tying them together just emphasizes the inelegance), OMNIA, etc. Note how so many of those dabs of crossword glue come at places where two themers overlap.

Love the voice of Natan and Finn coming through, though, what with BOOYAH! and "that's what SHE said." Even the STIRS clue, [Messes with 007's martini], has a younger vibe to it. Neat to get that fun, colloquial feel ... especially when one of the three constructors is a class of older students!

A great example of a simple theme executed well. Plenty of constructors have played on DR, by adding it, subtracting it, putting it outside the grid (Doctors Without Borders), etc. But I like Finn's take, which I haven't quite seen before. The title is perfect — ATTENDING PHYSICIANS indicating to add DR for kooky results — and it was great to get a bonus revealer in THE DOCTOR IS IN. That last phrase fills me with good memories, reading "Peanuts" strip for hours as a kid. Maybe as an adult too. Ahem.

Not all the themers made me laugh, but DR WHOS YOUR DADDY was awesome. Great base phrase, and the image of DR WHO biting his nails while awaiting a paternity test = comedy gold.

What made the puzzle stand out amongst the various DR puzzles is Finn's gridwork. Since the theme concept has the potential to become repetitive and lose solvers' attention, it was really important for Finn to work in a lot of snazzy fill. He did not disappoint, with so many strong entries that he pointed out above.

And that beautiful NE corner! It's tough to fill such a large chunk of white space; so many mid-to-long answers intersecting each other. Finn gave himself the advantage of only one themer constraining that region, and he was able to work in so much — HUG IT OUT, TEAM USA, PSYCHIC my favorites — with no trade-offs. Some say that YASIR ought to be YASSER, but both seem to be in prevalent usage.

The only place I thought was a little rough was the SW corner. READ ONLY, OH BOO HOO, yes! LA NOTTE crossing SYOSSET … not so much. SYOSSET is probably obvious for New Yorkers, but the NYT puzzle is done all across America. I would have liked to see all fair crossings for it, and LA NOTTI or LA NOTTA both seemed plausible.

Otherwise though, some freshness in FRAT BROS (I'm too square to have heard this, but it seems interesting) and a lack of gluey entries besides OSA is a great result. A really strong puzzle I'd happily point novices to.

Really fun idea, ___GATE words interpreted as various Watergate or Irangate-like scandals. I especially liked the ones where the meaning of the first part was changed completely. ELON GATE as a scandal related to Elon Musk = clever! NAVI GATE as a scandal related to the "Avatar" race is also humorous, although I'm not sure how many solvers will know who the NA'VI are. DELE GATE is a great insider's nod to the crossworld, as DELE is a niche term for editors … and crossword solvers.

FLOODGATE, TAILGATE, and APPLEGATE weren't as fun for me, as those terms naturally look like FLOOD GATE TAIL GATE, and APPLE GATE. I did a quick search to see if Finn had other options, but I couldn't turn up any others. Ah well.

Finn is so good about jazzing up his grids with bonus material. I love that FRENEMY / STAGE MOM pairing — it's tough to pull off parallel downs from a construction perspective, and to get answers that feel related is really fun. Same goes for LOST LOVE and CHAGRIN. That there is poetic.

The grid is already constrained by having six theme answers, but Finn manages to work in even more long bonus fill with AIR COVER and CROSSFIT. Incorporating long across answers like this is not easy to do, because you create biggish white spaces that are hard to fill. Really nice that Finn took his usual care to make sure the results were really smooth.

I also liked the clue for SEAN [Actor Bean, whose first name looks like it rhymes with his last, but doesn't], REPO [Pickup that gets picked up, perhaps], and TSA [Decidedly not-lax grp. at LAX]. All had a really jovial style to them, and that made me smile because it makes me think of Finn's natural effervescence.

Do people still say WORD UP without drawing eye rolls?

A very strong grid to bolster up a nice theme. The ___GATE pattern did get repetitive for me after two or three instances, but the bonus material and the silky-smooth product helped make up for that.

Fun theme, regular phrases interpreted in relation to a store that might be found in a mall — TARGET, SUBWAY, GAP, and APPLE are ubiquitous in malls and are ripe for wordplay. I've heard the SUBWAY FARE line before, but the others felt pretty fresh.

