David W. Tuffs author page

Awesome find in BACK and FORTH within BLACK FOREST HAM. As if the meats weren't tasty enough! It's impressive enough to find two halves of a common "X and Y" phrase within another phrase, but to have them so neatly arranged? I'm YODELing over this find.

There are a ton of "X and Y" phrases out there. Finding both components in a single phrase is another story. Add the constraint that they must both be found in proper letter order — and that the X word must start first? It's a wonder that David found so many. All these layers makes me appreciate the BLACK FOREST HAM discovery even more.

Some editors are hesitant to take themes that require circles spread out through themers, saying that they look ungainly and random. There sure are a lot of circles and shaded squares today; a visual assault.

Take HEAVEN ON EARTH. There's the usual challenge of trying to figure out where the spaces are in that phrase, but then you add in the circles. A N O N, okay. Wait. You also have to focus on the shaded squares? That interweave in and out of the circles? It's not my idea of heaven on earth, but as a change of pace, it can work EVER and ANON.

Excellent gridwork, David doing everything right with the layout. Pairs of adjacent long Downs in the lower left and upper right, where they only have to work with one themer apiece. Black squares wisely deployed, focusing on separating the themers, especially in that dense middle.

Now that I've been able to rub my eyes and refocus, I appreciate the finds more. Concentrating to find four that were as tasty as BLACK FOREST HAM would have made for a fantastic 15x15.

"Letter banks" are a standard for word nerds, challenging us to discover words or phrases using a fixed set of allowed letters. One example is the NYT's Spelling Bee. I enjoy finding the pangram, but more than that is too much for me.

Crosswords have tapped into letter banks time and time again. One notable subgenre is the full grid letter bank. I loved Peter Gordon's Hawaiian language-themed puzzle, though the successive ones have felt more like constructor one-ups-man-ship than solver fun.

One notable feature of today's characters echoes my obsession with finding the Spelling Bee pangram. These pairs of titles — clever usage of "characters" as roles vs. "characters" as letters, by the way — share exact letter banks, not loosey-goosey subsets. For example, "Californication" and "Fatal Attraction" both use ACFILNORT.

That might be an incidental point to some solvers, but as a constructor and recreational programmer (the coding problem isn't difficult, but it's a useful exercise), I enjoyed that constraint.

This mechanical engineer heavily into codes adored the wordplay in [Cyb-org.?]. That's the kind of delight that staves off the ennui; prevents your puzzle from being assimilated into the collective of crosswords that lack character.

Get it ... sigh Borg?

Sigh.

Genius-level find in WITHOUT SIN. I could almost give the puzzle a POW! on that single themer alone. It's so rare that I'm astonished by a discovery — to have a common phrase composed of an English word plus its Spanish translation? Sin comparación!

(If you ever travel to a Spanish-speaking area, the phrases "sin gas" and "con gas" for fizzy and still water are useful.)

The others didn't impact me nearly as strongly because I haven't had the fortune to travel to any Czech, German, or Dutch-speaking countries or befriend a native speaker. For the sake of completion, I did look up the translations of GUEST, THE, and FIRE, and they indeed are HOST, DIE, and BRAND in those languages, respectively.

Additionally, BREADPAN didn't feel as in-the-language as the sizzling FIREBRAND. Turns out it's a commonplace kitchen item — not a surprise that my second-grade-level baking skills failed me yet again.

THE DIE is difficult to justify as a standalone phrase; a verboten six-letter partial ("The die is cast"). I can forgive the infelicity in the name of an innovative concept, though, because there can't be many phrases that could fit into this theme. Creative way to symmetrically incorporate THE / DIE into the grid, too.

It's hard to imagine how even to approach finding these types of phrases — I felt compelled to sit down and think about how David did it (I still have no idea). If the others had struck me even half as strongly as WITHOUT SIN, this would have been a puzzle of the year candidate.

A couple of years ago, I ran across PEANUT ALLERGY / PEANUT GALLERY while investigating a different theme idea. It was so neat that I wrote it down in my spreadsheet … and promptly forgot about it among the thousands of entries. D'oh! David found a neat way to present this magnificent finding.

POWER STRIP / POWER TRIPS is also cool, as is SEASHORE / SEAHORSE. The latter elicits a tongue-twister feel, too — she sells sea horses by the sea hell …

Smart to present MOVIE TROPES in the grid instead of MOVIE POSTER, since coming up with POSTER from TROPES feels much easier than the other way around. However, I'd have liked a more overt clue like [Glossy cinema display featuring stars' names], since anagramming six letters is challenging.

Even five letters can be tricky. MENTAL LAPSE to MENTAL … PEALS? [The ringing inside Jeff's head as he overthinks things]

Four-letter anagrams aren't nearly as impressive, like SPOT to STOP. It's also not as interesting if one of the pair is much less common than the other, like OIL PALM to OIL LAMP, or BLACK STAR to BLACK RATS. Er, BLACK ARTS.

