New York Times, Wednesday, August 3, 2016

I'd imagine this general theme of putting one word inside of another has been done more than a few times over the years. But when "Dancing in the Dark" jumped out at me, I went on to come up with a list of other songs that fit the ___ IN ___ pattern. As I continued, I ended up restricting myself to ___ IN THE ___, then titles with a four-letter final word (which could be evenly split) and finally ones whose first word ended with ING or IN'. Hopefully you appreciated this tightening of the theme.

Since the New York Times has such a wide range of solvers, I wanted to make sure there was a song for everyone in the puzzle. Something from your youth or an old favorite to help get your foothold in this puzzle. It's a bit of a tricky theme for a Wednesday, but I think it's fair considering the high word count and repetition in the gimmick.

Looking at the clues in the final edit, I was happy to see that many of my clues were unchanged or only slightly altered. I like to think this means I'm getting better at matching The New York Times Crossword Clue Voice. I was particularly pleased to see my math, mythology, and TV references survive the cut in clues for AUNT, STYX, and ISLAND, respectively. That said, Will and Joel came up with [OMG, like, the greatest pal] for BFF, which put a big smile on my face, and crossword mastermind Erik Agard helped me out with the clue for FOUND MONEY: [Change out of an old pair of pants?].

Literalisms today, using song titles. As Neville mentioned, I've seen this sort of concept enough times to recognize immediately what was going on, so I really appreciated that he went above and beyond with his consistency and tightness. During my solve, I noticed every level of self-imposed constraints he pointed out. Very nice touch.

Even though I wasn't familiar with all the songs — I didn't totally recognize ROLLING in the DEEP and DANCING in the DARK — I did like Neville's thinking about "something for everyone," trying to broaden the spectrum of solvers that will appreciate the puzzle. He's a strong enough constructor that I had a feeling this was part of his thought process. Nice to hear from him that it indeed was.

Some excellent bonuses too, FOUND MONEY the standout. Who doesn't like reaching into a pair of shorts you haven't washed in eight months to find a $20 bill?

What, you wash your shorts more than every eight months? Me too. Ahem.

Neville is recent math Ph.D. graduate (congrats!), so it was fun to see the clue for AUNT. At first, I couldn't remember what PEMDAS was a mnemonic for but it came back quickly: parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction. Good to remember in case you have to solve some math formulas involving a mix of multiplication, subtraction, exponents, natural logs, factorials, second-order derivatives … (I just felt a bunch of you shudder)

AL OERTER is an interesting piece of fill. I learned him from crosswords, as that TER ending and those juicy vowels makes OERTER very useful for six-letter slots. But what a cool piece of trivia — amazing feat to win four consecutive gold medals!

I had to look up AXE and [Chopper], as I just couldn't believe they were synonymous. Were they new slang I'm not cool enough to know? (An AXE is slang for a guitar, and a chopper is slang for a certain type of motorcycle.) I felt pretty silly when I realized [Chopper] just meant "thing that chops." (groan)

Nice clean grid, really just the arbitrary time ONE PM and a MULTI prefix. Well-executed puzzle overall.

Relying on AUNT Sally and her order of operations acronym has fallen out of favor, and for good reasons. There are plenty more operators beyond the simple ones Sally happens to mention. Even if you do understand the arbitrary rules, it's easy to write confusing or misleading mathematical expressions.

Software programmers in particular are taught to avoid reliance on them. Extra parentheses clarify intent with no downside since compilers strip out unneeded ones for you. Worse, computer languages don't all agree on the order rules and some, like APL, ignore them completely.