Dan Schoenholz author page

AND MAKE IT SNAPPY containing ASAP? What a snappy finding! Imaginative concept; commonplace initialisms that can be found (in order!) inside phrases meaning the same thing.

If I'm being honest, IF I'M BEING HONEST was the least impressive of the three because HONEST duplicates the H of IMHO.

Wait. It stands for In My HUMBLE Opinion?

Ba, humble-bug.

I had similar qualms about the R of RESERVE, but my high school French pulled out that the R of RSVP stands for "répondez," or "respond."

With only three themers, today's standards demand that solvers are treated to at least four long bonuses plus squeaky-clean fill. LAID EYES ON / HOVERBIKES / ECHINODERM / HIPPY DIPPPY more than satisfies the first criterion! CONGRATS to Dan on such pizzazz.

Maybe it could all have been pulled off without the OLEO (or is that "olio"?) of ETE SOT ROI dings. It'd be an interesting challenge to attempt. Doable, but it might require slightly less fantastic bonus entries.

The concept is novel enough that it made me want to investigate what others might be possible. YOLO, right?

Let's see … SEIZE THE DAY, no … WHY NOT, LET'S DO IT sounds contrived …

Perhaps TLDR? THIS DULL DRECK IS BORING, MOVE ON JEFF … oh. Right.

Three neat finds in an intriguing concept I'd never precisely encountered before, plus a lot of sparkly fill? Hard to ask much more out of a Tuesday puzzle.

I recently picked up 100 Things to Be When You Grow Up for my kids, and to my surprise, "Crossword Constructor" was in there! The author's understanding of the word "career" is much different from mine. A few years ago, I had the good fortune to hang out with Patrick Berry, who is head and shoulders above the rest of us, making an actual living at this instead of getting paid lunch money for doing something we love. His secret? Live frugally.

That book got "lost," and I steered my kids to one about engineering.

Smile-inducing plays on "___ job" phrases. I've seen [Union job?] wordplay before, hinting at WEDDING PLANNER, OFFICIANT, etc., but it's still fun. Fresher was [Temp job?], a great way to kick off the puzzle. A temporary temperature worker sounds like the perfect intern for Goldilocks.

I was expecting [Flex job?] to be PERSONAL TRAINER. Nice surprise to get YOGA INSTRUCTOR instead.

The clue for OXYGEN has been changed a few times, so if you don't see [Most abundant element in Earth's crust], that's what it should be. I had an interesting exchange with Brad Wilber, who fact-checks for Will Shortz, about a previous version. TLDR; what would you guess is the most common element in Earth (by mass)? Turns out it's iron!

The grid has some blips — if you already have AGAR, adding another biology liquid like SERA ain't great — but Dan's long bonuses overshadowed the minor HELI IND kinds of blips. Perfect alternation of those long Downs, so much space to maximize flexibility. Dan hit it big with OLD MEDIA / PEN NAMES / TO FOLLOW / HIT IT BIG.

I came across P-trap = POTTY MOUTH first, and my hopes shot up. A Sunday grid is so big that needs a great theme to carry me all the way through, and this concept was so promising. Trap is slang for mouth, P-trap = phrase that starts with P and points to a mouth. Perfect!

GARDEN APARTMENT worked, too, although I wasn't sure what a GARDEN APARTMENT was — a flat with a garden outside? Apparently so! Easy enough to understand.

E-bond … even though my finance guy brain said, "does not compute," I vaguely recalled that term from a dark corner of my crossword memories. Ah. A series of bonds sold to raise WWII funds. Even though ELMERS GLUE fits it perfectly, not knowing what an E-bond was right away made it tough to enjoy.

C-sharp = COMPASS NEEDLE. There are sharps containers out there, but the connection from "sharp" to "needle" isn't as strong as I wanted. Feels like with all the musical notes, some other option would have been stronger. There are other C- phrases, too, like C-section, C-clamp, C-ration, etc.

Although the theme didn't hold my attention, the grid SURE DID! Excellent bonuses, so much AUTOTUNERS, ARTY-FARTY (artsy-fartsy feels more in use, but both are listed in dictionaries), NEW DEALER, SIREN SONG, and a lot more. It's not the cleanest grid in the world in terms of short fill but experiencing all those long bonuses was valuable.

Men in Black is one of my favorite classic movies, so repurposing that to describe GOTHS gave me a big smile.

Great concept that might not have hit its full potential, but I appreciated that Dan worked in so much else to enjoy.

