Derek Bowman author page

A puzzle filled with malarkey? This one's for you, Mr. President!

Funny-sounding words get tapped for crosswords all the time — a quick search turned up this BEQ puzzle from long ago — but that doesn't mean there isn't room for another. As a "The A-Team" fanboy, JIBBER JABBER made me incredibly happy. MUMBO JUMBO, GOBBLEDYGOOK, and BALDERDASH are fun, too.

I didn't notice that BLATHER was part of the theme until Jim Horne casually pointed it out (and I pretended that I already knew). Huh! It does balance SAY WHAT?, although I wasn't sold on that as a revealer. Why SAY WHAT? and not something simpler, like HUH?

I like the attempt to go the extra mile, but BEQ's puzzle worked fine without a revealer, which would have been reasonable here.

The biggest problem with SAY WHAT / BLATHER is the compromises they force. You don't want a newer solver to run into BAHA and LRON five seconds in. ARCHIVAL (interesting that it's just a letter different from ARCHRIVAL!) is an odd duck for a Monday. LEM is an outdated term. By the time a solver gets out of the starting gate, they've already sloshed around in enough muck that they might veer off for other entertainment. Putting SAY WHAT in the center of the puzzle could have produced better results.

Fun concept that I'd be happy to see again in another decade or two, although I'd want an extra layer to elevate it. Such a shame that this wasn't created with Jan 20, 2021, in mind — JOE BIDEN and MALARKEY are both eight letters long!

I read the revealing clue [Sacred text …] and filled in KORAN at first. The theme had to be KO RAN, as in "phrases with KO removed." A KO punch!

Ah, no.

TORAH?

TOR … ah!

That's a fun concept to build a puzzle around. It's no piece of cake to add three letters onto a word to form a new, valid word, so I enjoyed the CAP -> CAPTOR, RAP -> RAPTOR, REAL -> REALTOR, CAN -> CANTOR finds.

Derek and Jeff did a nice job picking out a solid set of base phrases that transformed into amusingly kooky +TOR ones. I imagined the CANTOR OF CORN starting off services with "A priest and a rabbi walk into a bar …"

Super solid gridwork, just an OSAY partial as the only crossword glue. Along with AW COME ON, TIME BOMBS, ON BUTTONS, LARYNX, etc. as bonuses, it felt meaty.

Expanding to a 16x15 can often cause trouble in gridwork, especially in the top and bottom edge of a puzzle, so kudos for the time and care they put in.

Why go to 16x15, you might ask? Since the themers are all inconvenient lengths — 13s and 12s — a 16x15 grid opens up many more possibilities in grid layout. It'd be possible to execute this theme set with a 15x15 grid, but the themers would have been crunched together in the middle of the puzzle, undoubtedly resulting in more crossword glue. I like the decision here.

I had to work hard to finish my solve, and the payoff didn't feel quite worth all that effort — it's ultimately a standard "add-letters" theme — but the execution is strong.

What a neat visual! Something so pretty about those four diagonals leading out to the four sets of circles. Eye-catching, artistic pattern.

We get THE WORLD circling in four places … that must mean "around THE WORLD"? ... with the SUN in the middle of the puzzle? It didn't all click for me, as I wasn't sure why around THE WORLD was circling … around what? And why were four worlds circling the SUN?

I'm sure my comics-ubergeek brother will clue me in, telling me about some fictional star system with four worlds circling the SUN. It'd be so awesome if it were called ETRURIA or ASASON!

Speaking of those, it's so tough to avoid obscure or esoteric entries when filling around so many circled letters. Although Derek and Sarah have a lot of flexibility in 1.) which way THE WORLD revolves and 2.) where to start it, it's highly likely that exactly zero of the 16 possibilities would have been easy to fill around.

I was all set to say how impressed I was with the NE corner, chock full of BATH TOY, PRELUDE, OODLES, and … ASASON? Oof. You can love someone like a son, you can think of someone as a son, but AS A SON by itself would be a puzzle-killer for me.

These types of heavily-constrained biggish corners tend to need entries with -ER and -EST additions, and/or RE- prefixes. The SW corner is a perfect example. EASIEST is a fine word, but ADORERS and LITHEST are both iffy.

It's common for these biggish, constrained corners to need short gluey bits, too. I don't mind an innocuous (and easily gettable) ESE. Maybe I should have known Jack SOO, one of the few Asian actors of his time? DIECI is … Italian for ten? Herb RITTS? Hmm.

This sort of puzzle with heavy constraints — so many letters fixed into place all over the grid — is so hard to pull off well. All in all, I would have liked a bigger payoff, something that made more sense of the rationale why four THE WORLDs were going around the SUN.

Still, what a great first impression the blank grid made on me.

ADDED NOTE: Astute reader Seth Cohen pointed out that THE WORLD rotates regularly, shifting two spots at each new position ... sort of how our world rotates as it revolves around the SUN. D'oh, can't believe I missed that. That does make much more sense now. I'm embarrassed to admit that I stared at everything for a good 10 minutes but couldn't piece together exactly what was going on.

Neat findings, famous Greeks whose names can be split up for funny results. HIPPO CRATES reminds me of Bill and Ted calling Socrates "So-crates," so that was a nice laugh. ARI STOP HANES is such a cool one, and DEMOS THE NES is fun too. Pretty darn cool that Derek managed to find three examples that work so well — and fit into crossword-friendly symmetry!

I also (mostly) liked the idea behind GREEK PLAYS, i.e. wordplay. It's a real shame though that the clue for GREEK PLAYS referenced "Antigone," by Sophocles. Why not use one of ARISTOPHANES's plays? Granted, "The Birds" isn't nearly as famous as "Antigone," but given that ARISTOPHANES is right in the center of the puzzle …

Derek gives himself an audacious task with his grid — 67 words is very low. Granted, this 15x14 layout artificially lowers the word count by two or three, but still, it's easily in wide-open themeless territory. I worried when solving the NW and SE corners, as regions that big usually come with big compromises. To start with TOSHES isn't ideal (pluralized names are inelegant, and when there are only two of them ...), but the rest of the NW was all right. I don't remember TOP COPS — I couldn't find much about it (is it a cult classic?). There's nothing amazing up there, but nothing truly awful either.

I was pleasantly surprised by the SE, too. Hard not to like a puzzle with SEATTLE in it. Again, there's nothing that wowed me, but with only ESSES, TARE (which is a term we use in engineering all the time), and the outdated PESETA (man, that's a giant number of A, E, S, and Ts!), the corner works. I prefer more snazzy entries — the type you'd usually see in themelesses — but this very low word-count does work as a change of pace. It is pretty cool to have SO many 6- and 7-letter entries interlocking in those corners.

A very cool finding to discover three famous Greek people that have such fun wordplay.

I've had to re-figure out the theme on this one at least three times now. Stumped? Hint: check out the first letters of each word in the answers to the italicized clues.