Elizabeth C. Gorski author page

My wife and I are obsessed with "The Great British Bake-Off," so I enjoyed this puzzle. There's something so soothing, so comforting about seeing people create pieces of art, and seeing the judges take such care to be both tactful and supportive in their constructive criticism. It's neat to see contestants flourish in that environment.

I particularly enjoyed the topmost of the LAYER / CAKES, the imagery of a CHEESEcake atop a layer of MARBLE cake = mouth-watering. And a CARROT cake layered on a SPONGE cake? I'd try that too.

A PATTY (cake) sandwiched in between a CRUMB cake and a SHEET cake, though? I can't decide which is more disturbing, the idea of a hamburger PATTY inside cake, or the inconsistency of having a sole PATTY cake which is not an actual cake like the others.

Whenever you stack two or more entries, you're bound to need a little crossword to hold things together. The bottom stack for example has CRO (prefix), ERN (suffix) and ETE (crosswordy bit of French). That's passable, but not ideal.

I've found that filling a section like this can actually be easier by expanding it. Counterintuitive, right? Turns out that a little 6x3 section has such little flexibility, that you can't really play around much. If that area had been 6x4, ETE could be BETE, FETE, PETE, etc. Then you can further play around with the EOCENE slot.

I did like Liz's work in the middle — any sort of triple-stack is tough, no matter how short the words are. Liz does very well to escape with just the awkward plural PCPS. I'd bet she tried all sorts of combinations there, even cycling in ANGEL, CREAM, FRUIT, POUND, SPICE, etc. in an effort to create clean crossings. It's just too bad that PATTY is such an outlier.

If you haven't tried GBBO, you're in for a treat. The peace and delightful calm I get from watching that show is similar to that which I get from doing Liz's generally delightful puzzles.

I'm a sucker for innovation, and I love visuals within a puzzle, so I enjoyed the "string" trailing off from the BALLOON formed by the He(lium) rebus squares. (If you didn't see the .pdf file, check it out — fun to see the string flowing through the clues.)

I also liked much of the longer fill Liz chose. In rebus puzzles, my favorite is when a rebus square trips you up, only to find that the special square has hidden the answer in a tricky way. ACID (HE)ADS and ALC(HE)MIST were awfully nice, and my favorite was TUNA SUB — or was that TUNA (HE)RO!

Not as much a fan of the shorter stuff like T(HE)A and R(HE)A, but some of that is often necessary when working around eight rebus squares.

Speaking of around, I was mixed on the circle the squares formed. The physics geek in me loved the perfect theoretical performance, air pressure equally applied in all radial directions! But the pragmatist in me said it didn't look like most real-life balloons. My pragmatic side usually wins these days, so I would have preferred some ovate shape. It also would have made it more fun to find the rebus squares — figuring out the circular pattern made it a little too easy to plunk them all in.

I was also mixed on having (HE)LIUM and OCTET tied into the theme. On one hand, I like that helium's atomic symbol, He, was captured right in a rebus square! On the other hand, it's not very elegant to have a theme entry without a symmetrical partner. I could have written off (HE)LIUM as a revealer, but then OCTET also didn't have a partner on the opposite side. Felt inelegant.

A couple of gluey bits like A NICE crossing A COLD, but some of that is natural in the construction of a rebus puzzle where you have to fix a lot of answers into place. There's not that much flexibility in finding good words with a ?HE? pattern for example — just THEY, THEE, AHEM, etc. so your options in filling around those regions are limited.

But overall, fun idea with a neat visual.

Mount Rushmore commemoration, with Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Lincoln laid out in order. Nice touch to use nicknames as the crossword entries, with THE MAN OF THE PEOPLE, HERO OF SAN JUAN HILL, and THE GREAT EMANCIPATOR working nearly perfectly for me. (I would have liked "The" HERO OF SAN JUAN HILL for consistency.)

