Adam G. Perl author page

This former mathlete was embarrassed to not know what a REFLEX angle was. Relieved to hear that Jim didn't recognize it either! And then when Jill (who's much brighter than me) screwed up her face … huh.

Good concept, visually representing the major types of angles, OBTUSE, RIGHT, ACUTE. REFLEX, bah!

I wanted the revealer to be KNEW ALL THE ANGLES. That would have been perfect. I wasn't sure if KNOWS EVERY ANGLE was as punchy, although it does seem to be in the language. It's a minor difference in wording, but it took away some of the impact for me.

For puzzles like these, it's so important to make your long fill shine. Without good bonuses, the puzzle can lack meatiness. Adam did well with NBA DRAFT, CASE FILE, GRATUITOUS, ANGIES LIST, MADE MAN. Even BASE TEN and SPONGES as [Moochers] helped out. Overall, meatiness achieved!

The drawback for puzzles like these is that there are almost always serious compromises around those shaded letters fixed into tight places. Throw on top of it the need to thread in a bunch of strong long fill, and smoothness is usually gonna get whacked.

I was all ready to say how amazed I was by Adam's execution around the toughest one, the densely-packed ACUTE. But then I hit NATANT. What an odd word.

REFLEX is tough because of the X, and ANGIES LIST running through it. See ALIENEE, ATNO, I GET.

ALINED was the worst for me, caused by the RIGHT constraints. Seems to be a variant of "aligned." Ick!

I could have overlooked these wonky trade-offs if the puzzle had felt a tad more spot-on to me. Just the three major angles would have made me feel like I truly did KNOW ALL THE ANGLES. Could have helped smoothify the puzzle, too.

Nice plays on TOO CLEVER BY HALF, adding 50% to each theme answer. I felt smug when I figured out the gist after THIRTY QUESTIONS (20 + 10) and a FIFTEEN FOOT POLE (10 + 5).

Then I felt like a moron when I couldn't for the life of me remember the Beatles song title. Seven days a week? Six days a week (with a rest day)? And then when I landed on Eight Days a Week, somehow I tried to jam in something that would fit the mathematical series of 30, 15, 7.5.

Too stupid by half is what I am.

Enjoyed the bonuses, FALSEHOODS, RIOT POLICE, even LOLCAT (squee!), EEYORE. Given how clean Adam made the grid — just a bit of ESS, EMS, EAMES (that last one I think is tough but fair) — I would have favored some more bonuses at the price of a little more crossword glue.

Would have been interesting to see what happened by removing the black square between LEE and COMEDY to produce another set of 10-letter bonuses, or to shift the black squares below NANNY to the left, to produce another set of 7-letter slots.

Ultimately though, I think Adam's decision to go a little more conservative is fine, focusing on early-week smoothness. It's no walk in the park to work around four 15-letter themers, after all.

Clever theme, indeed. I enjoyed the concept enough that if there had been some sort of halving series in the progression — perhaps 60(40) to 30(20) to 15(10) — I would have given it POW! consideration.

★ Such a great idea! At first, I was confused by a queen "beating" a king at a CHESS MATCH. She doesn't actually beat him, does she? I still didn't get the theme after wondering why an ace "beats" a pair at DOUBLES TENNIS — an ace just wins one point, right?

Beautiful a-ha click when I got to SOCK DRAWER. Two pair does beat three of a kind there (as this disorganized non-sorter of clothing well knows). Such a fun realization that the themers are all wordplay examples of when poker hand orderings get reversed. So playful, so amusing, and so novel.

Well crafted grid, too. Some bonuses in REDBOX, GO TO THE DOGS, LAME BRAINED, DO THE BEST YOU CAN; not too many dabs of crossword glue in ISR, RES. (Some complain about ESAI Morales popping up in too many crosswords, but he's had enough big roles to be fine to me.)

I would have liked a couple more great bonuses considering that there were only three theme answers. Since the solving experience was so smooth, I would have accepted just a touch more crossword glue to get another great bonus entry or two. Perhaps if AMES IOWA and TRIBUTES could have been replaced with snazzier entries?