I've seen this concept a few times, all the way back to 1994, but the added zing of EXTRA CHARGE is a fantastic extra layer. That's the type of bonus that you need to make a standard theme type stand out.

The meaning changes in PASS to PASSION and MILL to MILLION are excellent; drastic modifications. Funny to imagine anyone having a PASSION for being BOARDING a plane in this day and age …

I did pause at AUDIT to AUDITION, as they seemed related. I managed to sweep that aside to continue with the rest of the puzzle, but it kept eating at me. It turns out they share etymology, both derived from Latin for "a hearing, a listening." I still appreciated the image of an IRS applicant being tested with crazy number questions, though.

Back when I was hiring for my pharma startup, I used to ask techs how they'd add up the numbers from 1 to 100. I was looking for creative or even simple solutions, anything from putting the numbers into an Excel spreadsheet and summing to doing Gauss's trick of (1+100) + (2+99) + … (50+51). Learned a lot about candidates who started mumbling, "one plus two, that's three, add three is six ..."

Nice to get some rarely-seen-in-crosswords CARPORTS, MID-MONTH, DRY SALTS, PUMPS GAS, although I'm not sure if any of these are going to make anyone pump a fist. I more appreciated Farrah FAWCETT and MALCOLM as excellent uses of mid-length slots.

With four themers, today's standard is to have a perfectly clean puzzle, and there was too much ANON AZO BORA ON UP XER. Part of the issue is that threading long bonuses through the middle of the grid isn't usually as effective as placing the long downs in the usual spots — connecting BAND and SIRI, for example.

Overall, not a standout execution, but I did appreciate the impact of that great revealer.

★ Loved this puzzle from start to finish. My first impression was that it was novel, fun, and nicely consistent. But was there more than "single words broken in two, in a fun way"?

It took me a while to realize what was going on with the theme, and I appreciated it more and more as I cottoned to the details. I wondered, aren't there tons of possibilities? It's easy to break words rhyming with RYES in two parts, right?

Then, it dawned on me that it wasn't just "rhymes with RYES," but "ends in -IZE." That's much more restrictive, lending a feeling of tightness. But there had to be a bunch of other short words Dan missed, right? SIGHS for example. And … PIES. BUYS!

Turns out there aren't any good options with any of those three. ROMANTIC SIGHS almost works, but it's not quite like the others. And there are few (interesting) words ending in -PIZE or -BIZE.

Perfect tightness makes the theme so elegant. Beautiful.

Lovely early-week grid, too. Dan worked in a good number of long bonuses — BODY SHOP, TED TALKS, EATS IT UP, DIET SODA. Note how widely-accessible those are, nothing cutting-edge flashy like the latest pop single or movie that will elate some and turn off others.

Along with squeaky-clean fill — the only nit I could pick was a bit of SORE AT and GOES TO, filler that felt like wasted potential — it's a fantastic product. Sticking to a 78-word grid is so smart. Some constructors feel like going to the max number of allowable words is beneath them (me included, sometimes), but it's a great way to achieve the epitome of Monday-ness.

Top-notch work. This is exactly what a newb-friendly NYT puzzle should be.

Neat finds, multi-word phrases where the last word sounds like a letter, and the first word starts with that letter. JOHN JAY, BUSY BEE, etc. I liked CHINA SEA and UP TO YOU best since those were tricksy. At first, I wondered, shouldn't it be something like SULU SEA? D'oh! Silly Jeff.

Interesting approach, using the notepad to make a (very small) contest out of this. (GOLLY GEE is what Will and Dan were getting at.) It didn't really work for me since there wasn't any prize involved, only sort of a "hey, challenge yourself and see if you come up with the right answer!"

(That doesn't work with my three-year-old, BTW.)

I'd much rather have gone full meta-contest. Send in your answer! Win a prize if you get it right! It works very well for Matt Gaffney's weekly contest (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!), for the WSJ Friday meta-contest, for Will's weekly NPR Puzzler, for so many things. Why not the NYT crossword?

I've chatted with Will and Joel about their decision to not go down this road, and I respect their thinking — it can be very frustrating for solvers if you can't get the answer right away. Solver dissatisfaction! Angry emails! I get that. The solver is priority #1.

But it feels like the NYT is missing out on something great. Something stickily addictive. ARE YOU LISTENING, NYT BIZ DEV PEOPLE? STICKY = MO MONEY!

And if they decided to not go down the contest route, I'd rather have seen GOLLY GEE incorporated somewhere in the grid, with the theme left up to the solver to grok. Much more standard NYT-ish. This notepad approach is sort of miry, trying to make up its mind what it is.

