New York Times, Friday, October 16, 2015

It seemed natural to build a puzzle with 26 unchecked squares — given my checkered past in the crossword world — so I did. (And in case some solvers didn't count the unchecked squares, the notepad made their significance clear.)

A key constructing challenge for me was ensuring that the short entries with the unchecked letters were fair. Hence, I did not allow acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, Roman numerals, partials nor propers. Okay, so I eventually caved on that last one and allowed SAM and MENOTTI to creep in. Not too obscure.

Overall the fill turned out really clean, and I'm quite happy with the whole puzzle.

Note anything unusual about all those unchecked letters around the perimeter? Not surprisingly, this puzzle is a pangram! At first, I wasn't sure why so many single letters were strewn around the perimeter, but the concept finally dawned on me, helping me to fill in the M of MENOTTI and the J of JAR. Neat idea to make it seem like there are 26 unchecked squares, while secretly tying them together.

All those black squares around the perimeter cut down the average word length of the puzzle. Usually this statistic is not something I care about, but here, it means that there are very few entries of 8+ letters — the ones I usually look forward to cracking the most. Some of these feature entries were great — OPEN PRIMARIES, RAISING THE BAR, AS A LAST RESORT I really liked — but others like FAILING STUDENTS and QUEENS OF ENGLAND didn't seem as in-the-language. The latter seems more like a Jeopardy! category rather than a phrase people say.

And even this investment manager doesn't get super excited by ROLL OVER AN IRA. Yes, it can be a wise action within retirement planning, but it's not an aspect that tickles me. (Yes, there are many aspects of money management that do tickle me. Weird, I know.) And PROCEDURE MANUAL reminds me too much of long orientation days at a new job. It actually has a lot of potential to be saved with a great wordplay clue, but the straightforward [How-to guide at an office] doesn't do a lot for me.

There are a bunch of 7-letter entries which do add a little spice, like EYE TEST. Others like EMERITA and GEMINIS are pretty good too.

I always appreciate how Joe pushes the envelope with almost every new construction. He's a natural selection for this theme week, and this idea is pretty cool. I would have liked some indication of the idea — PANGRAM or THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG or something — but there's already a lot of constraint put on the grid. Already with some LENOS, SAY SOS, MOANER kind of stuff, I wouldn't want to force much more.