New York Times, Saturday, March 18, 2017

This puzzle was constructed in January 2015, and a revision was suggested in June 2015. After re-submission the revision was accepted for publication in October 2015.

The construction started with WHAT A JOKE, a sarcastic comment that often finds me stifling a chuckle when I hear it in person. The next placement was ZEBRA FISH, a term I hadn't heard since I was a boy. So it was with these two scrabbly entries that things got underway, with fingers crossed for a you-know-what.

I mentioned in the notes for my debut puzzle that I use a home-made grid filler program. One of the limitations of the tool is that it uses an unranked word list (of freeware origin) that still contains plenty of clunkers. This means that achieving a clean fill with lively entries is an exercise in patience. In the original construction of this grid I wasn't patient enough, because I allowed two iffy words into the fill. It was lucky for me that they were confined to the SW quadrant, or Will and Joel might not have suggested a revision.

The clue for ROSETTI (36D — Mozart contemporary Antonio ____) is intended to be tricky. I figured some solvers would put SALIERI.

I think Will and Joel's YOYO DIET — [Go in and out of middle management?] — is funny and clever.

Like Roland's others with similar grid designs, there are very few long (8+ letters) slots, but he does well with the ones he has: WHAT A JOKE crossing ZEBRAFISH, yes! Not only are both snappy entries, but each contains a rare letter. YOYO DIET and JIVE TALK are also fun (I'm fairly sure I've seen "Airplane" more times than you). And although BEST EVER and FINE TUNE aren't quite as nice, they're still solid entries.

Those 7-letter slots are so tough to convert to strong entries. Love AXL ROSE, and OUTTAKE is nice, with its good clue: [It could be a blooper], making me think about a bloop hit in baseball at first. But no other entries stood out on their own.

NAZI ERA … I appreciate the clue pointing out that this ended after WWII, but for me, crosswords are escapism. Not much fun to see NAZI ERA, even though it is a crazy-looking string of letters in NAZIERA. (Kind of looks like "nazier," i.e. more like a Nazi.)

It's tough to fill these sorts of big corners without dabbing on crossword glue, so it's no surprise that the upper right and lower left — the two more open corners — suffer more than the others. The grid flow is much appreciated, but man oh man does it make it tougher to fill those regions with smoothness and snazziness.

That DARIEN / ROSETTI / OUSE / TSE / IRVAN area felt particularly troubling. ROSETTI was already a tricksy misdirect, as I was 100% ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY SURE it was Antonio Salieri, Mozart's antagonist featured in "Amadeus." (You got me, Roland!) But, ROSETTI is a composer educated solvers ought to know. The other crossings, however … hmm.

Along with some random ASE, ERI, FLA, ENOTE (does anyone really use this term?), it was too much crossword glue for me in a themeless. Those big corners featuring a ton of 7-letters answers are so hard to fill.

But overall, a good workout, featuring a couple of strong long answers.