New York Times, Saturday, May 8, 2021

This puzzle's minitheme has a funny backstory. In the pre-COVID days, I used to create a monthly word puzzle out of sticky notes and post it in my cubicle for any interested co-workers. I even had a leaderboard sticky note with the names of everyone who had solved the puzzle. Erik Agard sat next to me, so as you can imagine, the leaderboard almost always had at least one name on it before you could say "sticky note"!

One month, I made a puzzle out of two columns of sticky notes where I changed the first letters of alliterative two-word phrases. For example, a sticky note in the first column read "halted," and a sticky note in the second column read "silk." Changing the first letters of those two words yielded "malted milk," and "m" became a letter that was part of the final answer (which, if memory serves, was "Mahomes," as in Kansas City's legendary quarterback). Another pair of sticky notes read "mighty"/"fight," and my intended answer was "eighty-eight."

One co-worker stopped by my cubicle and stared at the puzzle for several minutes, evidently perplexed. We got to talking about which answers she'd already figured out, and she mentioned "nighty night" for "mighty/fight." Nighty night! I hadn't even considered that, but it was clearly just as good an answer. I quickly patched up the puzzle by changing "fight" to "night" (so solvers would know that "night" wasn't part of the answer), though this amusing find ultimately intrigued me so much that I decided to make a whole puzzle out of it. Moral of the story: Always get your puzzles test-solved!

Apparently, I've spent too much time running Monte Carlo analysis for my fantasy basketball team because I dropped in NBA ALL-STAR immediately. No crosses needed. With all the crosswords I have on my mind, it's no surprise that my fantasy basketball team's forte is blocks.

I overlooked the mini-theme until well after finishing. I kept staring at EIGHTY-EIGHT. What a random number to use. Sure, it corresponds to Mercury's orbit around the sun, but it still seemed like an odd choice to occupy valuable real estate. Then it dawned on me that NIGHTY-NIGHT looked similar … such a fun mini-theme!

Speaking of mini-themes, years ago, I experimented with a GORDON GEKKO / GREED IS GOOD mini-theme … until I realized that Gekko doesn't say exactly that in the original movie. He does in the sequel, so perhaps that's what the clue is referring to?

Some excellent cluing — some that might need explanation, though. TIGHTEN is [Turn right, say]? Think about "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey" for screws. Tricksy!

[Common complex rule] might be easier to grok, in that it's referring to an apartment complex. I immediately jumped to complex statistical rules applying to assessments of fantasy basketball draft pick values, but perhaps that's just me.

Brilliant HOUSE RED clue. Although I've seen variations on cab alternatives before, it still misdirected enough from HOUSE RED. And HERBS used "in a pinch," like a pinch of dried rosemary, that's delicious!

I have an incredibly high bar for David, especially since he's near the top of my POW! list, so there weren't quite as many fresh or snazzy marquee entries as I hoped for. The brilliance of the cluing sure helped make up for that, though.