Adam Fromm author page

You know you've done too many crosswords when there's a four-letter word, _ALU, the clue is [Geography blah blah blah] and you roll your eyes before confidently entering YALU.

You know you've been quarantining too long when you spend five hours reading about the YALU river, dreaming about getting outside the house, even if it's to visit North Korea.

I admired Adam's audacity today, this gimmick taking me forever to crack. We've hopefully made it clear in the grid below — for example, 17-Across is GR(AB C)ONTROL while 3-Down is IN 2. On old phones, ABC is over the 2. See?

At least we older folks see. I wonder if some Millennials will have ever seen a TOUCHTONE PHONE. Back in my day, you had to take two high-voltage wires and zap them together to generate a number on your phone. We got shocked to hell, which would explain some things about me, but that's the way it was and we liked it.

Ah. Some solvers still may not get what's going on. Who are the MNOERS, you ask? That's the religious puzzle-solving NBA team who scrambled SERMON. Ha ha, no, it's the 6ers. No, not the GERS — that's the International expansion team located in Berlin — it's the (SIX)ERS.

You know, the 76ers' nickname? No, you don't know that?

It's a good thing Adam cut down on the levels of trickery!

This is a rare case of a puzzle I'd like to see super-sized into a 21x21 Sunday. It's a neat idea, but so tough. Placing the special squares (roughly) where they would appear on a keypad would have sharpened the a-ha moment — something like Liz Gorski's one from years ago would have been great. It wouldn't have been possible with 7 as PQRS, but plenty of old phones used PRS, which could have been in PR STUNTS.

★ I've seen a ton of plays on UNITED NATIONS, so I groaned when I uncovered the first themer. It was interesting that AD LIB connected CHAD and LIBYA, but I wanted there to be something more. Ah well, what can you do? At least this was a novel approach to this tried and true theme type.

I continued my solve, my interest piqued by some of the long finds, TRIAGE between AUSTRIA and GERMANY is a great discovery. Since there are so many possible ways to pair up two countries in the same part of the world, long finds like this stand out much more than shorties like SCAM connecting LAOS and CAMBODIA.

It wasn't until well after I finished that I got a nagging feeling in the back of my head. Did I miss something? Even after reading Adam's note, it didn't quite register.

To say my geography knowledge is poor would be offending the word poor, so I looked up CHAD and LIBYA. Curiously, they're right next to each other.

LAOS and CAMBODIA too?

Wait just a second …

OMG.

Every pair of countries abuts!

I couldn't believe my eyes. I'd never have thought to try something like this because it seems impossible that there would be any longish words formed. To get something like TRIAGE between the bordering nations of AUSTRIA and GERMANY? That's brilliant!

Ah. The title. BORDER CROSSINGS. Double ah, Adam made it as clear he could in his note.

Little did Adam and Will Shortz count on my geographical idiocy.

Solid gridwork, too. I don't love seeing TED CRUZ in my Sunday puzzle, but it does give me a chance to talk up my buddy Craig Mazin's twitter, where he recounts fantastic tales of being TED CRUZ's college roommate.

There's not much else notable in the grid, but with a sprinkling of GOLD STRIKE, SWORD DANCE, EARTH DAY, HOT COCOA, and not much of the DAU (daughter?), ELOI, FRUG, OENO ilk (answer to Adam's question above: I say OENO), it's above average gridwork. I appreciate how well Adam spaced out his themers, wisely squeezing two together in rows 3/4 and 18/19.

This is a fantastic set of finds. I hope that solvers are more astute than me. What a shame if people put this puzzle aside before getting that OMG moment.

Dazzling clue alert! [Country superfans] had me puzzled, making it tough to break into that middle triple stack. What a delight to first figure out it started with a rare letter, J — not often that a rare letter anchors a triple-stack.

And then an even bigger pleasure to realize I'd been duped. Not a country music star like I'd been worried about, given my terrible knowledge of pop music. Country, as in nation! I'm not sure how common the term JINGOISTS is, but I don't care. What a great misdirect.

Solid triple-stack. None of them is as brilliantly clued as JINGOISTS, but MAJOR LEAGUE GAME, PRIVATE PRACTICE, GENERAL AUDIENCE are all good. I wish at least one of them had been given a wickedly clever wordplay clue — PRIVATE PRACTICE seems ripe for one. Something related to the army?

