New York Times, Tuesday, May 13, 2014

My husband and I own a lawn/landscaping company and monitoring the weather is an obsession with us as our livelihood revolves around working in the great outdoors. In 25 years of business, we have worked through every imaginable type of weather condition including Nor'easters, tropical storms, blizzards, ice, freezing rain, hail, droughts, wind, thunderstorms, etc. and thankfully, a lot of gorgeous, sunny days as well. For someone like me who watches "The Weather Channel" every single day and follows three other forecasters on Facebook, it was on my "radar" to construct a weather-related puzzle.

I initially submitted this puzzle back in November 2011 with 4 movie titles that each described the weather for a particular U.S. city/state and clued as such. "THE BIG CHILL" was clued as [Weather forecast for...International Falls, MN]; "TROPIC THUNDER" [Weather forecast for...Honolulu, HI] and so on. In Feb. 2012, Will responded that he liked the concept in principle but did not think that the movie "A MIGHTY WIND" was well enough known (but worked for Chicago, IL) and "MERCURY RISING" (for Miami, FL) could apply to any place that got really hot and therefore, not as good a candidate for a theme entry. So, I went back to my notes and eventually submitted two different theme concepts to Will — one with movie titles and the other with song titles, clued as the Weather Forecast (revealer) for a specific city/state. The song title version was accepted in August 2012.

I was a bit surprised to see that my original cluing concept of weather related to a city/state was dropped in the final edited version, but I am still happy with the theme entries clued as song hits from various years. Also, Will kept almost 60% of my clues as submitted, which is also very pleasing. For me as a constructor and a solver, it is all about the theme. However, like many other new constructors have stated in their notes, I am now focusing on improving the fill and striving for less crosswordese in my future puzzles.

Now, it's time to go outside, weed my garden, and enjoy "1966 Beatles hit" [Good Day Sunshine].

Song title masquerading as WEATHER FORECASTs, fun! Even being an idiot when it comes to pop music, I easily recognized three of the four songs by title, a good mark for a Tuesday puzzle. AGAINST THE WIND took me most of the crossings to get, but after Googling it, I realized I ought to have known it. The slow process of increasing my pop music knowledge base chugs along...

With five longish themers, it's great that Tracy managed to work in some long fill. LIVE WIRE and HEPTAGON are really fun. So bizarre that someone would decide to make a coin in the shape of a HEPTAGON! (I recently learned this from a really good Matt Gaffney Weekly Crossword Contest puzzle.) Currency people, get on a triskaidecagonal coin already, will you? (I'd buy that for a dollar! What, no original Robocop fans in the audience?) Also, a nice touch that EDIT OUT and SLEEP IN are in symmetrical locations.

I've had the pleasure of co-constructing with Tracy a few times now, and one aspect I really appreciate about her work is that she has a very different perspective than me. Being a nerdburger Star Wars robot-fighting sports-talking math lover, I tend to fill my own crosswords with stuff that skews heavily male (see above Robocop reference). So I really like it when Tracy puts more academic fill in, like BAHIA, ARHAT, HELOT. Classes up the joint.

There were a couple of crunchy locations, not too surprising given the theme density and the long fill. That's a lot of constraints to work with. The word ERUCT stuck out for me — not sure whether to wince at it or to appreciate learning something new? With so few Bing hits (45K), I tend to think the former. And crossing the plural of a name I didn't know, ERINS, made it feel even crunchier. Along with an AMIR here, an ORIG there, it felt not as smooth as I typically like. Ah, the difficulties of working with high constraints.

Finally, it's rare to get a Tuesday treat, a wordplay clue that makes me smile. I'm sure I've seen variations on [Place for sweaters?] before, but I liked getting a fun clue, not about a sweater to be worn, but a sweater, as in a person who sweats. Good stuff.