AMERICAN CINCINNATUS was a mystery to me, but I did like learning it — a reference to the Roman statesman Cincinnatus, who was a model of civic responsibility. Neat piece of trivia.

The cluing of HOME OF MOUNT RUSHMORE ... as best I can figure out, [… or a hint to the answers to the four starred clues in left-to-right order] is a complicated way of saying "these four answers are the heads on Mount Rushmore." Don't the four clues, which directly mention Washington, Jefferson, et al. already give up the game?

Very difficult to pull this theme off, with the presidents in the correct order. I bet THE FATHER OF OUR COUNTRY was Liz's first choice for Washington, but that unfortunately doesn't work with crossword symmetry.

The likes of GROUND CREW and HARD HAT helped to spice up my solve. AGE LIMIT, EVANSTON, and EGO IDEAL are real things, but for my money, they're not nearly as fun as the aforementioned plus BRIT POP, IKEBANA and OKAY OKAY. With a puzzle that has long themers difficult to uncover, it would have been nice to have a few more pieces of strong fill to help hold the solver's interest.

Quite a bit of gluey bits — the middle felt especially choppy to me, running into a lot of HWY, COS, OREM, OTO, OBE, ONE TO entries. Some of this is fine, but all concentrated into one region makes it more noticeable.

So although there were some compromises, I liked the imagery of Mount Rushmore evoked by this puzzle.

★ What a cool grid today! Normally I associate Liz with Sunday puzzles featuring cool visual effects, but today she shows off her well-rounded constructing chops. Not only does she delve into themelesses, an area she hasn't focused as much of her time on, but she goes all the way into the Saturday deep end with an incredibly hard task: the ultra-low word count themeless grid.

I usually assess themelesses with a ridiculously dorky MBA-speak ASSETS and LIABILITIES scorecard, incrementing ASSETS for each colorful entry and upping the LIABILITIES count for each glue bit. (If there's a "puzzle-killer" — an absolutely heinous entry — the entire grid gets tossed right out of consideration.) One aspect I usually don't account for is a "wow factor." It's pretty rare for me to be impressed just by the look of an empty grid — for example, quad-stacks used to get this bonus from me when they first appeared, but now they don't. I would add perhaps three or four extra points to the ASSETS column today because of the wide-open grid with a pattern I don't remember seeing, and I would also raise my LIABILITIES limit to maybe eight. Sometimes it's worth slogging through more glue than usual in order to see something new and different.

The danger in ultra-low word count grids is that they're so hard to fill that the constructor sometimes finds it good enough to just fill the darn thing, period. That used to be good enough — take a look at some of the record-setting grids and the swaths of glue they contain — but not anymore. Liz gives us some beauties, including three interlocking grid-spanners, plus a spate of really nice 7s and 8s: OBAMANIA, EVEN ODDS, ADMITS IT, HOGWASH are all great on their own right. Strong, amusing wordplay makes REDWOOD, CORSAGE, DEICERS, even ORDAIN and HORSE stand out as well.

It does have its flaws, as I would expect. There's the weirdly spelled AMEBA (which I've been guilty of using in the past), and a lot of the four-letter words are unsightly. Hit the "Analyze" button below and you'll see that the alphabetical list starts with ABER AROO DORN (although I like me some Worf) and ENTO — not a great sign. And although it's neat that there are no three-letter words in the grid, I would have much preferred a strong grid-spanner to replace THREE LETTER WORD, which feels a tad gimmicky to me, especially given that this sort of thing has been done before.

Overall, I loved the initial impact of the grid — a rare occurrence for a themeless for me — and the solving experience was really entertaining. I was able to overlook all the glue in order to savor the strong entries and playful cluing.

"Word hidden in phrases" theme today, from an old Prego commercial that sounded vaguely familiar. Given how frequently my bachelor dinners used to be 1.) get jar of spaghetti sauce 2.) open said jar 3.) drink, I'm sure that tagline must be laced in the back of my head somewhere.

