New York Times, Thursday, April 9, 2020

Favorite clues rewritten by the editors (answers at the end):

• Release with track changes?
• Like a slide tackler's shorts, perhaps
• Called a strike (though the replacement [Worked from home, say] is quite timely)
• Prime mover?
• Fusion spot, say
• Use half a booth
• They periodically swarm

I'm happy to debut eight words/phrases today, including two that are five letters long (debuting short words/phrases is more unusual than long ones). They are CAR AD, DISCO ERA, MADE A CHOICE, MY FAULT, PLUOT, PUT ON HOLD, ROAD MARKER, and SLEEP LAB. Even though the three long ones are thematic, that's still more newness than I can typically cram into a themed 15x15 grid. Eight debuts is quite high for such puzzles. As of today, that's good enough to tie for second place in 2020.

If you're a logophile looking for a good quarantine read, I recommend Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper. It paints a vivid picture of the people responsible for crafting our most important reference book (sorry encyclopedia fans!). You'll get humorous anecdotes, interesting trivia, and probably more than eight new words!

One final note — I'm surprised there are non-thematic periods and hyphens in today's cluing. I avoided them in the clues I submitted; they seem inelegant. Perhaps the editors intended them to disguise the theme?

Answers: REMIX, STAINED, UMPIRED, AMAZON, CAR AD, EAT ALONE, and CICADAS.

In high-echelon puzzling circles, crosswords are disdained, treated as pooh-poohed poo caked onto the gumshoe's shoe. Crosswords? Crosswords? Why don't you do some word searches? How about a spot the differences? I have a few Highlights magazines that might occupy your tiny pea brain for an hour.

Thankfully, I run with a group of humble solvers who love complex puzzles and aren't afraid to admit being completely stumped. We work our asses off, familiarizing ourselves with any code ever devised, memorizing alphanumeric substitutions so we can reel off the fact that Q = 17^th letter of the alphabet, letters in ASCII tables are coded from 65 to 90, and communicating easily in tap code.

So it's particularly embarrassing that I couldn't come up with the letter represented by a single MORSE CODE dash. A single dot? Easy! It's E, appropriate for easy. A dash … should be a common letter. S! No, that's dash dash dash, as in the dash dash dash dot dot dot dash dash dash of S O S.

(Astute reader Larry Byrd points out that I got that wrong. It's dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot. D'oh d'oh d'oh!)

R? The first free letter they give you in "Wheel of Fortune"?

L, as in long?

My team just assigned me dog poo duty.

Point is, I don't know how many solvers will make the connection, that the dots and dashes in the theme clues stand for Es and Ts, respectively. Listed out:

• -able = Table = PUT ON HOLD
• Big nos. = Big nose = SCHNOZZOLA (do people say this these days?)
• Op-ed = Opted = MADE A CHOICE
• Mil. post, say = Mile post = ROAD MARKER

Luckily, Alex's gridwork was so stellar that my solving experience was still pleasant. I completed it as I would a themeless — a strong themeless at that — and enjoyed so much of NAUTILI, OPTIMISM, DISCO ERA, SLEEP LAB, MY FAULT that the theme didn't matter.

Adding DOT (clued as [E, in MORSE CODE]) and DASH (clued as [T, in MORSE CODE]) into the grid would have helped immensely. That would have presented some construction difficulty, but making the theme work is well worth the price of fewer great bonuses.