It's so rare for me to see a non-derivative theme idea. Loved, loved, loved this one; made me brainstorm for other examples, which is a sign of a great theme idea. (All I could think of was some potty humor related to a STRAIGHT FLUSH …)

Will once rejected one of my puzzles because all the themers were short — 7 letters or less — and thus didn't stand out enough. I didn't totally get his reasoning, but seeing today's puzzle made it more clear. I liked the idea, LOST ART used to transform C(AR T)HIEF to CHIEF, P(ART)IES to PIES, etc. It was hard to see where the themers were, though. I've highlighted them below to make them stand out more.

Although the themers are short, working in eight of them is no walk in the park. Adam does well to spread them around so they don't need to interact with each other.

Some neat findings, C(AR T)HIEF to CHIEF, M(ART)INIS to MINIS and B(ART)ENDER to BENDER my favorite. That last one feels so appropriate too, a BARTENDER someone who might facilitate someone going on a BENDER. And MINIS is so close to MUNIS, which are also [Bond orders] — I was so confused, desperately wanting MUNIS to work but knowing that EDWARD U couldn't be correct.

A few of the others didn't do as much for me. REST(ART)ED to RESTED … neither word is particular snazzy. Similarly, P(ART) ONE to PONE. And I like THE (ART)IST as a phrase, but having ART so blatantly in there didn't feel as tricky.

The ENFIELD rifle is apparently an early 20^th century British rifle. All the crossings seem fair, but with so many proper names crossing it — YANNI, LORI, ESTEFAN — it seems ripe for some solver frustration. I liked some of the other fill better, like POLARIS, MR TOAD, and as Adam mentioned, FEEL FREE and TAKE THAT!

It would have been great to get a few long answers — 7 letters or longer after losing ART — since you could lay them out in a traditional way. But that may not have been possible.

THE TIMES / THEY ARE / A CHANGIN tying this puzzle together, featuring six (!) fine anagrams for TIMES. They're starred in the clues, but I highlighted them below in blue so they stand out better. (I must admit, I missed two of them at first.)

I felt like I ran into a lot of crossword glue as I solved — ALIT, APO, SMOOT, ATNOS just to start along the left-hand side. And given that at first glance, there didn't seem to be a huge amount of longer theme material, I stopped to consider why this was.

A normal weekday puzzle has roughly 50 theme squares, something like four themers of 12ish letters, or five themers of 10ish letters. This one, at 53 squares doesn't seem to be much different. But it's much, much harder to work with a bunch of short answers than it is just a few long answers. This might be counterintuitive, but every time you place a word, no matter how long, it reduces your flexibility. Now consider that Adam had nine (!) entries to place. That fixes so much of your grid into rigidity.

The next problem is adhering to the 78-word maximum. Because every theme answer is relatively short, you must work in some long fill. I really like INDIGO GIRLS, IN THE MOMENT, even TWITTER, SANCTUM, TUNA SUB, CIAGATE. But every time you place one of those, it further chokes down your flexibility, forcing so many little areas that require crossword glue to hold them together.

Now, I still didn't love running into IM AT, REOIL, I GO, TEM, etc. during my solve, but at least thinking about the construction challenge made me better appreciate it. I do wonder if it might have gone a bit smoother if two of the six anagrams had been placed on the west and east (roughly ,where ALIT and ESOS are). That might have helped them to stand out, as well.

It is pretty cool to have six different anagrams that all work just fine — quite a nice find. That plus a perfect revealer splitting up just right for symmetry made it an interesting theme idea for me.

I really liked the idea here. GOBI TWEEN and GO BETWEEN — what fun! PARIS ALE and PARASAIL were pretty clever as well. Neat concept, taking common phrases / words and pronouncing them as if they were geographical in nature. Extending Will's point, I wish there had been more examples of this. To only get three was a bit of a disappointment, as I really, really enjoyed GOBI TWEEN.

Additionally, I really wish the RIVER in CRY ME A RIVER had been transmogrified like in the other themers. To see it left as is was a letdown. So overall, it felt like I only got really two examples of this neat concept.

It was a relief to uncover GO BETWEEN and see how it related to GOBI TWEEN since I hadn't figured that out. But afterward, part of me wanted to struggle to figure it out. It's a good theme concept, and I would have liked to have earned the a-ha moment, rather than having it spelled out for me.

All that said, Adam does an admirable job of executing with six longish themers. Five themers is hard enough, and six usually requires some overlap. Check out the bottom, where PARIS ALE overlaps with CRIMEA RIVER. That's four overlapping letter pairs, four places fraught with potential danger. But Adam does a nice job of filling in that south section with not just fine words, but an MRI SCAN and SPARTA. I'll pay the NATAL price for that any day.

