New York Times, Saturday, December 31, 2016

In my first career as a mechanical engineer, we used to tell our clients that they could have two of the following three things:

1. Good
2. Fast
3. Cheap

It's not possible to achieve all three, but that didn't stop certain clients from demanding them all. Some of us engineers were fond of telling them sure, if you have to have all three, why don't we just make your product out of UNOBTAINIUM?

Our business folks weren't too hot about that response. We sure thought it was funny, though.

I had queried Brad Wilber at the Chronicle of Higher Education with a list of made-up compounds in fantasy: UNOBTAINIUM, KRYPTONITE, DILITHIUM, ICE NINE, MITHRIL. He said it was too much of a list puzzle (imagine that!) for him, but UNOBTAINIUM would sure make a great themeless seed.

I don't make many themelesses these days since everybody and their brother submits a ton of them to Will. Plus, I think it's a much more interesting challenge to come up with a great theme. But when I heard NERD CULTURE in an audio book, I quickly counted it out (stupid compulsive constructor's brain, just let me listen to the book already!) — 11 letters, the same as UNOBTAINIUM! Felt like a mini-theme I could get behind.

Unfortunately, 11 letters is a terrible length to work with in a themeless. It's so stubborn, forcing placement of certain black squares right off the bat, draining flexibility. I tested dozens of possibilities, all of them leading to some dead-end or requiring 70+ words (that's not a very interesting construction challenge to me), before finally arriving at what you see.

I wasn't thrilled about three middle entries — PERSIANS, CADENCE, SANCTION, but each felt like there was possibility for good cluing. SANCTION, for example, is a word that can mean one thing … or its opposite. (I clued it as [Approve … or prohibit].)

The upper right took hundreds of tries before I finally felt that the result was sparkly and clean enough ... with one hesitation, anyway: I love ASCII ART, and it fits great with the NERD CULTURE mini-theme, but would solvers struggle with the SIRENIA (it's the order containing manatees) crossing? I love that SIRENIA term, derived from the Sirens of Greek myth. Hopefully, people who don't know ASCII can think about the term "Animalia" and get the -IA ending that way.

My original clue for ANACONDA was [Sir Mix-a-Lot's "don't want none / Unless you got buns, hon"]. I was pretty sure Will wouldn't be able to use it for the NYT audience. But I had to try.

Shout at to BRAD at 26-Across! Thanks so much for the idea.

This is Mr. Chen's 17th NYT crossword in 2016. Others in double digits are David Steinberg (12), Zhouqin Burnikel (12), Patrick Berry (11), and Timothy Polin (10). Here's the breakdown by year.