Pawel Fludzinski author page

DRINK DRINK DRINK! And then DRINK DRINK DRINK again! Mickey and Pawel pack six toasts into their grid. I was confused by the revealer, especially since there was no "when doubled" qualifier, to make a total of six instead of just three toasts. But who's counting?

Neat that they crossed TO YOUR HEALTH / L'CHAIM and DOWN THE HATCH / KANPAI, so fortuitous that this worked out. Opportunities like this don't come along often, so it's fun to see when the crossword gods shine down upon constructors.

The opposing viewpoint is that even if those intersections are possible, should they be used? I miscounted themers the first time through, glossing over L'CHAIM and KANPAI — placing two short themers vertically can mean that they blend into the fill. As neat as crossing themers can be, I might have preferred for all the themers to be horizontal, as they would have stood out better for me — maybe shifting L'CHAIM roughly to where CASINOS is.

The crossing answers also cause grid inflexibility, a bane for constructors. Check out the lower left — Mickey and Pawel do well to include a black square at the very corner, but still are forced to use ADONAI, a toughie. Along with KANPAI, it made for a crunchy experience for me. I wouldn't mind as much if there weren't already some SERIE / HOSP, EMAC / KCAR, ALER, etc. through the puzzle.

Speaking of SERIE / HOSP, it's so tough to bracket a region with two themers, like in the south. DOWN THE HATCH on top, PROST on the bottom ... it's no wonder a few dabs of crossword glue were necessary to hold things together. When a themer is on the bottom edge of the puzzle like PROST, you can't separate it from other themers using black squares — might have been better to jam PROST somewhere in the middle of the puzzle.

I've been to Japan maybe 20 times, done a lot of drinking. For the job! (It's super important to go out with business colleagues after work.) It still took me a while to recall KANPAI, though. (Then again, I did usually drink way too much …) Hopefully, KANPAI won't be the black sheep for solvers. I do think it's reasonable, but it did feel a little out of place.

That said, fun to get so many drinking exclamations. Made for a cozy — dare I say toast-y? — puzzle.

Twelve-letter answers are the bane of themeless constructors (along with 13s and 14s). Black squares are so precious in themelesses, and when you have to deploy six of them immediately, you sacrifice flexibility from the get-go.

Love DUMPSTER FIRE and VITRUVIAN MAN! (I built a themeless around VITRUVIAN MAN years ago, but I had so much trouble with the grid that I abandoned it. Stupid 12-letter entries.)

Another grid design element of note today: the big upper right and lower left corners. It's rare for constructors to try anything quad-stacked, even eight-letter answers, because they're so darn hard to make both smooth and sizzling. I thought Pavel did a nice job getting both of these relatively smooth — just STE and ACAN as prices to pay — but neither corner shined for me. I do like HABANEROs and IN STEREO, but nothing else stood out.

A common issue for these big quad-stacks; you tend to either get smooth or sizzling, but not both.

As a huge fan of John Nash, I loved GAME THEORY in the bottom stack. ARE WE ALONE was nice too, at least for us cosmic ponderers. There were some prices to pay in AGAS and ETERNE, but I enjoyed GAME THEORY so much that this corner would have turned out great in my eyes …

… except that I had already experienced ETOILE in the upper left corner. ETOILE (deep French) and ETERNE (only in poetry) aren't exactly related, but they felt like similar enough dabs of crossword glue — containing so many friendly letters for constructors — that having both didn't seem elegant. Ah well. GAME THEORY is still a game-changing entry for this solver.

TITRATOR … back in my day, we had to do all our titrations by hand. You kids have it easy with your mechanical TITRATORs, grumble grumble.

Overall, there was too much crossword glue for my taste — along with the aforementioned, there was ECU / SESS, TO TEN, the dreaded arbitrary EEE shoe spec, OLEO / KIP etc. (Though as a huge "Princess Bride" fan, I don't mind INIGO at all!) But that's one of the side effects of featuring 12-letter entries. Rarely easy, as those buggers can propagate problems all throughout a grid.

Singing, strangers in the night … doo be doo be doo … wait. DOO BY DOO BY DOO? It took me a long time to figure out that it's DOOBY DOOBY DOO. As nonsense words, there's probably no "correct" spelling. Considering the rest of the themers though — TO BE OR NOT TO BE, TO BE IS TO DO, TO DO IS TO BE — man oh man, did I want DOO BE DOO BE DOO.

Ah well.

A puzzle without super high theme density — four medium to long themers — can definitely be executed in just 72 words, while incorporating colorful and clean fill. If done well, it can allow the constructor to toss in a ton of snazzy bonus fill. Sometimes I wonder if it's worth it though, since constructors who chose to do this accept all sorts of compromises.

Today, I thought Pavel did a great job of this construction feat, introducing a ton of long fill like DEAR SANTA, CALL SIGNS, CIABATTA, RARE BOOK, etc. while keeping his gluey bits to a minimum. With just a bit of SSTS ABED ENTR, this 72-word puzzle turned out smooth.

I really appreciated that effort today. The theme got to be a bit repetitive, so all the bonus long fill really helped keep my attention.

The theme felt a bit loose for my taste — variations on BE — but there was something fun about the Sartre and Socrates quotes mirroring each other. I don't totally get what TO BE IS TO DO or TO DO IS TO BE means, but they sure sound philosophically deep.