I like the quality of Liz's themers today. Since ITS is a relatively easy word to work into phrases, she does well to increase theme density, giving us five themers in addition to the revealer. Nice layout to accommodate that — a pair of crossing 7's in the middle is made possible by the "pinwheel" layout. And such a beautiful clue for one of the themers, PIT STOP. It took me a while to figure out why a PIT STOP was a "time to retire?" Made more sense when I parsed it as a time to "re-tire." Love it.

In that vein, today brings us so much of the cluing goodness I've come to love. Our old friend OLEO, a totally fine entry in my book but questionable according to others, gets a bang-up clue, repurposing the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine." Yellow sub(stitute) indeed! And although I've seen POET clued in relation to poetic feet (iambs) before, I got tripped up yet again by [Foot specialist?]. Just a handful of these great clues adds so much to a puzzle.

I wasn't wild about seeing the variant EGIS, and the REATAS and DONEE kind of stuff aren't great, but overall Liz does well to keep the puzzle pretty smooth, while kicking in a pair of long entries (SESAME OIL and KNEE BENDS) to boot. The ARIOSO / ORAN / ASSAM section might get people in a bother, but it does reflect Liz's more cultured and artistic bent, which I like seeing in her puzzles. Fun to see a constructor's personality shine through.

Overall, I would have liked a more recognizable phrase as a revealer and a bigger challenge given the standard theme and easy letters of ITS, but it's such a nice execution that I enjoyed the solve. The extras helped a lot for me.

Liz gives us the INSIDE DOPE today, four instances of DOPE broken across two words. A 10/11/9/11/10 in a 74-word grid is a tall order. Five theme entries already increases your level of difficulty, making the middle one nine letters ratchets it up further, and shooting for a 74-worder puts the triple hurt on a constructor.

I like the ambition of it, especially in all the long fill Liz had to incorporate. You'll almost always win my heart with BRUCE LEE in the grid, one of the few true Asian superheroes. Many a time in my youth I got saved from getting into a fight because kids assumed I knew kung fu. I didn't correct them, and I'll leave that ambiguous in case any of those people are reading. (If you are, I do.)

In the same vein, PHASERS in the same puzzle? You had me at BRUCE LEE, but dang! If only BRUCE LEE had been armed with two PHASERS in his movies, people would still be intimidated by me.

I had quite a bit of trouble finishing, actually giving up in the NW corner. I don't think I've ever been so happy to see a RRN (random Roman numeral) as I was to see LII. Even then, GRAND OPERA is something I'll have to add to my vocabulary, and the proximity of the random river and the Madonna song I had never heard of made it tough. If only I had paid attention in art class with BERNINI, everything might have fallen. As much as I like the high-class nature of BERNINI and GRAND OPERA, it would have been so nice if they hadn't crossed each other.

I tend to prefer hidden words when there isn't solely one single hidden word. Synonyms for DOPE would have been a nice touch, perhaps ASS, FOOL, TWIT, etc. hidden? It was good to read Will's comment about this puzzle being three years old. The crossword art form evolves so rapidly these days.

But overall, a good amount of fill tickled my fancy today, BUYS OUT one of those finance terms I personally dig, and a great clue for LIME TREE. "Why on earth would you pick fruits when they're still green?" I asked myself, just before head-desking.

More grid art! Liz usually employs circled letters to form visual elements (check out how many on that page are hers!), but today she uses those black squares as her paintbrush. I generally prefer this approach, as black squares are such a strong visual element that they often overwhelm any other effects. And what an effect today — as a pet lover, I couldn't help falling for that cute dog in the center and its ears standing straight up.

For me, the best Sunday puzzles are the ones with themes or ideas that cannot be done in a 15x grid. Jill and I did a similar dog picture a while back in a 15x, but that picture constrained things so much we didn't have room to put more than a few theme answers in. I love how today's large palette allows for quite a bit more, namely themers starting with the name of a WHITE HOUSE DOG. Neat idea.