I did enjoy thinking of what other phrases might fit. Came up with PRINCESS AND THE PEA (okay, no initial THE is a cheat), CAN I SEE? You wonder why those weren't included. Hey, YOU WONDER WHY!

Pretty good execution on the grid. I enjoyed the bonuses of KSTATE (hugely recognizable moniker in college bball), LOSS LEADERS, TRIPLE AXELS.

Not a fan of the ADUEL, NEAPS / ENJOIN kind of stuff. The last two are tough — are they worth it to get AM TUNER, GUNSHOT, TANGENT in that toughish to fill corner? For me, not so much, but I can see how others might say yes.

Overall, I enjoyed the theme idea. Wish the halfway nature of the "contest" had been thought through better.

A friend of mine once told me it's incredibly easy to come up with crossword themes. When I asked him (with amusement) to come up with one so we could make it together, he listed off DING-DONG, PING-PONG, SING-SONG … and then he turned red and said well, maybe it's not incredibly easy. (Just easy.)

That sort of repetition alone wouldn't make for a very good crossword, but Dan found a way to turn these types of phrases into an interesting idea. I particularly liked OF THEE I SING SONG, such an apt description of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." And as a fan of the hapless Knicks, I enjoyed NEW YORK KNICK KNACKS, which is sadly an all-too-true description of that motley crew these days. (Remember the days of Patrick Ewing, amirite?)

Took me a while to understand JOINED AT THE HIP HOP as a three-legged race, but it made sense, eventually. See, you're tied up … sort of at the hip (more at the leg though) … and you're hopping (more like loping) … well, if you squint, this clue sort of works.

Some nice bonus fill, STRAW POLLS, RED CAVIAR, RAW DATA and PEGBOARD my favorites. (I'm a huge "American Ninja Warrior" fan and desperately want to build a hanging pegboard in my living room for training, but my wife is surprisingly not hot on that idea.) I was mixed on ONE A CAT — we, unfortunately, see OCAT or ACAT all too often in crosswords. Is seeing the full esoteric game any better? Hmm, not sure.

Dan did a nice job in giving us a smooth grid overall. I picked up a little ETAT, ATWT, SEM, SEMAINE (French for "week") but it wasn't enough to give me an AGUE. I would have welcomed a little more of the gluey short stuff to get some more snazzy longer fill.

Overall, still a bit repetitive-feeling for my taste, but I did like Dan's creativity in finding an interesting way to incorporate these TIP-TOP HIP-HOP FLIP-FLOPS into a crossword theme. Making a crossword is so (incredibly) easy!

PICTURE / FRAME telling us that all perimeter answers are motion PICTUREs. At first I felt like the revealer was inelegant, placed into odd locations with no symmetry, but I liked Dan's effort to save that by using the ACADEMY to balance everything out.

Great gridwork. It's so hard to build around perimeter themers, since they immediately make the four corners so inflexible. At first I thought Dan had a ton of freedom in choosing from hundreds of single-word movies out there, but reading his notes (about how each of the perimeter movies are Best Picture nominees) made me realize how little flexibility he really had. Most any pair of crossing perimeter answers in a corner means trouble, and having such a limited set can mean trouble.

But that NW came out so strong, kicked off by AVATAR and AMADEUS, including the nice VARIETAL / ANGELINA / REDDIT. There aren't any fantastic multi-word entries like IT'S A GIRL, but given the ultra-tough constraint of having AVATAR / AMADEUS fixed into place in a big space, I can only imagine how much time Dan spent working through that corner, restarting when he hit even the most minor of crossword glue. Now this is the way to start a puzzle!

The SE wasn't quite as nice, given the I MET partial and HITHERTO (although the lawyers in the solving audience might disagree with me), but it's still very smooth. I'm so resigned to seeing two or three ugly bits like I MET in a corner of perimeter puzzles — to get such effortless-seeming results was a great and pleasant surprise.

Perimeter puzzles also often show signs of strain as the constructor tries to merge everything in the middle, but Dan also does well here. Keeping his NW and SE corners big and wide-open means he can spend a bunch of black squares in the middle of the puzzle, helping him knit the four corners together more easily. RENA was the only head-scratcher for me, but she is a soap star, and all the crosses are fair.

Been a while since we had a perimeter theme, and usually it's pretty apparent what's going on because of all the crossword glue needed to hold the thing together. Really nice craftsmanship from Dan today.