With just four themers, I'd expect some nice long fill from Joel and Finn, and they deliver. I didn't remember how close the name NORMA BATES was to Norman Bates. Fun to piece that one together.

They also give us two long acrosses, which are much less common than long downs. This can be tricky, as these long across slots can cause filling problems. Check out how much overlap there is between APPLE TURNOVER and BANNER ADS, for example. The good thing is that the BANNER ADS slot can be filled with just about anything, and Joel/Finn select a strong entry that facilitates easy crosses. I really like how they worked in UBER and T BONED in that section.

I wasn't much a fan of CAREERIST though. It does have dictionary support, but I can't remember ever hearing the term throughout my engineering or startup pharma careers. Or through business school. It does allow for CASH CAB to be worked in, but I'm undecided on how good an answer that is. I did catch some episodes while it was on, but I wonder if it will seem passe to some solvers even now.

I like how they pushed the word count to 74, allowing for more 6-letter words than usual. TOW CAR and TURRET are ones we don't see every day. I did feel like the fill strained slightly, at least more than what I'm used to seeing with Joel's work — it's unusual to see even a single ABAA or an EFTS in his puzzles.

This is a rare case where I thought the theme would have made for a better Sunday-size grid. I liked the idea, amusing in its store wordplay, but I got a sense for only a teenty-tiny mall. I would have enjoyed another three or four stores added into the mix, in order to set the scene more completely. Perhaps STAPLES, KAY (Jewelers), PAYLESS, SEES (Candies), etc.?

★ Great change of pace M ONday puzzle, the seven days of the week "broken" by black squares a la DAYBREAK. The northwest corner is just about my personal ideal — three very nice long entries, some contemporary entries in LIFE OF PI and PRIUS, a touch of James Bond in MARTINIS, higher education represented firmly with FERMI, and a wordplay clue around OTIS' development of the elevator. Beautiful variety.

Seven theme answers — actually, 14 — is rarely easy to implement. Most often it calls for trade-offs, forcing the constructor to choose certain aspects over others. I like Finn's prioritization of getting the seven days equally spaced, in every other row. That felt spot-on, given how the days within a calendar get laid out. Would have been a bit odd to have MON and TUE entries crammed together in adjacent rows, for example.

It would have been nice if the days were all parts of the longest across answers though — darn those pesky trade-offs! THU being part of NEOLITH and UNITARD was much more elegant to me than WED being part of WOW and EDDA, for example. And COLLAPSED and EASY MONEY not being part of the theme felt slightly awkward.

But you can rarely get everything when you shoot for the moon. I really appreciated Finn's effort to go the extra mile on this difficult construction, decorating the NE corner with the fresh entry, HOT MIC. Totally worth the ONE IN partial.

A final note, regarding PIMP. Will and Joel and I were shooting the breeze at the ACPT last weekend, talking about what types of entries are just fine and which push the line. JAILBAIT was the main one we mulled over, but PIMP also popped up during the discussion. I'm perfectly fine with PIMP, as the "Pimp My Ride" TV show is pretty popular, but I can see how some solvers might be turned off by it. Tricky.

Such a treat to get something different and well-executed on a Monday.

Tribute puzzle, celebrating the 50th anniversary one of the most popular films of all-time, THE SOUND OF MUSIC. Nice added touch to incorporate rebus squares of DO RE MI FA SOL LA TI DO in an ascending scale. Tribute puzzles can be a bit dry if they simply list facts about the subject, so the additional layer is much appreciated.

I really enjoyed Finn's voice coming through in this puzzle. He's a recent grad who went back to work for his alma mater (Columbia), and his early 20's, much-hipper-than-me vibe shines through. There's fill representing that — GLAM UP, VEG OUT, MINAJ, EPIC! — but also the cluing. I doubt I'd ever think to clue OMG as "u r KIDDING!" And he does a great job of saving the partial OR IT with the meme of "pics or it didn't happen!"

I had to research two clues to make sense of them, so hopefully I can shed some light:

PICA: apparently the PICA is a typographic unit, defined as containing "12 point units of measure." Huh. I wonder if PIKACHU is 12 points high? More importantly, how many apples high is PIKACHU?