I didn't know every WHITE HOUSE DOG, so the puzzle played difficult for me. It was even harder because Sundays require more open space than usual weekday themed puzzles. Check out that giant SW region, with MILLIE SMALL / LEG WARMER / ANNE MEARA. That's a themeless-esque stack right there! Not easy to fill. The crossings were rough for me, and I imagine I won't be the only one. MARL has an old-timey ADIT-type feel to it (an ADIT is a rarely used word for a mine shaft opening), and OREL / RAMA / MILLIE SMALL / NEWELL make for an awfully difficult pile-up of esoteric proper names.

Deploying so many black squares to form the picture of the dog forces big open spaces everywhere throughout the puzzle. The south is another good example of that. That giant space contains some great entries like BUDDY SYSTEM and ESCAPE ROUTE. However, MDCC, OSE, STETS, and POEME are a pretty high price to pay for all the goodness. Sundays are so tricky to create without a few of these blips. In many ways, much harder than a themeless.

Overall, a great visual, causing a lot of constraints in the grid and some compromises in the fill.

Nice concept today, ten theme entries containing the word CENT, with the C of CENT doubling as a cent sign. Additionally, the cent sign looks like an "I" atop a "C," so crossing words use the vertical line within the cent sign as an I. Finally, the entry TEN CENTS ties everything together. Lots of layers! At first I didn't see that all the cent signs started the word CENT — neat a-ha moment when that snapped into place.

So many constraints today. It's hard enough to work with ten theme answers in a 21x grid. It wouldn't be any harder than a typical Sunday construction, except that Liz connects several of her theme answers. Check out how PAIN PILL runs through both VICENTE FOX and CENTRIST — nice touch. Liz could have put a black square on the second P of PAIN PILL, creating PAIN and ILL, along with HOT and LATE in the across direction. I like the extra touch, giving the solver some nice fill in PAIN PILL and HOT PLATE.

Speaking of long fill, I liked seeing STATE DEPT, too. What an odd sequence when unparsed: STATEDEPT. I usually don't like abbreviations, but this one's so crazy it's pretty neat. It was also nice to see HEALTH FOOD and NO RELATION in there too. Uncovering that bonus fill in a Sunday really helps keep my attention through a long solve.

As much as I liked having long theme entries in the down direction (WRITEUPS, I SWEAR, IRON ON, PAIN PILL), I was okay seeing shorter ones like TAIL, AIDE, IAN. The longer ones are so nice, but incorporating them requires so many constraints to be placed upon the puzzle, so much inflexibility, that there were a bit too many bumpy spots for my taste. I don't mind seeing an occasional ISLIP or POLA or AME, but there were enough of them that I noticed them during my solve. The IRAE / TAL / LURIE section in particular was rough for me — I know that musicians tend to think DIES IRAE is a freebie, chess players consider TAL as quality fill, and literati like LURIE, but all together they make for a tough trio.

[Times table?] tricked me — what a nice moment when I realized a MASTHEAD is a sort of table on the NYT front page. And [Mountains have developed over them] had to be CONTINENTS or LAND MASSES or something, right? Wrong! Over EONS = clever stuff. And my favorite of the day is [It may be a credit to you], where "credit" refers to a college credit. That's the stuff that keeps me JONESin for more.

It would have been fantastic if all the cent signs were arranged in the shape of a cent sign, but that would have likely caused all sorts of compromises. Still, a guy can wish for a neat visual element, especially when he sees Liz's byline.

Finally, it was a nice touch that Liz didn't put any other C's in the puzzle. Not sure that many people would even notice this, but it adds a layer of elegance that I appreciated.

