By pure coincidence, this puzzle happens to run on my fiancé's birthday, so I'll take that as an opportunity to talk about him a bit. Quinton and I met as students at Princeton, both singing in the Princeton Nassoons (a cappella group) and the Chamber Choir. After graduation he spent a year in Tajikistan on a fellowship before joining me in the DC area, where we now both work on federal contracts. Although I usually enjoy doing the New York Times themeless puzzles solo, I love him enough to save some Fridays and Saturdays to solve together every few weeks. He especially helps with foreign language, geography, and vocabulary clues. We'll see if he can finish this one solo!

This puzzle is a bit un-millennial of me in that much of the grid is skewed toward older references, which may trip up some younger solvers. I've always been a fan of wide open grids with heavy intersection, even at the sacrifice to some overall zippiness and trendiness in the grid entries. It often makes it more of a challenge to both construct and solve, which I appreciate. This puzzle is an example of this constructing style: it doesn't quite have the youthful verve throughout, but I think the overall fill quality and intersection in the middle makes up for it. The side sections were a bit more flexible – only the unfortunate plural BEERYS which I didn't like, but liked better than the inelegance of adding a black square in the corner.

Hope you like this (unexpected) birthday present Quinton!

I'm a sucker for innovative patterns in themelesses. I still greatly enjoy standard themeless layouts, as long as the fill is sparkly, but there's something so thrilling about seeing something new. Big swaths of white, swirling from SW to NE! More swirliness in the other corners! All done with pretty good grid flow, and a ton of long entries? Color me intrigued. Nervous, too – it's so difficult to fill a grid like this well – but intrigued.

Such a pleasure to get a snazzy triplet in the middle, FIXED ASSETS / HIGH AND AWAY / BARBARA EDEN. Okay, at least one of these could bore most anyone – finance haters, baseball haters, old sitcom haters. But I like the variety.

Personally, I like finance and baseball (at least the fun slang), but I did do some head-scratching at BARBARA EDEN. When I looked her up on Wikipedia … man oh man, that theme song! Though I never watched the show, I love that jingle.

Then, GEAR TRAINS and ICE CAPADES worked through the middle stack! As a gearhead, I love GEAR TRAINS. And [Arrangements of teeth?] obfuscating it made it even better.

And there was more — nice stacks in each of the four corners! Loved loved loved PIERCED EAR / ONE MAN ARMY / ISLAND HOPS. Such juicy answers!

Well, let's reduce that to two loves. Agreed with Ryan, BEERYS is one of the worst pluralized names I've seen in memory. Ick! I'd have preferred the black square at the S as Ryan described, but who knows what it would have done in the NW.

I personally would have never let BEERYS through. But if it enables such a great triplet of long entries, why wouldn't you? Woudja look at that, after all these years, I'm still adapting my thinking.

(Okay, I still probably would have fought like heck to get rid of BEERYS.)

Overall, great usage of his long slots, and I love the innovation and solid execution using a challenging grid pattern. Very impressive work from a relatively new constructor.