New York Times, Thursday, March 30, 2017

I hope that this puzzle brings a hearty aha to many solvers in the process of figuring out how six legitimate-looking answers could be clued so wrongly. I was able to spread things out in two ways. One, having the MIC start two words, end two words, and be in the middle of two. And second, having three horizontal and three vertical theme answers. Also, they are scattered haphazardly to make finding them more challenging. I was pleased to have the reveal actually drop.

After I submitted the puzzle but before I heard back about it, another puzzle on an independent site showed up with the same reveal, and my heart sank. But it turns out that the theme was played differently in that puzzle, so only the reveals turned out to be alike.

Will and Joel had me revise some bad- and dull-fill areas, resulting in a punchier solve. I submitted several clues for most of the answers, and they did an artful job of mixing easier with more difficult while keeping the puzzle in the Thursday level of difficulty. They improved my wording on some and put in some of their own clues when mine were too cutesy or dull. I love their clue for GAIT.

To the solvers out there, may there be many post-puzzle-performance MIC DROP moments for you ahead!

Solvers must drop the trigram MIC from words so the entry makes sense with the clue. I particularly enjoyed BALSAMIC to BALSA, and FORMICA to FORA.

I was all ready to grouse about the random placements of the themers (highlighted them below); how that goes against crossword symmetry. But I softened after reading Lewis's note. I still prefer adhering to crossword symmetry, but I appreciate Lewis's line of thinking. I did have some nice surprises during my solve in that way.

Lewis worked in some nice fill into those big corners. EL GRECO and CD PLAYER framing the bottom left were particularly snazzy, especially with a great clue for the latter. [Turner of music] is usually TINA or IKE, yeah? This time it's a literal turn-er of CDs. Fantastic!

A couple of tough entries and crossings — I had to think for a while if I considered them all "fair," i.e. most educated solvers could (or should) figure out the right letters. MBABANE was unfamiliar to me, but not knowing your world capitals = shame on me. One could argue that people shouldn't have to know what a NENE is, but again, world capitals should be a part of every NYT solver's repertoire. (MANAMA, Bahrain was in last year's ACPT final puzzle!)

ZABAR'S crossing ZENER ... good engineers can identify a ZENER diode, but ZENER cards do feel esoteric for the general population. ZABAR'S may be a big deal in upscale restaurants, but this crossing leans over to the unfair-ish side to me, especially to non-New Yorkers.

Some unsavory gluey bits in ECCE, YEE, OBLA, IMA (I wondered about KO'ED … but is KO'D better? KAYOED looks even stranger). But overall, not so bad given the tough construction requiring big open corners, along with a themeless-esque word count of 70. It had a bit of a themeless feel to it, which I liked.

I would have liked more examples of MIC taken out of the middle of words — FOR(MIC)A is more interesting to me than POLE(MIC), for instance — and even better would be some examples using snazzy phrases instead of regular words. But Lewis did discover some good words that have this MIC DROP property.