I absolutely loved the concept behind this puzzle. It's a rare person that can come up with something I've never seen before, and when it comes to a visual element, it's the amazing Liz Gorski more often than not. Each of the themers today are cars hidden in longer phrases, and each car is resting beautifully on two "wheels" (check out the grid below if you missed this)! How cool is that? And as if that weren't enough, all the letters inside the wheels are O's. Loved, loved, loved it.

Liz does such a nice job of choosing themers and hiding the cars within. CIVIC PRIDE, what a nice phrase, and without a hint that it's camouflaging the Honda CIVIC. Even down to the Subaru FORESTER within CS FORESTER, that's beautiful stuff.

And some of the clever clues, dynamite. [De-file?] for ERASE was so nice. [Ones who are the talk of the town?] for CRIERS? A puzzle chock full of these would put me in heaven.

Jim and I had a good conversation this week, and I mentioned that I almost gave my POW to Liz for this beauty, but I had a hard time with OPTIMA CARD, which stuck out as not nearly as good as the others. Plus, even given the constraints, there was a bit too much of the BAAL, SLYE, ME ON, YEO, OTIC, TOPOL, TO YOU, etc. for me. I realize that much of that kind of crossword glue was largely all due to the wheel O's, but I had a hard time with the sheer quantity of it. Jim's reply struck me as so elegant that I asked him if I could repeat it here:

"Here's an analogy I haven't yet mentioned in public writing but I keep thinking about. When I look at a painting in an art gallery, the fineness of the brushstrokes and the correctness of the proportions are interesting, but I when I think, wow, that's beautiful or strange or insightful or compelling or I have some other strong emotional reaction, those technical details never affect my appreciation (or not) of the painting. The nude in La Grande Odalisque by Ingres is anatomically unlikely but few would argue that she doesn't belong in the Louvre."

I have a hard time disconnecting my constructor/solver's brain, unable to avoid looking at the little flaws and tics. I wish I were able to forget about it all and just look at the big picture. I would imagine it's an incredibly beautiful way to look at life in general, one generating a abundance of happiness. Something I will aspire to.

So overall, it really was a beautiful puzzle. Jim sums it up best: "Liz has a visual sense of the possibilities of a crossword puzzle that nobody else seems to have. She sees pictures." Hear hear!

Tribute puzzle to a great man. Surprising that we haven't gotten more MLK tributes on MLK Day. Maybe it has to do with the conspiracy put on by The Man, who also somehow makes good people of the world work on a such an important day.

*shaking fist at The Man*

Tribute puzzles are hard to do. I think they should celebrate the person by giving us a reminder of their achievements, but since it's a puzzle, it ought to entertain as well. My personal preference is to avoid tribute puzzles unless there's a way to incorporate an extra element, something that could only be done in a crossword puzzle. For example, I did a Roger Ebert tribute last year for the LA Times, with black squares looking like two thumbs up on the sides of the puzzle. That sort of thing.

Ouch, I hurt my shoulder from all that patting myself on the back, so onto the puzzle. I absolutely loved seeing the crazy sequence of consonants M L K J R in the dead center of the grid. How many times do you see an entry as cool-looking as that?

I wasn't as keen on seeing WE ARE FREE AT LAST as the final theme entry, because by itself, it doesn't carry Dr. King's message very well, seeming to imply that he's saying that we are (currently) free at last. Perhaps just FREE AT LAST would have been better, clued as something like "38-across's hope for all people in the future". It would also have been nice to see LET FREEDOM RING too, another important phrase repeated in Dr. King's speech.

Puzzle-wise, nice selection of long downs. As Will mentions, those are important slots in a puzzle, as the long downs are an important source of potential snazziness. And as always, Liz does a great job of plunking in two winners, even though her theme density is high. And she also manages to sneak in ATTACK AD, very impressive! The fill suffers a bit though, with such difficult (for a Monday) crossings as APIA/PIAGET as well as unslightly crosswordese (AROO, A IS, NES), and an arbitrary score (ONE ALL). Probably all fine for a later week puzzle, but it's not my personal preference for a Monday.

