Gordon Johnson author page

Not long ago I rewatched Baz Luhrmann's take on "Romeo + Juliet" starring a very young Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. Set in a fictitious but thoroughly modern "Verona Beach," the movie is true-ish to Shakespeare with the Montagues and Capulets at war, swords and knives replaced with a lot of guns, and of course "a pair of star-cross'd lovers." A fun movie if you haven't seen it.

It made me wonder though if we'd ever seen star-crossed lovers crossed up in a crossword puzzle. This was all the more interesting since I noticed that STAR CROSSED LOVE is 15 letters long. If I ran this phrase across the middle of a puzzle, could I find sets of star-crossed lovers to go in each of the four corners?

Let me tell you, there are a lot of options! John Lennon and Yoko Ono would do. But then so would Clark Kent and Lois Lane. Or Janet Leigh and Spencer Tracy. There's also Burns-Allen, Cash-Carter, Geller-Green and Butler-O'Hara!

The trick was to find couples who were real star-crossed lovers, whose last names could be crossed, and hopefully who could be set up symmetrically in a grid. BURTON-TAYLOR fit the bill, and it just so happens that their names fit symmetrically right across from BEATTY-BENING. (Although in fairness Burton-Taylor was a famously rocky relationship while Beatty-Bening have been together for years.)

BOGART-BACALL was another obvious choice. But here the symmetry failed me. In the original version of this puzzle, I did have a solution: I used Clyde BARROW and Bonnie PARKER in perfect symmetry across from BOGART-BACALL.

The problem of course is that all of the others are actors and actresses who are/were together on and off the screen. Bonnie and Clyde were real-live people who have been portrayed in the movies, but it just wasn't consistent with the rest of the theme. So we went with PITT-JOLIE instead, damn the symmetry. And so far, damn the "star-cross'd"-ness. They're still together, right?

Three's the charm, they say. Unfortunately I had to go through that cycle 6 times before getting here. Meaning this is exactly the 18^th puzzle I ever constructed, but my first ever for the New York Times. So, good to be here.

As a first timer, perhaps I should say I work for the UN, I've lived overseas for many years in many different places (currently Bangkok), and my background is in engineering, philosophy and international affairs. Somehow those three fit together well enough. These days I mostly focus on environmental issues.

So contemplating groups of threes, I think I was sitting in a meeting one day having trouble concentrating. So my mind drifted toward groups of threes, as it does. There are so many! From the Wise Men to the Blind Mice to the Little Pigs, from Three Dog Night to Three Days Grace, from the Stooges to the Musketeers to the Holy Trinity. And in the inanimate world the list continues: there's earth, wind and fire; the sun, moon and stars; rock, paper, scissors; and of course … liquid, solid, gas.

Now most of these potential themes have been worked over pretty well already. But the cruciverb database told me that STATESOFMATTER was as yet unused. As well, this nice 14-letter word is exactly the same length as LIQUIDSOLIDGAS. So I was off and running. Choosing H2O as the matter in question, I looked for phrases that included ice, water and steam that hadn't been overused already.

ICESKATINGRINKS had never seen used, runs to 15 letters and could go smack dab in the middle of the puzzle. So putting that in place and with the other themers as my guide, it turns out that WATERTANKS and STEAMBOATS are both 10 letters and fit perfectly and symmetrically at 11D and 26D, locking all the theme words together quite nicely I thought. So there you have it.

One last point for the purist in us all: yes, there are more than three states of matter. If this puzzle had a title, it would have been "Forget Plasma." According to Wikipedia, I guess we should ignore "Bose–Einstein condensates, neutron-degenerate matter and quark-gluon plasma" as well.