Of course, if you nail one side of a crossword, you have the other side to contend with due to symmetry requirements. And to me, A RIP and the awkward plural foreign ENEROS without any bonus material is not the best of trade-offs. It definitely works and is fair, but I would have liked more than just that.

Finally, a great clue for ATOMS. Element-ary indeed! The chemistry dork in me approves.

Overall, a strong idea, a great example in GOBI TWEEN, and a pretty good one in PARIS ALE. Two or three more in a similar vein could have made this puzzle great.

Interpretations of common phrases as if they described a career; fun stuff. Being a former mathlete PLOT POINTS made me smile. And in my last career I had a lot of work in patents and copyrights, so seeing TRADE SECRETS repurposed in a kooky way also gave me a laugh.

Typically I'm not a fan of sectioning off parts of the grid, like the NE and SW today. I find that it often messes with grid flow, potentially stranding the solver in a tiny section with few ways of breaking in. But I like what Adam's done today — by separating those two little areas, he gives himself wide freedom to do most anything he wants in there. I like the little bonus of GIVE / AWAY and DOWN / EAST; something a little novel. Losing a little grid flow felt like a worthwhile trade-off to me.

One aspect that I found a little odd was that only one of the themers was a single word. HANDLEBARS sticks out in my mind, as TRADE SECRETS, PLOT POINTS, and COVER STORIES are all nice two-word entries. I do like how Adam made sure each resulting themer was a present tense verb plus a plural noun — that's the kind of consistency I like. If the theme concept were more constrained, that would be one thing. But it seems like there are enough phrases in this ilk that HANDLEBARS could have been something else that fit with the other three perfectly.

The grid felt fairly smooth to me, with one exception: the west, containing AMAIN, and AMANA crossing both LAHTI and ALERO. The latter three are perfectly reasonable answers, but proper names can be tricky (especially when they cross), potentially leaving the solver with a sense of malaise if he/she doesn't know both. I realize Christine LAHTI is pretty famous, and there are a lot of people who own AMANA appliances and old ALERO cars, but perhaps swapping out BANDSTANDS for something else would have produced a smoother experience for more subsets of solvers.

Entertaining Tuesday.

Nice theme today, a literal interpretation of phrases with the word "after" in them. The morning after pill becomes literally PILL MORNING, one thing after another becomes ANOTHER ONE THING, etc. At first I wondered what these four had in common — there have to be hundreds of "X after Y" phrases out there. But sometimes you just have to turn off your constructor's brain and enjoy the ride. I mean, I BEFORE E EXCEPT AFTER C transmogrified into the crazy looking CIBEFOREEEXCEPT, plus a great clue for it? Excellent.

Unusual placement of themers today, but Adam makes it work pretty well. Typically it's best to spread out themers as much as possible, as having two rows in between themers is much better than one (three is even better, but that usually isn't possible unless you only have three themers). Note how all four of them are crammed together toward the middle, only a single space between adjacent ones. I do like how it presents all the meat in a group, sort of concentrating all your best material into one fell swoop. But it does create some difficulties.

Check out the west and east sections. When you have two grid-spanners so close to each other like this, the west and east sections will be often be constrained enough to cause difficulty. Adam does well to get by with just PARC and RTE. Not shabby at all. I wonder though, if those two glue-y entries could have been reduced by spreading those themers apart, perhaps even switching things so the grid-spanners were in rows 3 and 13. I realize this may come off as nit-picky to some, but in today's world of rapidly increasing crossword quality, I believe many solvers are expecting more and more smoothness from their puzzle.

A huge number of really good clues today, enough that I slowed down my pace to enjoy. [Twenty-one words] for HIT ME (blackjack-related clue), [Starbuck's orderer] having nothing to do with the coffee chain but everything to do with the Moby-Dick characters, even [Make a long story short, perhaps] for EDIT and you have a lot of nice material concentrated up top. I really enjoyed that. And then saving the best for (almost) last, [One acting on impulse?] for AXON — that's the way to make your clues work for you.

So even though I would have liked the themers to be more specific, tying together better somehow, much of the rest of the puzzle stepped up its game to produce a very enjoyable experience for me.