CATARACTS: the "Cataracts of the Nile" are white water rapids in a section of that river. Having spent a long time in ophthalmic pharmaceuticals, it was hard for me to not see "cataracts" as the ocular impairment. But now I see! Cataracts can also mean "large waterfalls."

Beautiful clue for WINO, repurposing "port authority" for a completely different meaning. And some great trivia today. I've been to TAIPEI several times but never knew it was called the "City of Azaleas."

A literal interpretation of THE DESCENT OF MAN, Darwin's seminal treatise on evolutionary theory. Neat how those five theme entries seemed incomplete … or was it perhaps a rebus? I first turned up WONDER WO, and wondered (pun intended) if how in heck a MEN IN BLACK theme could possibly relate to the theory of evolution. (insert conspiracy theory here)

The misdirection made me appreciate even more Tom McCoy's puzzle from a few weeks back, where he intentionally placed a black square at the upper left corner, intending people to think that it was a rebus theme — BLACK squeezed into a single square. I hadn't even seen that trap, but now that I fell into today's, I realize how it would have been fiendishly clever for those encountering it.

I appreciated how Finn placed his themers symmetrically. Sometimes with this type of "bending" puzzle, the constraints become too difficult. So much real estate is required, and the constructor ends up spreading the themers at random. I find that inelegant. Even though I was a little put off by the fact that there are only five themers, I think it's a better solution than cramming a bunch in willy-nilly. Of course, the optimal solution is to still have seven(ish) symmetrical themers, even if they were a little shorter. Very tough to do, since those "bends" take up so much space.

I usually don't care about a lot of proper names in a grid. It's a plethora of esoteric ones I find bothersome. Let's say it was just LEONIA, INNESS, JACOBS. Totally fine! DOOLEY and NAMIB and NORRIS with a rough clue? Hmm. AMAZONAS taking up a precious long slot? And even having watched most of "Game of Thrones," being expected to know TALISA? It's tricky — propers are so useful because people spell names in odd ways; super useful for constructors in need of a jam-saving entry. Easy to go too far, though.

Overall, I liked the theme, and my solve was enhanced by a number of really strong clues. If you missed their impact, go back and look at TERMITE, BREW PUB, WRISTS, and ABACI. So worth an extra look.

Another one from the young guns today. Finn, a recent graduate of Columbia, features a nice 1-Across with HUMBLEBRAG. Sometimes I worry when I see a definitional clue at 1-Across, as that usually means it's going to something you either know or you don't. But this is a strong one. Not only is it something that's worked its way into the sphere of people as unhip as me, but it's something that can be inferred. Excellent choice to seed the puzzle.

What a beautiful SE corner. It's always tough to come up with three strong stacked answers without having to resort to a couple of glue bits, and Finn's triplet is really well done. SOCIAL LIFE / WINE COOLER / FRESH START almost tells the story of the nerd who became cool once he started drinking. Hmm. Aside from the moral ambiguity, it does evoke a lot of strong pictures. And the fill is so clean, even SWF perfectly fine by me.

Where this puzzle really excels is where that triple turns upward. It's tough to turn a corner like that with just neutral, clean stuff, so to pull off ET VOILA and SEXPERT is pretty darn impressive. Even PROOFER gets an insider's nod to Finn's work in journalism.

It would have been nice to get a little more long stuff. This puzzle doesn't have quite as many 8+ letter entries as a usual themeless (often you see 14-16 slots for 8+ letter entries), which can be fine if the 7's are fully utilized. There are nice entries such as IRONSIDE weaved into the grid, but PALETTES and ORLANDO and CLEARER and UNEARTH won't usually earn checks from Will (I wouldn't think).

AT A SLANT, however, does get a thumbs-up from me today, given its beautiful link to EQUAL, just three slots away. I find it elegant when you can cleverly link close entries, in this case [Level] and [Not level] with slightly different meanings. Clue echoes and cross-references can work so well if they're this close within a grid.

I appreciate Finn's attention to detail, assembling his grid with very little glue. When your only little bits are TRA and ENOL and TELE, that's a success. Quality work from one of the young PHENOMs.