I'm all for going to sub-140 words, if the solving experience doesn't suffer. Beginning my solve with OSOS ESSE AMI ERSE … that's not a HOT TAMALE corner. I'm glad that David made up for some of that with solid bonuses in FLIP SIDE, ASIA MINOR, GEM STATE. A bit GLITCHY here and there, but certainly not IT'S A MESS.

Enjoyable concept. My obsessiveness forced me to run the code to see what other examples I could find: HEAD USHERS / HEAD RUSHES, TURKEY BREAST / TURKEY BASTER, and SUGAR LUMPS / SUGAR PLUMS. Some of these might have strengthened today's solving experience. Alternately, concentrating the five best finds into a Thursday 15x15 could have enhanced the presentation.

Neat finds! As a former "Star Wars" fanboy (pre-"Phantom Menace") I'm ashamed to say I never thought of LANDO in ORLANDO. There have been so many space-addition crosswords over the years. It's refreshing to experience a novel one.

Great idea to feature ORANGE RED = OR ANGERED in the middle. The multi-space-shifting is some Matrix-esque maneuvering.

I wasn't as hot on ORALIST. While I admire the transmogrification to OR A LIST, I don't use (or even see) the word ORALIST nearly as much as the others.

Regular readers would be stunned if I didn't write code to figure out other possibilities, so here are the additional results that twelve lines of code spat out:

• OR ANGINA (yikes, no one wants to hear about medical conditions)
• OR ANTES (who?)
• OR BISON (any Street Fighter fans out there?)
• OR BITER (thankfully no biters in this house — yet)
• OR ESTES (who, and who?)
• OR MANDY (whatever the question, the answer is Patinkin!)

I might gone with OR BISON over ORALIST, but David's choice has merit.

With a 7/7/9/7/7 themer layout, the 7s are often best in rows 4 and 12 — putting them in rows 3 and 13 forces big corners, chock full of 7s. That's not always an issue, but when you're already splitting the grid top to bottom with a middle 9, the corners become hard to fill with both color and clarity. I love CHIA PET and HENDRIX. I'm glad David called out EIS and EINS out himself. TXT and EXT are gettable, but most editors would at least ding both.

Kicking off the puzzle with EMS crossing ESO BESO is tough, too.

However, the lower right corner is beautiful! Not a drop of crossword glue, and LAVERNE / COX to boot. Maybe you don't know the OitNB star, but it's not hard to piece together two names that you've likely seen before in other contexts. And if you're not a fan, there's LEONINE and TRAVAIL as bonuses. Amusing to juxtapose TRAVAIL with STRESS FREE, too.

Perhaps some layout tweaks could have improved the execution, but overall, a good product. Memorable parsing theme, too — OR LANDO will be frozen into the carbonite of my mind.

★ Some great finds, ZEN GARDEN becoming EN GARDE, PROSECUTE to ROSE CUT, STABLEMATE to TABLE MAT, WEATHERED to EAT HERE. These types of letter-removal discoveries pique me most when there's a space insertion or deletion or shifting, so they all delighted me.

Apt revealer in ENDLESSLY, too, ZEN GARDEN without its ends becoming EN GARDE.

The circles confused me at first, though. Why are Z and N important, I wondered. A-ha! If you turn Z 90 degrees, it becomes an N!

Wait. P and E? Is that a reference to Proctor and … Emble? Peeking and entering?

S and E … are both compass points? Ironically, that's when I realized that my wanderings were directionless.

It would have been fantastic if all the circled letters were the same. Or somehow related. Or spelled out a relevant phrase. An extra layer would have blown my mind. It's not necessary though, since the finds were all fresh and interesting.

Fantastic debut gridwork. Some editors balk at so many black squares (on the sides of the puzzle), but I'm all for whatever facilitates colorful and clean fill — at least, up to a point. I'm fine with the aesthetics of these pyramid blocks, but I wouldn't want them to grow any bigger.

David used his black squares so carefully throughout the hardest section to fill, the middle. Dotting them throughout created a lot of separation between the themers. That didn't leave many to use for the corners, but that's okay. Regions like these big corners are tractable when you only have to work with one theme answer running through them.

Such great additions to my solving experiences in DREAM ON, DON KING, ENGAGE, DIET PILL — and that was only the first quadrant! JEAN-LUC Picard, PRENUPS, the ROYAL WE … I could tell how much time and care David put into his filling process.

Maybe Harold STASSEN is a bit esoteric these days, but I'm sure older generations will shake their fists at me for saying that.

Once I got over my disappointment that the circled letters didn't do anything except indicate removal, my admiration soared. Enjoyable finds and an equally enjoyable grid. Great debut.