A puzzle on the QT: Q T phrases, linked together with the apt CUTIES revealer. Nice choice of themers, QUICK THINKING and QUALITY TIME having real quality. And QUANTUM THEORY is fantastic! Wish I could say I understood the workings of QUANTUM THEORY better, but part of its mystique is its incomprehensibility.

That's what I tell myself, anyway.

QUARTER TONE is an interesting one — I played cello and trombone for decades, but I still had to think about how many semi-tones there were in an octave. Aren't there just seven steps in a C scale? C D E F G A B back to C, right? Yes, but semi-tones are the individual steps in a chromatic scale: C C# D D# E F F# G G# A A# B C. Thought-provoking clue / answer pair.

Qs are notoriously difficult to integrate into crosswords. With four of them, many constructors would place black squares such that all the Qs either started a word or were the second letter (AQUA, EQUAL, etc.). I like how Pawel went big with both SEQUOIA and GIANT SQUID. The latter is an especially colorful answer, made even more so by the Jules Verne-related Nautilus clue. Very nice.

Pawel also chose to go with a 74-word layout, very tough when you already have to wrestle with four Qs. Generally I like the results, with some nice long stuff like GORGONZOLA and EBENEZER, but the north and south regions didn't come out as smooth as I think a Monday puzzle ought to be. "Dies IRAE" was unknown to me before I started doing crosswords, and I had been in orchestras for two decades.

And that ETTE / BOIS / GENET crossing GINNIE / EGESTS … as much as I like EBENEZER down there, I don't think it's worth all that glue. It's tough. Once you place that B of EBENEZER, it makes that already constrained south section even harder to fill.

So, a nice concept with great themer choices, executed with POW-level quality … except in two spots. So close!

Nice wordplay theme today, literal interpretations of "X in a Y" phrases, CANARY IN A COAL MINE transmogrifying into COAL CANARY MINE. This is a theme type that hasn't been done too many times before, my LAT debut and Parker's weekday puzzle coming to mind. I like that Pawel tried to do something different with it, expanding to a Sunday-size puzzle. He sent me a shorter version of his notes, but I asked if I could run the longer version — I liked reading about his entire process.

I like the balance Pawel struck today. There's not huge amount of sparkling fill — FAT CHANCE, MT EVEREST, PARODIST, RAW DEAL, CADDIES — but it was enough to add zest to my solving experience. And I appreciate how I didn't run into too much glue. I hitched when I got to SONDE, an odd little bit, but that fell pretty quickly. Some might have trouble with CALAIS, but that town does have historical importance so I think it's fine. Keeping things to a smattering of CPO, EIN, NNE, OON, SFC, OESTE, etc. isn't too shabby.

Since three of the theme entries are essentially identical to Parker's 2011 puzzle, I would have liked more time between the two. How much is enough? For a crossword-OCD person like myself, Parker's puzzle came to mind immediately, so perhaps something more like five years? Of course, most people will have long forgotten even things like their ... their... (well, I forget) over the course of three years.

Anyway, a fun puzzle with some nice long themers.

Clever theme idea, the type of tricky Thursday puzzle I like. Words are "hidden" IN BED, i.e. there's a ROACH hidden in B(ROACH)ED. I like having that struggle on Thursdays, grasping at straws until you finally cotton to the twist.

I admire the audacious construction. Tough, tough, tough layout today. As soon as I opened up the puzzle I wondered how smooth each of the quadrants was going to be. Each one of those corners looks like it's straight out of a themeless puzzle, and each one turns out to be even harder than filling a themeless grid. Why is that? Each area has a pair of crossing answers, and anytime you fix two crossing answers into place, you're bound to have trouble (or at least sacrifice a little smoothness). The letters around two crossing answers just tend to be tough to work in without making at least a compromise or two.

I was quite impressed by the SW corner. ERENOW is something many constructors avoid like the plague, but if it's the only piece of glue that holds a corner like this together, it's well worth the price. LENNON next to YOKO ONO, worked in as fill around the BROOMED / BROKERED crossing themers? Setting aside the fact that most people say "swept" instead of "broomed," this is a really nice corner. With so many six and seven-letter entries crammed together, this is an outstanding result. Must have taken a lot of time, a lot of trying out different options.

The others suffer a little, though. To be expected. Not ideal to have SOARERS crossing ALERTER, with AMBS kicking off the puzzle. ED MEESE is fine once in a while, but with a couple of ISS / LYS / DSL type entries, it made that corner feel a bit weak.

What a nice revealer, IN BED. If only it had been clued to the fortune cookie game (all fortunes are made more interesting when IN BED is added). And it would have been nice to have IN BED centered. Its position did allow for a piece of good fill like DRUM SET (and its fantastic clue!), but how much more elegant would it have been if IN BED was smack dab in the middle.

So perhaps I would have preferred a puzzle with a more traditional layout? Or adding a pair of blocks to turn it into a 74-word puzzle? Tough to say, since it's difficult to incorporate nine theme answers, especially when some are short (seven letters or less). A little more puzzle flow would have been nice too — having four mini-puzzles can give a feeling of isolation, not having the feng shui of a puzzle that moves like water from start to end. It is a unique layout though, and there's something to be said for trying out new things, giving solvers a grid they haven't seen before. I do like the stretch to innovate.

Beautiful idea. I really enjoyed the moment when I figured out what was going on.