★ Easily the best Monday puzzle I've done all year, and perhaps one of my all-time favorites. Dan has such an interesting idea — phrases where the first word is the nickname of a state, and the second word contains that state's abbreviation. The SHOW ME state (Missouri), gets its MO in SHOW ME THE MONEY. What a great find! And being from CA, I loved GOLDEN State's GOLDEN CALF. Simple idea, yet innovative, interesting, and accessible to solvers of all levels. Just perfect for a Monday.

I also appreciated that Dan added in long bonus fill, even though he was working with a fairly theme-dense puzzle. PARTY HOP and SEQUENCE in the across direction, and a bit of PLAYDOH, SO TRUE in the vertical, added even more spice to my solving experience. A bit of ACHE FOR and RANG IN ain't bad, either.

BAY MARE (Massachusetts, the Bay State) was a little mystifying to me, but some research shows it's a real thing. It's pretty impressive that Dan found a themer that worked in so few letters.

And Dan did all of this with meticulous care in his short fill, just a minor ADM and EDS. Such a smooth solve, exactly what I want out of a Monday.

What to even point out, in the name of a balanced critique? Maybe the revealer could have been worded a little better? I had to read that a few times before understanding the gist of it. Maybe a final revealer could have helped — STATE NICKNAME, perhaps?

So well executed on all levels: theme, long fill, short fill, puzzle flow. I'd give Dan a gold star and a trophy if I had one, but he'll have to settle for the POW! If I had a POM (Puzzle of the Month) like Matt Gaffney, this one would easily be in the running.

Neat find, PAIR OF JOKERS describing how each of the themers is made up of two comedians, i.e. CRYSTAL BALL = Billy CRYSTAL and Lucille BALL. I was impressed that Dan was able to find such nice phrases without dipping into the little-known comedians. I had to think for a second about SHORT (Martin) and WINTERS (Jonathan), but they came back quickly.

Is PAIR OF JOKERS a real phrase, used in real life? I intuitively know it refers to the two jokers that usually come in a standard deck of cards, but it doesn't quite flow off the tip of my tongue. It's too bad — if I hadn't hitched at the revealer, I might have given this one the POW! just based on how cool Dan's finds were. SHORT WINTERS feels more neutral than an asset to me, but the rest of them are such strong phrases, made up perfectly of two well-known comics.

Really enjoyed the long fill today, Dan utilizing an unusual arrangement in placing FENG SHUI / WENT WILD horizontally. I wonder if JOKERS so close to WILD was a shout-out to the old "Joker's Wild" game show? If so, I approve!

I'm usually not one to care for duplicated short words, especially things like TO, ON, IN — they're so minor that I barely notice them. LETS NOT crossing LET GO, though … that was pretty tough to overlook. It's too bad — even with five themers and a bunch of nice long fill, Dan manages to the keep the gluey bits to just some minor RIN, LIC, LAA stuff. If it hadn't been for the LET/LET dupe and EFS, which feels more icky to me (when is that ever written out like that?), it would have been such a beautifully smooth solve.

Still, it was pretty good execution overall, with some great theme finds.

Tribute puzzle celebrating NORWEGIAN WOOD's 50^th anniversary. Well, almost. It's such a shame that this was published two days shy of that occasion. Dec. 3, 2015 is a Thursday though, and this theme isn't nearly tricky enough for that day of the week. Rats!

I used to be a big Beatles fan, so that first line, I ONCE HAD A GIRL (very waltz-y, sing it in 3/4 time!) came easily. Hoo boy, the rest wasn't so easy. Pretty cool find that the first three lines happen to break so nicely, so as to fit into a crossword grid when NORWEGIAN WOOD is the revealer.

Sometimes people come to me with theme ideas with 12-14 letter themers, and they wonder why I cringe a little. Entries of this length can be so inflexible, causing spacing issues. Usually you want to put your revealer in row 13, which helps you keep two or three rows of space between themers. This gives you so much flexibility in placing blocks as you trying to separate themers.

Check out how Dan's themers are squished toward the center of the puzzle. Pretty tough when OR SHOULD I SAY and SHE ONCE HAD ME have just one line separating them. Dan does quite well given this constraint, although IRES is kind of a wonky word in the present tense verb, and I always wonder if ARTY shouldn't be "artsy."

As tribute puzzles go, I liked the fact that Dan found a fortuitous split of the lyrics. That's much, much better than having a listing of THE BEATLES, something about the song, something else about the song, and NORWEGIAN WOOD. It would have been cool though to aim for the actual anniversary, and figure out a way to add in a Thursday-ish layer (not sure what that is, but it'd be fun to try to riff on NORWEGIAN WOOD somehow). As it is, it felt slightly thin to me, like I wanted a little something more to chew on.

