New York Times, Thursday, November 12, 2015

So I have a secret . . . I love pandas! There, I've said it.

This is my first foray into grid art. The "eyes" of the grid came pretty quickly for me as a starting point. I always love pushing the rules ever so slightly, so I was pleased when the unchecked squares looked good. After that, there aren't many other placements that work for the nose and ears.

The "triple PA" was a must have for me. Once I got into the corners, it wasn't too difficult to add more PA's, especially near the bottom, which is broken up a little more. I was a little iffy on ENSE and SSTS in the South East and was willing to sacrifice one of the PA's. But Will seemed to be ok with it, so voila, there are 11 PA's That's good right?!

Have to tip my hat to Patrick Blindauer who beat me to the "panda punch" about a year ago. But I hope that with my cute and cuddly grid art, solvers find this fresh and fun.

I love grid art. There's something so cool about opening a puzzle and seeing black squares arranged in some crazy pattern. I'm not sure if today's grid looked more like a PANDA's face or a zoo enclosure trapping the PANDA? (I sort of saw the face after reading David's notes, but I had to squint pretty hard.) Even if neither really came through for me, I do like seeing innovative grid patterns. Even inkblot-like ones can be fun.

Speaking of fun, very fun to search for those P AND A = PA rebus squares. How cool is (PA)(PA)L (PA)LACE, containing three of them! I like seeing rebus strings within long answers — not only is this harder to construct around, but it makes for a more challenging solve. The PAs in FLIP(PA)NT, (PA)LIMONY, S(PA)NISH RICE, and OOM (PA)H P(AH) were a blast to uncover.

And I liked how David featured a 16-letter in KNOW NOTHING (PA)RTY — almost all 16s will be new, since few grids go to 16 columns. This one seemed slightly off to me as I know that party as the KNOW NOTHINGS, but I like it either way. SALES DE(PA)RTMENTS as a plural felt like I got cheated a bit since I've seen that answer in singular many times before, but it still works fine.

Stuffing in 11 rebus squares is a tough task. You're going to need some PAs in short answers, and stuff like I(PA)D, S(PA)Y, S(PA)T work so well. It's unfortunate to have some of them in the A (PA)L and AT (PA)R types of entries, though.

Also unfortunate was to get a smattering of SSR, SSTS, APO, LMN, ENSE, TREO, etc. throughout the puzzle. It's all relatively minor, and I wouldn't have even minded them in aggregate if there had been something stronger to make it all worthwhile. But as it is, the visual didn't have such a mind-blowing effect that it overshadowed all the gluey bits. I might have been happier having only 10 or less PAs in the grid if it meant cutting the number of gluey bits in half.

I tend to find straight rebus puzzles a bit tired these days, so it was a relief to have a lot of fun uncovering all these rebus squares today.