New York Times, Thursday, August 20, 2015

This is my tenth puzzle published in the NYT, a personal milestone, and if I've learned one thing at this point in my short constructing career, it would be to give the solvers what they want, and for many it's a Thursday rebus.

This idea occurred to me at work, the phrase COMPRESSED AIR had rebus written all over it. When I had the chance I researched whether anyone had published this theme before, and found to my surprise they had not. I then went about finding words and phrases that included the trigram AIR, fitting as many of them as I could into the grid. A couple of the entries involve the word "air" itself which I wanted to avoid, however I thought it was not fatal to the final product.

The original puzzle had the central entry UPSTAIRSDOWNSTAIRS running east-west but I changed it to the more apropos north-south. It also had ten entries that Will asked me to replace, and I was able to switch out nine of them. The two clues of mine which I hoped would make it and did, were 27-Across, and 62-Down, as always Will and Joel livened up a lot of the others.

Hope this puzzle satisfies that Thursday rebus jones.

Nice idea for a rebus, AIR getting COMPRESSED into a single square. Since so many rebus puzzle have been done by now, my strong preference is for there to be some rationale, some interpretation which justifies it. This is a nice one. Check out our list of rebus puzzles — especially in older ones, people just chose some random string and rebused the heck out of it.

I like how Jules incorporated AIR into some of the puzzle's longest entries. AIR hidden in PR(AIR)IE DOG and CL(AIR)VOYANT and UPTON SINCL(AIR) = fun and twisty to uncover! I also like that in these three examples, the word AIR isn't explicitly part of the entry. It is nice to get some bonus AIRs through the puzzle, but CON AIR and SEA AIR (and the odd BAIRNS) I could do without. With no rationale of why eight AIRs is the appropriate number, having just five or even four, with all of them hidden so nicely in longer answers, would have been my preference.

Grid is stretched out to 16 rows in order to accommodate UPST(AIR)S DOWNST(AIR)S — fun to have a marquee answer with two rebus squares. If you stretch a grid to 16x15 or 15x16, you'd think the word limit of 78 should go up proportionally, meaning that it's okay to go up to 83 words. That's what Jules does today, but I prefer keeping close to if not under that original 78 word limit. Today, we see a whopping 39 entries with length = 3 or 4, almost half of the puzzle. That's a huge number of shorties.

UPHOLDER … for only having two pieces of long fill, I want them to sizzle.

Pretty well executed otherwise. It can be tricky to fill rebus puzzle grids, because every rebus square you put in means you have both an across answer and a down answer frozen into place. The AIR string is easy enough to work with, so Jules did have some flexibility, but he did pretty well to keep the glue to the minor stuff: TET, ESO, SCH, ATT, etc. None of those stick out enough that they affected my solving fun.