Perfect title, BIG NAMES IN E-TAIL referring to people whose names only differ from a normal word by a final E. BUNS OF STEEL into BUNS OF (Remington) STEELE was my favorite, and LAY IT ON THICKE was fun too. All of them gave me at least a small smile, which is unusual for this type of theme. Well done, Dan!

What really impressed me was how well Dan used his mid-length fill. Usually the 6- or 7-letter entries are hard to make sing. It's so much easier to rely on 8+ letter lengths for colorful fill, since longer fill means more possibility for multi-word phrases, and more variety in general. I kept a running list of very strong mid-length fill, and I couldn't believe how much I kept adding:

• BOWTIES
• STYMIE
• OAXACAN
• SENATOR
• ROSE TEA
• STEINS
• MGM LION
• SCALIA (including a great clue with him referencing fortune cookies!)
• SHOVE IT
• I WAS HAD
• IF AT ALL
• ELECTRA

I see a lot of constructors using prepositions in their mid-length fill — adding ON, TO, IN, UP, etc. — which I find perfectly fine but not colorful. Instead of spicing up a grid, these types of entries just act as filler, IMO. We could all take a lesson from Dan's careful selection of mid-length stuff today.

Good job with longer entries too. NUTCASES, MEMORIALS, CHEFS HAT all added to the quality of my solve. NICE PEOPLE felt a bit made-up, but perhaps that's a more regional term.

I uncovered SHOPPING MALLE first and got LONE WOLFE and JOKERS WILDE after that. Having all authors in an E-TAIL puzzle seemed perfect (I'm a big user of Amazon.com for books). So it was a disappointment to get an assortment of others afterward — a hockey player, singer, actor, etc. I enjoyed the puzzle as is, but I would have loved another layer of elegance and specificity by having all authors. That might not have been possible, so perhaps just one instance of each profession would have been my second choice.

The NYT audience is so broad that I think it's smart to have a range of simpler to extremely complex Sunday puzzles. This is a great example of a "starter" Sunday puzzle, one I'd give friends that are still intimidated by the NYT crossword. Simple idea and very well executed.

Even with his crossword-friendly vowel/consonant alternation, Milton OBOTE is vastly outnumbered by Idi AMIN in terms of Shortz-era appearances, at a score of 7 to 44. If only he had changed his name to BOTE. Or TESS.

Dan gives us theme entries each with five O's, tying it nicely together with THE BIG FIVE OH. Relatively smooth grid; a good start to the week.

How can you find theme entries like this, you might wonder? The old way is to try pulling it out of your memory banks, which still works just fine. But you can also try our Finder page, which gives you a quick way to search for a pattern such as "*O*O*O*O*O*". This will return all the matching strings that have ever been used in the NYT crossword as well as many from outside sources — if nothing else, it's a nice first pass, giving you possible entries such as:

• A ROOM OF ONES OWN
• BY HOOK OR BY CROOK
• COME HOME TO ROOST
• FOOT LONG HOT DOGS

A handy way to sort through possible themers. I tend to prefer ones that haven't seen much use, but the most important to me is to pick ones that are snappy and interesting to solvers. With so many choices available, it's important to be selective and pick only the best of the best. I like Dan's choices, BOOK OF MORMON and VOODOO DOLL in particular.

I did find it a bit odd that there weren't five themers, which somehow in my mind would have made more sense with THE BIG FIVE OH. Thinking about it some more, that doesn't necessarily exemplify THE BIG FIVE OH any more than three themers. Hmm. (I never claimed to be logical.) I also did find it a bit odd to have OOO at the central down spot and not have it tie into the theme somehow, especially since there are three themers with the five O's. It's not necessarily a bad thing; it just made me wonder if that was supposed to be part of the theme or not. It'd be one thing if the area were so constrained that OOO were the only option, but our old friend Yoko ONO could have fit there just as easily. Probably best to avoid such confusion on a Monday, methinks.

Finally, Dan does a great job of selecting single-word fill entries. Often, multiple-word entries are snazzier, but if you're careful about your choice of single words, they can be just as strong. SORORITY and HOOLIGAN are such fun words, ripe for imagery.

ADDED NOTE: aha, my spidey sense tingled for a reason! Dan let me know that the Easter Egg is the set of five "eggs" (the grouping of five O's) in the center of the puzzle. Fun!

