New York Times, Wednesday, May 10, 2017

The main idea behind this puzzle was to create something kinetic — a continuous flow of sports action proceeding from top to bottom the way most solvers approach a puzzle of midweek difficulty. A single rally in a game of badminton seemed ideal to me because of the various kinds of 4-letter birdies that could be arranged on either side of the net, all six of them easily clued "off-theme." (I wanted very much to get architect Christopher WREN in, but couldn't make him fit.) A player SERVES, and the birdie zigzags across the net till IT'S OUT.

The 12-letter BADMINTON NET forced 16 rows for symmetry, which gave me just a little extra wiggle room for optimizing theme placement. Birdies kept moving around from one slot to another until they seemed to make the best fit. But the big job was the non-theme staggered fill in the center of the grid — from ION BEAMS to POLITICO — which pretty much defined (and confined) how good my short "glue" would be. Mixed results: OSE, ONA, ENC, IDI and PES are words I'd like to ban from my future efforts.

I loved making this puzzle and would like to try more where things can "move around" through some sort of landscape.

Fun and creative concept, players hitting a shuttlecock back and forth over a BADMINTON NET. Or is that a BIRDIE? I dug that repeating pattern of four-letter birds ping-ponging from one side to the other. And getting the finale of ITS OUT was a fun ending. Amusing to visualize the BIRDIE finally landing out of bounds (if you think of the sideline as AREAMAN / ALIENS).

Some good bonus entries, too. As a die-hard sci-fi guy, I love me some ION BEAMS. POLITICO and Kim BASINGER were nice as well. SENSE ORGAN felt a bit too dictionary-definitionish for my taste (pun intended), but it is valid. And although UNACCENTED is a bit dull as an entry on its own, getting a misdirecting clue in [Not stressed], as in "laid back," made for fun wordplay.

Puzzles featuring a whole bunch of short themers can be tough to fill cleanly. Ned did a pretty good job of separating all his themers with black squares, and some of the places I thought would suffer turned out quite well. For example, it's usually tough to fill a corner bounded on its top and bottom, like with the upper left bounded by RACKET / DUCK. RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) will be tough for some, but the acronym is in use. And working in one of my favorite baseball players of all-time, ICHIRO = much appreciated.

But there were many places that suffered. It started off with an OSS / ONA — not too bad, considering having to work around not just RACKET, DUCK, and LOON, but BADMINTON NET. But ... thankfully Ned pointed most of them out.

None of these is a "puzzle-killer" to me (Will's term for an entry that automatically forces a rejection), although PES is close. But so many of them in a single puzzle = no bueno; makes a grid feel wonky. Just four BIRDIEs would have accomplished the same effect for me and would have made for a smoother puzzle.

Overall though, a clever idea with a smile-inducing set of revealers.