I hope everyone has the day off today. If you're doing some volunteer work today in remembrance, TWO THUMBS UP. Ow, my shoulder!

A Liz Gorski puzzle! One thing I know for sure with a Gorski construction is that it will almost always contain some neat visual element. Always a treat to see her byline, especially on Sunday-size grids and their big palettes.

A beautiful holiday puzzle, Liz uses her trademark "connect the letters in alphabetical order" theme to form an angel. She then defines ANGEL in several different ways, i.e. GOLFER CABRERA. It's a neat twist on a standard theme type of "switching" the clues and answers, i.e. "Angel" is the clue and GOLFER CABRERA is the answer instead of the other way around. The picture of the angel itself is really pretty, and surprisingly hid itself from me until the very end. Jim mentioned that he likes connect-the-letter puzzles when it's not obvious what the end result will be. Fully agreed!

For this theme type I tend to prefer in-the-language phrases, as it can be a bit disappointing to run across made-up sounding phrases in the puzzle. But in this case, it's pretty difficult to come up with even one in-the-language phrase to define ANGEL. So overall, I think the nice picture of the angel is still worth it.

From a construction standpoint, you might wonder why Liz didn't use L-R (mirror) symmetry on this one like she typically does for her holiday Sunday puzzle, like the gingerbread man one from 2011. Surely the (almost) L-R symmetric angel would best be shown with a L-R symmetric puzzle, yes? Typically it would, but the fact that Liz uses one 21-letter theme answer, MICHELANGELO SCULPTURE straight down the middle prevents L-R symmetry from being used.

Why, you ask? Because with a L-R symmetric grid, a grid-spanning central vertical answer forces the constructor to have a triple stack of grid-spanners right down the middle. Think about how you would break up columns 10 and 12 (on either side of the middle column 11): anywhere you put a black square in column 10, you must put a symmetrical one in column 12. That results in a one-letter word in between = no good! Typically L-R symmetry is no harder to use than normal (rotational) symmetry, but it has its own idiosyncrasies.

A final comment: any time you have letters fixed in certain parts of the grid, you're going to up your level of construction difficulty. And with 21 fixed letters, that's a lot of constraints! Look at the "angel's head" region, for example. With A E O L fixed in place AND a themer running down the center, it's very tough to fill that area cleanly. A NET crossing A LOOP isn't great, but it's not bad considering the severe constraints in that location. And generally Liz does well to escape with a TOA here and a ESE/ENE there, while managing to work in snappy stuff like EXIT ROW, OUTTAKES, and GENE POOL to spice up the solve. RENVOI was a toughie for me, but as Frank Sinatra often did, I enjoyed adding the term to my lexicon.

What would the holidays be like without a Liz Gorski visual puzzle?

What a treat to get a themeless puzzle from the Sunday master! More often than not, themeless constructors use triple-stacks of 9's, 10's, or 11's in the four corners, but Liz throws that all out to feature two 13's and a 15.

Not many people do this because it's tough to work 13's into a themeless, seeing as how they quickly constrain the grid. Note those two black squares at the end of CREAM AND SUGAR and at the beginning of HARAJUKU GIRLS: they're stinkers. Dirty rotten stinkers! Typically it's best to retain maximum flexibility in your black square placement in case you run into problems (or opportunities), but fixing four squares in this way ties you down right off the bat. There's a good reason why you don't see a lot of 13s in themeless grids.

But Liz does well to work around them, incorporating all sorts of good stuff. GLORY BE is a great answer, and STORYBOARD has a great clue. TILT A WHIRL sure makes a nice cross to HARAJUKU GIRLS. I like that the long answers are in little pockets rather than stuffed in the corners like usual. Nice change of pace.

I had a very hard time with HARAJUKU GIRLS, mostly because I used to do a lot of work in Japan when I was a mechanical engineer. We had clients in Shinjuku, so that word stuck in my mind. