New York Times, Thursday, October 10, 2013

In addition to the rebus entry at 36A, Jeffrey's first version of this puzzle had DAY and WEEK rebuses at the top and bottom of the grid. I thought these were unnecessary, and they constrained the construction in these areas too much besides. The revised version of the grid, which you see here today, is cleaner and nicer, I think. And the "aha" at 36A is really great.

"All the time?" is a fantastic clue for the central theme answer (a set of rebus entries going from SUN to SAT). A central entry plus two vertical grid-spanners may not seem like a lot of theme material, but incorporating vertical answers across the central entry adds to the density. Jeffrey could have made all seven of his crossing entries short stuff like LEMON and FRIDA, but he ups the ante by giving us the juicy SUN YAT SEN, ARE WE DONE, THUCYDIDES, and EASY VIRTUE. I hadn't heard of that last one, but pretty much anything from Noel Coward ought to be gridworthy. Beautiful work in the center of his grid, quite a feat. Well done!

One aspect of this construction that jumped out at me was the high number of 3-letter words. Will tries to keep them down to roughly 20(ish) or under, because too many of them become distracting to some solvers. Here, we have 30 three-letter words, and that's not counting LE(MON) or (FRI)DA. As a result, the solve felt a bit choppy to me. This sort of grid arrangement (lots of short entries, lots of long entries) does have the potential for long snazzy fill, but not a lot of the longer entries felt fresh and sparkly (to me, at least). I did like VARIATION and its science-related clue, but SIDE AISLE and UNDREAMED OF felt a touch off to my ear.

One aspect I appreciated here is the liberal use of cheater squares (black squares which don't affect the total word count). Jeffrey incorporates three pairs of them, and I'm sure this gave a better result than without. Yes, the extra black squares do cut down on the open feel of a puzzle, but I'd personally much rather take a cleaner fill with cheaters. In particular, note the black square at the end of SALIVATE and its match just before DEAD BODY (nice save with the clue for an otherwise creepy-ish entry, BTW). Those 9x3 stack sections are tough to fill cleanly, and placing just a single set of cheaters opens up the possibilities greatly, because the universe of 8-letter words is about 10% bigger than that of the 9-letter universe. I'd bet we would have had at least one other OSO or MEDE type entry without that particular pair of cheaters.

Rebus puzzles are getting tougher to innovate, given that there have been over 300 of them in the NYT now. I appreciate Jeffrey's fresh take on this one, all the rebi in a neat calendar row. Clever idea and a great clue for that entry.