Nice "hidden words" theme today, one I didn't see coming. I liked how each language runs across two words, breaking the LANGUAGE BARRIER in a way. Juicy theme phrases too, ALL ATINGLE and THE BREWERS both ones that you don't see very often in crosswords. Will's comment was interesting to me — it took me long enough to figure out what the languages were, that I decided to highlight them below. I liked having to search them out, especially given that this is a Wednesday puzzle. Adds body to the solving experience.

Big, open corners give so much potential for long fill. Man oh man did I love uncovering BUG JUICE; what a beautiful entry. Same with I RESIGN. But filling a corner like that is a themeless-esque challenge, always calling for balancing snazz vs. cleanliness. Was BUG JUICE and I RESIGN worth the price of CEN, EPT (EPT is such an inept word)? Not sure. I bet Dan debated whether or not to break up BUG JUICE and go from 76 to 78 words in his puzzle.

The NW and SE corners were a much clearer case for me. I love getting ECLAIRS and YES WE DO as bonus material, and it comes at only the cost of ROS Asquith, who I know from children's lit but most people will not. Even if you don't know her though, the crossings are all fair. You might not even notice the ROS entry as you fill in the crossing words — such a minor little entry. Thumbs up on the decision to keep those two corners wide-open with long fill.

Finally, there was a clue/answer pair that took me ages to figure out. I stared at [They know beans] for the longest time, even having ?OYA in place. SOYA, perhaps? I ended up guessing (MTG feels like a weird abbreviation for "meeting") and scratched my head. Why would Francisco GOYA, the Spanish painter, know beans? Ah. It's the food company GOYA, a big supplier of beans. Clever!

Today we get TV shows with one word homophonically changed, thus CHANGE OF PROGRAM. I liked the fact that Dan chose a wide variety of shows from all walks of life. A soap opera, a sci-fi, a sitcom, a drama — something for everyone. Except CHAMPIONSHIP BRIDGE with Groucho Marx, that is. Harrumph.

Dan does a really nice job with his spacing today. Note how little overlap there is between most themers? At least two rows between, ideal for a 21x. The closest he gets in the vertical direction is some overlap between DAZE OF OUR LIVES and THE EX FILES, but that's only a mere three letters.

So why doesn't every Sunday constructor do that? The way Dan manages it is that he puts two themers running down, TWIN PEEKS crossing DAZE OF OUR LIVES (and MIAMI VISE crossing AWL IN THE FAMILY). This type of interlock isn't always possible, especially given that many puzzles don't allow a lot of flexibility in choosing a theme set. It's fortuitous here, because it allows him to work in nine meaty answers but still retain great spacing. Very nice job in layout.

The one drawback is that I'd expect those areas with crossed themers to be the roughest places to fill. Any time you cross entries like that, you introduce an extra set of constraints into a grid skeleton. And for me as a solver, I had a difficult time in the NE. The partial A WAVE isn't bad in itself, especially given a surfing-related clue (I love to surf (badly) when I can). But surrounded by RVER and I NEED (sorry LL Cool J, even you can't save that) and GELEE made for a rough patch to complete.

All in all, I think it was worth it, in that the rest of the puzzle came pretty smoothly to me. An ACU here, a ST LO there, that's certainly a passable level of glue. Made for a relatively hiccupless solve. Nice.

Overall, the straightforward homonym theme will likely appeal to a big chunk of Will's solving community. It was a little too straightforward for my personal taste, but I often remind myself that while I tend to like complex, meaty themes, a (great?) majority of Will's audience prefers simpler puzzles. And while I personally love a heavy dose of twisty wordplay clues, there are many solvers out there who like puzzles with less playful cluing. I often have to remind myself that I'm NOT representative of the majority of the NYT's solving audience.

Finally, when you make a silly mistake by putting in SECTS SIN THE CITY (now THERE'S a show I would watch!) it's hard not to smile.

Ah, a puzzle about taxes! As we've already established I'm an odd duck, it won't surprise you to hear that I'm a huge fan of doing my taxes. Trying to pull levers throughout the year to figure out how we can lower our tax burden, from timing our charitable donations to mutual funds vs. ETFs to deferring vs. realizing carry-forwards, is one of my many joys in life.

I like the timing of the puzzle, just before tax day (although most everyone else would probably appreciate it more right after the relief of April 15 passing). I also like Dan's wacky interpretations of snappy phrases. MANY HAPPY RETURNS is one I've heard before in regard to taxes, but TABLE FOR TWO is a beautiful one, as it relates to tax tables for a married couple vs. a single filer. BRILLIANT DEDUCTION is also, well, brilliant, making me laugh. The others, WITHHOLDING CONSENT and SCHEDULE CHANGE, felt a little too literal to be fun for me, reminding me of unpleasantries from past tax years. It's often no fun for anyone when the IRS issues a SCHEDULE CHANGE announcement, for example. Especially those of us who like our schedules to stay constant, thank you very much!

Today's layout provides for a discussion on themer placement. Note how Dan's first entry is in row 4, not row 3 like most Sunday puzzles. That's because it's a bit too long to put in row 3 — no good, because that would necessitate a giant block of black squares in the NW corner. But having the first themer in row 4 makes the overall spacing more difficult than normal. Those first three themers are separated by just one row each (in rows 4, 6, 8). Anytime you can place two rows of space (instead of one) in between themers it's SO much easier.

Notice the difficulty in those overlapped areas. We see ORY and RESHAPE in one overlap, ELL and the plural UGHS in another, RIGGER in another. Creating better spacing could have reduced this effect. Because there is flexibility in which themer goes first, something else like MANY HAPPY RETURNS could have been placed in row 3, with likely cleaner effect.

Some really nice stuff in the fill though. I love seeing SEGWAYs around town (GOB Bluth fan, anyone?), CRASHPAD (a must for highball bouldering), and a super-hard to parse BE A PAL. Along with those nice NW and SE corners full of ART GLASS, HELLIONS and TELETHON, these types of entries did help enhance my solve.

MANY HAPPY RETURNS in a few days, everyone! Go chase down that last BRILLIANT DEDUCTION.

Great use of the Schrodinger convention today, resulting in an amusing theme. This is the only puzzle in the NYT Shortz era with a single Schrodinger square, but it's used well for the theme, and the crossing answer isn't tortured at all for either answer, both SET and SEAT being perfectly fine answers for "Box ___". Well done!

I had a pause in the last two theme entries. I usually solve on computer, so ????NEWSPAPER baffled me for the longest time. I'd be very curious to know what percentage of people solve on paper still. I'll bet it's quite high, but dropping. Perhaps THIS NEWSPAPER will still be fine for the majority of solvers today, but I bet in ten years it won't. I personally tried to construct a xw with this exact same theme four years ago (I failed), and remember having real trouble coming up with a way to incorporate NEWSPAPER so it had a symmetrical entry.

And A SUNBURNED ZEBRA flows so much better to my ear than A SUNBURNED PANDA. Perhaps that's just the way I've always heard the joke, but I refused to take ZEBRA out of that space for the longest time. A thought: how cool would it have been if ZEBRA/PANDA had been five additional Schrodinger squares? Extremely hard to do, of course, if not impossible. Schrodinger squares are so difficult to pull off such that the clue works equally well for both possibilities, and when you stack five of them in parallel, it quickly becomes a Gordian knot.

Dan only has four theme answers, so he spices things up by adding in the very nice EPHEMERA, DOWAGERS, and JOHANNES. I'm not convinced BALL YARD is "a thing", but it's passable, and I bet many would disagree with me (vehemently!). Dan takes great care with the rest of his fill; I only really noticed TYRO, SSI, OKEY, etc. as lesser offenders.

Overall, a theme that comes across as a bit old-fashioned, but a well constructed puzzle. I love Dan's great attitude, going back to improve the puzzle even after puzzle acceptance. I want to see more constructors shooting for the stars, striving for perfection.

Quite a challenge for me today, as my knowledge of popular music is sorely lacking. Still though, a fun puzzle, "spoonerizing" famous(-ish) songs into wacky results. I laughed when I hit MAD BOONE RISING — brilliantly hilarious resulting phrase, plus the base song (Bad Moon Rising) is actually something I know. A perfect entry for this theme.

It can be quite a trick to build a theme around "oldies", as a chunk of your solving constituency might be left in the lurch. I felt a bit left out when I couldn't uncover SHES SO HIGH or HES SO SHY, same with I CITE THE WRONGS and I WRITE THE SONGS. Hard to feel deeply engaged when neither the base phrase nor the "wacky" ending phrase makes any sense. But might be solely my personal issue of being an oldies dunce; I could easily be in the minute minority here.

Now that I got that out of the way, I really appreciated Dan's construction. Once I saw those big open corners in the SW and NE, I braced myself for ugliness. Each one of those — a 6x7 chunk, for goodness sake! — is as difficult to fill as a subsection in a themeless. But both of those corners are absolutely beautiful, packed with nice stuff like PIEBALD and LETS EAT. Same goes for the west and east sections, where I cringed at first sight of the huge white spaces and their potential for disaster. But again, quality results, ENCODER reminding me of "A Christmas Story" and NON WORD with its great Colbert clue.

