New York Times, Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Not surprisingly, I got the inspiration for this theme after noticing a few sandbags on the side of the road. My first snarky thought was something to the effect of "How much use do these things even get? This place [the Twentynine Palms USMC base] is on the edge of the Mojave ... how often is flooding a problem?" (It happens occasionally as I later learned.) After this, I switched to mocking the sandbags themselves. "And what good of a bag are you anyway?" I thought. "If you lose your sand, you just become a regular, old bag."

Snark soon gave way to curiosity. Were there other bags whose identity was solely dependent on what they held? From the outset, I prioritized including ICE and SAND, since the ice bag and sandbag best illustrated the theme concept I was going for, i.e. a bag specifically designed to hold only one item.

After ICE and SAND, theme answers were a bit harder to find. I initially thought AIR would be a good choice, but airbags typically get filled with pure nitrogen or argon gas and not the 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, etc. "air" to which we Terrans are accustomed. Also, technically speaking, even ice bags and sandbags contain air. There were also a good number of "___bag" entries that didn't work with my theme definition, e.g. shopping bag, windbag, handbag, and a few others too lewd for me to list.

I ended up choosing TEA and BOOK but also liked MAIL and MONEY. (I didn't like BODY or GARBAGE due to the unpleasant imagery.)

As for the fill, it would seem that I tried to squeeze in some long downs and/or a tinge of scrabbliness. This resulted in a bit more glue than I'd allow in my current submissions; nonetheless, I hope the longer answers and lower word count add a little variety to your Tuesday solve.

Enjoy the rest of this week's puzzles. I know I certainly will!

Will has been spacing out these "words that can follow X" themes; a good thing. Even with a catchy revealer like IT'S IN THE BAG, they run the risk of feeling tired if seen more than a few times a year. I did like David's choices of themers — BOOK EM DANNO and SAND CASTLE are pretty nice. I didn't know ICE ROAD TRUCKERS, but what a cool name!

Does Sarah Palin call herself a TEA PARTIER? More importantly, when Putin looks over from Russia, what does he call her? (Don't answer that.)

Ah, the adjacent long downs. It's so tempting to leave two long slots open and try to stick the landing. I really like ACAI BERRY and DECOUPAGE. Those are the types of entries I'd shoot for. The price of ORA and ARG … yeah, I'd pay that. But when you throw in the random OOX, that feels like too much. It's a slight step up from [Three random letters], but just a slight one.

And as much of a Star Trek fan I am, Kirk just doesn't sound right without the T in JAMES T KIRK. Total nerd snobbery, I know. Also, the price to pay of OJO + SAO + SESS + NRC + LIS feels quite heavy to me.

Part of the issue is that David chose to go down to 72 words, a very tough task when you're working with five themers. That means his upper right and lower left corners are pretty big ... right where those parallel downs sit. Makes the task even more challenging.

I do like what David did with the upper left. Having two themers separated by a six-letter space (BOOK EM DANNO and TEA PARTIER separated by ONSITE) is something I avoid, because it's usually hard to find a six letter word that gives clean crossings. Some people might complain about SPOSA, but I kind of like that.

The symmetrical spot, the lower right, demonstrates the difficulty of this layout. I like ICKIER a lot, but ERGOT, SKED and RET aren't great.

I appreciate David's effort to push the boundaries given the straightforward theme. A bit rocky around the edges, though.