New York Times, Tuesday, May 16, 2017

My first attempt at this theme hid scrambled state names in phrases, but most of the states were only four letters long. Will and Joel wrote back that "hiding California in AFRICAN LION is beautiful (!), but....they were not impressed with the shorter ones.

They suggested I try to find some longish states (seven or more letters) where adding one letter and scrambling led to something interesting. That turned out to take a LOT of digging because most state names (like Illinois and Hawaii for example) don't have easy letters to anagram with — none of these five phrases had ever appeared before in the NYT, and three of them were not even in any of my word lists. They all Google well though, so I decided to give it a shot.

When I got the preview version of the puzzle last week, I needed all six crosses to get SENT UP (my memory is not great) because I had never heard this phrase used as a synonym of "parodied." There is a LOT of support for this clue in dictionaries, but I surveyed five word-nerd friends of mine, and none of them had heard of this usage. I think if I were an editor, I would have to lean toward dictionary definitions over my personal experience, but I'm sure sometimes it's a close call.

This is one of the puzzles I'm most proud of at this point because I did not think it was going to be possible and it turned out way better than I had even hoped for.

Sometimes I wish the NYT weekday crosswords ran titles. I'm not sure what today's would be — is there a catchy phrase that means TAKE A STATE PLUS A LETTER AND ANAGRAM INTO REAL PHRASES? Perhaps … "Altered States"? "Plus ones"? Neither is quite right, but both start to get at it. Sort of.

I so badly wanted the additional letters, R E O T N, to … spell something? To be representative of that state? Anything but "add a letter because that's what was needed for this anagram." I spent some time searching for some higher meta layer, but this NOTER notes none.

That's likely asking for too much given the constraints, but a guy can wish.

Ignoring that for now, I like the themers overall. WARNING SHOT, IM SERIOUS, and AFRICAN LION are great phrases. NORMAL DAY and BANK RATES are a bit drier, but they still work.

Pretty good gridwork, too. Bruce's chops have improved greatly over the past year, largely avoiding the usual crossword glue constructors resort to, while integrating a lot of nice bonuses. RAW BARS. The full ARAL SEA. POOP OUT. KID LIT. LADY DI. Such great use of those mid-length slots.

He did employ a curious word up top, CAPSID. I thought I was pretty good with biology (my previous company was in pharmaceutical development), but this was a mystery to me. I like the word, after having looked it up, and I think it's fair game. But I can see how some solvers might need every crossing, and even then still think they must have something wrong. That would be not terribly satisfying.

I would have liked the upper left and lower right corners to be less segregated from the rest of the puzzle, too. Perhaps moving the black square between NAN and BAN one to the right? The segmentation does make the construction process much, much easier, but it can also make for a choked-off feeling for solvers.

There's an interesting seed of an idea here — altering states somehow. I so badly wish there had been some extra layer to bring together those extra letters somehow, though.