A "Little Women" puzzle, featuring the four main characters, Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy, hidden at the beginning of phrases. It's a theme that's been done before, but 1.) what theme hasn't been done before? and 2.) Adam did a really nice job of hiding the four in phrases or words such that they were nicely hidden. Even after I had plugged in JOKES AROUND and LOUISA MAY ALCOTT I was still wondering what was going on. Nice job, fun to have to do a bit more work on a Monday.

Curious choice, AMYL NITRITE. A real toughie to all but the chemists in the solving audience, although all the crossings seemed fair enough to me. And it is an interesting term to learn. The crossing ALL IN clued as "Tuckered out" sure gave me pause, as I'm not too familiar with that usage of the phrase. Perhaps "Final betting words" or the like would have addressed a bigger audience? Hard to say, but I was sure glad to see Mr. Happy Pencil pop up after I had been hovering a nervous fingertip over that crossing "L".

AMY did stand out to me as the only one where the name isn't pronounced the same as in its themer (AMYL is a short "A" sound if I'm remembering my organic chem correctly — although David says he pronounced it with the long "A" while at school in the northeast, so it might be regional), but I'm not sure I could come up a better themer. AMYGDALA, a part of the brain, is the only other thing I could think of that *might* be more something I'd like to learn on a Monday. But it also has a different pronunciation than AMY.

With five themers, and relatively long ones to boot, this construction had a great deal of constraints facing it. Any time you run words through three separate theme answers (look at NESTING SITE and AMALGAMATED), you're going to have very little options for those spaces. This makes filling awfully difficult, because normally you can try out five, ten, fifty different words in any one long down spot and figure out what's going to make for best fill. But when you have only a few options to plug in (ADULTERATED, AMELIORATED, APPLE BUTTER are some of the limited choices for the AMALGAMATED spot), you kind of need to go with the best you can get. That's why I rarely (if ever) run down entries through three themers.

Because of this layout, the fill suffers a bit, seeing the partials AS A and IT IN, the random Roman numeral CMVI, the relatively not well-known places in AMES and ORONO, the foreigns OBI and AMIE crossing near to MME, etc. Sometimes adding black squares to cut down word length will make a puzzle easier to fill, but Adam couldn't do that because he's already at the limit of 78. I'm not sure, but perhaps I would have let him go up to 80 words? I do like the long down fill, but AMALGAMATED and NESTING SITE aren't (to me) as snazzy as SOUNDTRACK and BYE BYE LOVE. So perhaps allowing those to be broken up could have made this a smoother Monday. I love seeing GAVIN McCloud, who brings back fond "Love Boat" memories, but perhaps putting a black square where his G sits might have helped the overall fill quality.

Definitely a good workout, on the hard side for a Monday.

Hiding a four-word phrase with a revealer is a tried and true theme type, and what makes or breaks it is 1.) the quality of the themers and 2.) the interest level / a-ha factor of the hidden phrase. On both counts I think Adam does pretty well. Four very nice long theme entries today, all answers I'd be glad to use as fill in any of my own puzzles. I especially liked HOOD ORNAMENT and RED HERRINGS, fun and snazzy answers.

Curious to put the revealer at 1-across though. I think if I had encountered WOLF at the very end, LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD would have been a fun hidden phrase. As it was though, having WOLF at the beginning sort of deflated my balloon. It is interesting to break conventional patterns once in a while, but for me, this didn't quite work.

I loved seeing INERTIA as long fill, a great use of a seven-letter space. Even better that it got a real physics clue! ON A TEAR is a nice one too. But with only a few places for long fill, it feels like a waste to use a slot on ERELONG. I suppose it could be a favorite entry for some people, but it felt like an ERE, but LONGer. (That sounded a lot more brilliant in my head.) How's this: it felt like filler stretched out on a medieval rack.

Finally, I do like a bit of bonus theme content every once in a while, but having BIG / BAD felt haphazard to me. It's not symmetrical with anything else, and it forces some fill compromises in the East section, the IDEES/GARDE/SSE/COE pileup. Call me conventional, but I would have preferred for the final theme answer to be BIG BAD WOLF. That would have necessitated five theme answers though, which of course is much harder to execute on than a puzzle with only four themers, so who knows how something like that would have turned out.

Trying something new is important to advance the state of the art. Who knows, perhaps I'll look back on this day as the dawn of a brave new era. And if not, I'll just appreciate the four minutes of puzzly diversion plus some very nice long entries.