Bear with me as I delve into some numbers. Typically most 21x constructions lean heavily on three, four, and five-letter entries — they're typically necessary to hold grid regions together. Unfortunately, these shorties aren't usually "exciting", because most of them have been used so many times that solvers are used to seeing them. Debuting JUBA (the capital of South Sudan) is a rare example where a shorty is cool.

So the real genius of today's puzzle: Dan did a great job of laying out his grid, incorporating a lot of six- and seven-letter entries (a total of 49!). That's very hard to construct, since you're purposefully eschewing the gluey type short answers, forcing yourself to make grid sections connect through long answers. Very, very difficult, akin to building a network of bridges across the Grand Canyon. And look at the great result: SHOULDA, HARPOON, GI JANE, SCARAB, etc. all make for a chewy puzzle.

Great workout, the type I usually only get in themeless constructions.

A clever idea for a theme! CONFUSION parsed as CON FUSION, i.e. requiring the fusion of CON to 10 perimeter answers in order to make sense of their clues. And to top it off, each of the 10 perimeter answers is a word in its own right. Pretty neat.

It's not often that we have puzzles with perimeter theme answers, and there's a reason why. Each corner is difficult to construct in its own right, and it's very difficult to get the fill from one corner to mesh cleanly with that of the other three corners. Toss in a middle entry and you've made your life very, very difficult. I keep on telling myself that I'll never do another one again, but I have a short memory. The eternal optimist in me says "It really isn't so bad, just do it!" And then I mentally disappear from everything else for five days. Clearly I need to go all Memento on myself*.

Dan has his best filling success in the north and south, where he's wisely used black squares to semi-segment these areas for easier filling. As a result, he puts in BATTEN DOWN and IN LA LA LAND while keeping things mostly clean. The south isn't quite as nice (LAR next to TATI) but including NBA DRAFT I think is worth the price. Nice stuff there.

The difficulty level ratchets up in big corners where the perimeter answers don't have a lot of options. I bet Dan came up with a list of possibilities and then figured out what he could intersect in the corners. The fact that the themers cross in the four corners is awfully elegant (cheater squares in the corners make things easier by opening up many more themer options), but it also makes it very difficult to fill those sections cleanly. Dan does a nice job in the NW, with VESPERS something I didn't know but enjoyed looking up.

The SE had me stumped though. ELEAZAR is fair for a Thursday, but PES and ON AN crossing it is unfortunate. Same sort of issue in the SW, with CMI atop RIBBER, with CIEL in close proximity. I can imagine Dan tried dozens if not hundreds of possibilities in these sections, and kudos to him for adding in cheater squares in order to try to make things work better. But man oh man, this type of construction is a bear to keep smooth.

Fun concept and terrific theme; some success and some bumps in the execution.

*NOTE TO SELF: it really isn't so bad, just do it!

A nice twist on the puzzle type where all the theme answers are definitions of a single word. Dan's additional element of using homonyms of the single word (WII, OUI, etc.) helps keep the idea fresh. And I laughed when reaching "Whee!" A major goal of crosswords is to entertain, and seeing that brought a smile to my face.

This theme type isn't seen much these days, since the answers tend to sound like made-up phrases. PERSONAL PRONOUN and CRY OF DELIGHT are both snappy answers, in-the-language, but FRENCH FOR YES will cause some solvers to grumble, saying that it's not as satisfying to solve such an answer. All puzzle themes must evolve or die (the simple "word that follows the first half of X, Y, Z-across" is largely dead, for example) so I think in the future, this theme will need to include all in-the-language phrases as theme answers or have some other advancement in order to be successful.

In construction, it's generally best to spread out theme answers as much as possible, since this provides for flexibility in filling. Typically rows 3 and 13 contain the first and last theme answers for this reason. Ten and 11-letter answers in these positions often make for an easier to fill grid, while eight and nine-letter answers add a layer of difficulty. Today's is prime example of this: note how the 9-letter theme answers in rows 3 and 13 create wide-open 5x5 white spaces in the NE and SW corners. Anything 5x5 or bigger can be very difficult to fill cleanly, and having something like STERS is not an optimal result. There are ways around this, breaking up CAME ONTO and OLD FILES for example, but that takes out some good long fill. A difficult trade-off.