New York Times, Thursday, May 16, 2019

Seems appropriate that MACHU PICCHU has UP in the middle of it. The Incas and their clever wordplay!

I don't often build crosswords around short themers, because these shorties tend to get lost amongst all the long fill that (generally) has to go in a puzzle. But I liked the concept and theme set well enough, that I decided to give it a try. How hard could it be?

Hard, as it turns out!

Just placing the symmetrical pairs and laying out black squares to separate them was tough enough. It took a couple of dozen tries to come up with an arrangement that seemed fillable.

But I had to deploy so many black squares in the center of the grid — four sets of three diagonals takes up a lot of real estate — that I ended up needing at least a few long across answers (where STAGE ACTOR and STATIONARY are now). That felt problematic, because wouldn't solvers wonder how these two were related to the theme?

Hmm.

Why not go whole hog, I reasoned, and throw even more long across fill in, that it felt more purposeful as fill? Surely that would fix the issue.

What? You wondered how SUPER SLO MO was part of the theme? Darn you!

Finally, I rarely use cheater squares in the way that I did just before KRAFT. It just looks fugly to me; seems cheap. But darned if I couldn't figure out a reasonable fill in the SW corner without it. I tried every usual trick in the book, but every single one dead-ended at some bizarre piece of fill.

Bah!

If you haven't gotten the chance to go up to MACHU PICCHU — and more importantly, even higher to the peak at Huayna Picchu — that's one to put on the bucket list. Not for the faint of heart, faint of breath, or faint from fear of falling to one's death off of towering heights that have virtually no safety measures, though.