New York Times, Thursday, October 1, 2020

The idea came to me back when I started my puzzle "career" umpty-mumble years ago. I was working for the phone company back then, in a job that called for staring at a telephone keypad for hours on end and having nothing to do, so I guess it was destined to be. I've long loved the idea, but it took me a dozen-odd years to actually make it work, which means I either have great foresight or need to get out more. (I have my suspicions on that count.)

This was the fourth version of this grid I submitted. For the first one, I used buried spellings for the numbers as well as the letter combos (the TWO in NETWORK, for example); Will and team thought this was one trick too many, and suggested treating the numbers as straight-up rebuses instead. This also allowed me to add a fifth theme square, which is one of those horrid curses that tastes suspiciously like a blessing.

I stumbled through two more rejected drafts trying to cram everything in, a challenge in the same way that backing a school bus into your breakfast nook is a challenge, but I finally got it so the grid wasn't too disjointed and the fill wasn't too cringeworthy. I think fewer proper names would be a vast improvement, but beggars, choosers, and all that. Either way, it's done, it's decent, it's Autumn, life is grand.

You know you've done too many crosswords when there's a four-letter word, _ALU, the clue is [Geography blah blah blah] and you roll your eyes before confidently entering YALU.

You know you've been quarantining too long when you spend five hours reading about the YALU river, dreaming about getting outside the house, even if it's to visit North Korea.

I admired Adam's audacity today, this gimmick taking me forever to crack. We've hopefully made it clear in the grid below — for example, 17-Across is GR(AB C)ONTROL while 3-Down is IN 2. On old phones, ABC is over the 2. See?

At least we older folks see. I wonder if some Millennials will have ever seen a TOUCHTONE PHONE. Back in my day, you had to take two high-voltage wires and zap them together to generate a number on your phone. We got shocked to hell, which would explain some things about me, but that's the way it was and we liked it.

Ah. Some solvers still may not get what's going on. Who are the MNOERS, you ask? That's the religious puzzle-solving NBA team who scrambled SERMON. Ha ha, no, it's the 6ers. No, not the GERS — that's the International expansion team located in Berlin — it's the (SIX)ERS.

You know, the 76ers' nickname? No, you don't know that?

It's a good thing Adam cut down on the levels of trickery!

This is a rare case of a puzzle I'd like to see super-sized into a 21x21 Sunday. It's a neat idea, but so tough. Placing the special squares (roughly) where they would appear on a keypad would have sharpened the a-ha moment — something like Liz Gorski's one from years ago would have been great. It wouldn't have been possible with 7 as PQRS, but plenty of old phones used PRS, which could have been in PR STUNTS.