New York Times, Monday, October 31, 2016

Happy Halloween! If you were hoping for a spooky puzzle today, I'm sorry.

As is often the case, this theme idea came to me while I was driving my car. I've been known to absent-mindedly shoot past an exit or two while my brain is running through theme ideas and my fingers are tapping out word lengths on the steering wheel.

The day this puzzle had its start, I happened to hear Marvin Gaye's MERCY MERCY ME on the radio. I immediately started to think of other song titles that fit the X X Y word pattern. The next one I hit on was (I'm ashamed to say) the Vanilla Ice "classic" ICE ICE BABY. At that moment, a theme was born.

My apologies to those solvers for whom pop music is terra incognita (I'm looking at you, Aunt Annie). I suppose picking up on the theme will help a bit in filling in the squares, even if you're unfamiliar with the song titles.

Songs that didn't make the cut include the Everly Brothers' "Bye Bye Love" (due to the inclusion of BYE BYE BLACKBIRD), and Van Morrison's "Real Real Gone". In my opinion, Van Morrison walks on water, but "Real Real Gone" seemed even more obscure than the (I'm sure to some) obscure WILD WILD LIFE — which "Real Real Gone" could've replaced from a lengthwise standpoint. I think I had another possibility or two, but I can't recall what they were now. Can anybody think of others? There's a fun party game for you when you've finished bobbing for apples.

For a follow-up puzzle, how about three-word song titles, like "Fun Fun Fun" and "More More More"? I think I'll leave that to someone else.

One last thought: if this doesn't get "Puzzle of the Week" and 5 stars across the board, the election was obviously rigged.

As Vanilla Ice would say: Word to your mother …

Song titles of three words, the first and second words identical. As a pop music idiot, I really appreciated that Pete stuck to fairly well-known songs. I might even be able to sing them. Okay, maybe hum them. And if I was forced to go to a karaoke bar I could probably throw in a "mercy" here and there, in MERCY MERCY ME.

I wondered how hard it would be to find examples fitting this pattern. Turns out, pretty hard! I didn't spend a lot of time looking, but Pete seems to have unearthed a pretty tight set of popular songs that stick to this idea. Very nice.

Even though he has to work around five long themers, Pete still makes the extra effort to put in some long bonus entries. None of them jumped out at me (MENS CLUBS isn't as vivid as "old boys' club"), but FRENETIC and SITCOM are fun, and EXCISING is an interesting word.

I felt like the grid got too strained, though. I wouldn't give this one to a relative newbie, as it might elicit a "I have to know what ELOI, AWN, and STERE are in order to do crosswords?!" reaction. I explain to people that you don't actually have to know these things, since you can just ignore them and rely on the crossing answers. But although that's a logical argument, I find that these types of entries don't go over too well, and certainly don't engender a feeling of wanting to do more crosswords.

For a Monday puzzle, I would have liked a different trade-off in snazzy long fill vs. sparkliness. I do like it when constructors go the extra mile to work in several pieces of long fill, but entries like ABANDONED don't feel worth the price of AS I, EIN, ANO, etc. plus the aforementioned.

In the end though, I found the five themers to be a tight-ish, entertaining set.