New York Times, Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Neat idea, trying to form the shape of a shoe by using shoe components: HEEL, SOLE, ARCH, SOLE, TOE, TONGUE, and LACES. I especially liked the ARCH forming the shape of an arch — a beautiful little touch.

Diagonal theme entries are notorious for being difficult to pull off. Fixing two of them in place — and right next to each other! — is usually a recipe for disaster. One of them constrains the across and down fill so much, and two of them wreak havoc on your flexibility and freedom. But Paul does quite a nice job here, even working in the NBA's D-LEAGUE into the mix. EERS is an ugly piece of glue to be sure, but to get away with only that in the center is not bad at all. DEUCEDly good, I might even say.

Visual puzzles are tough to pull off, especially in a 15x puzzle where the canvas is very limited. Even after finishing, I wasn't sure what I was looking at. It's sort of shoe-like. The TONGUE and LACES are both sort of in the direction they usually are, perhaps in a hiking boot or something. But both of them together made the picture awfully busy. I wonder if just having the LACES would have made for a convincing pic? Perhaps it would have been better to use shaded squares instead of circles to form the shoe?

Ah, what about the GUM, you might ask? That quirky little finish to the puzzle was simultaneously fun and icky. Not a huge fan of being reminded about all the times I've stepped in gum. But why not reverse the shading and circles? Might have been fun to have the GUM in circles; a sort of bubble(d) GUM, if you will.

Not sure I buy the partialish IN THE EVENT or the "have I heard that before?" COLLEGE MEN, and I didn't care for the shared etymology of OVO and EGG CELL. I can understand the difficulties in the first two, trying to come up with anything that would fit into those slots given the constraints. The last one felt eminently preventable.

So some hitches here and there, but I like the pushing of the boundaries to do something different.