Hey, wait! Hold on just a second! (I admit, I skimmed over Adam's note, missing his point entirely at first.) MAJOR, PRIVATE, GENERAL? Okay, that's cool. Triple-stacks have been done to death, so they have to have fantastic entries to make them stand out. I'd never considered an alternate way to achieve stand-out-itude. How is it even possible to get three army ranks in a stack? That's an impressive feat.

I was revving up to grumble about the usual issues with triple-stacks; especially the gluey bits holding them together: APA, MCC (CD = 400, x3 = 1200 = MCC), and the terrible EEE. EEG TEST is a weird phrase, too, usually seen as just EEG. But heck, in the service of something cool, I can give that all a pass.

I'd have liked a little more zing in the other long slots. TABLE TOPS and GOOD SENSE are good, but AT THE ALTAR (feels like a partial) and RESTORED ain't gonna win any awards.

DEAD AGAIN was a well-made movie, but it literally didn't win any awards. At the time, I thought it wuz robbed. But I'm not sure it has staying power within the crossworld.

I hope other solvers figure out the mini-theme, because that was memorable. Along with the brilliant clue for JINGOISTS, I was thoroughly entertained.

You had me at math puns.

ROOT OF ALL EVIL as √666 was hilarious. POWER OF ATTORNEY as X^Esq made me smile. As did 3.BB. I've taken so many THREE POINT SHOTs in my life (most of them missed, sadly), how could this former mathlete never have thought of that?

Even the ones that didn't hit 100% amused me. $$$/X = CASH DIVIDEND yes, in that a dividend can be the number on top of the divide line. Hard to remember that definition of dividend though, making for not as strong an a-ha moment.

Still, math humor!

As Adam mentioned, the grid wasn't as smooth as I wanted. I stopped counting gluey bits at 10, and it kept going. ECOL ELA FISC ILE OME etc.?

AH, SO, I say (with squinty eyes).

A great majority of constructors should never go below 140 words. There's an exponential rise in difficulty, inversely proportional to the number of words. Don't do it; resist the temptation! Split up TACONIC so you get rid of AH SO. Trouble with the SW corner? Use more black squares there — break up DEPRESSORS and get your long downs elsewhere. A 6x5 chunk of white space is rarely easy to fill with smoothness and color.

Thankfully, the theme entertained me enough to overcome my qualms with the gridwork. I'd love to see Will start returning grids for rework with two caveats:

1. don't go below 140 words unless your name starts with Berry, and
2. go up to 142 or even 144 words if that makes for a squeaky-clean grid, with at least 4-6 strong bonus fill entries.

I bet few solvers would notice an occasional 144-word puzzle.

A themeless built around intersecting 15-letter entries typically needs a lot of crossword glue to hold it all together — filling around each intersection gets to be tricky. When I saw the blank grid, I was sure that there would be a ton of ugly short entries in the upper left. Not only do two 15-letter entries intersect inside it, but that big section is essentially an 8x4 chunk, which is hard enough to fill, even without that added constraint!

Great surprise to get excellent work in that corner. JUICE BOX and SEX TAPE provide some zazz, and HEBRIDES and AQUILINE are pretty good. HAJJI feels rickety, as I'm used to seeing it HADJI, but either is fine. So with ILEA (plural of ileum) as the only price to pay, it's a big thumbs-up from me.

As Adam mentioned though, the opposite corner didn't turn out quite as well. MINICAR feels odd. I love ATALANTA in Greek myth, but she does tend to get overused in crosswords due to her friendly consonant / vowel alternation. And ANNAS / SAY A ... still, RED DRESS was fun given that I had already uncovered ROXANNE, which has a RED DRESS featured in the lyrics. Wish they had been linked through their clues!

Some bumps here and there: ECCLES is an odd-looking abbr., HWY is minor, and there's a reliance on some old-feeling entries: SAYER, REO, and (dare I say it?) RICK SPRINGFIELD? He's fallen out of my consciousness, unfortunately.

I would have liked more sparkle out of those 15-letter entries — they're all fine, but none of them made me want to go tell friends about this crossword. Hard to believe that JACKASS THE MOVIE is 15 years old now.

But overall, for the difficulty level of the grid design, it's pretty good execution.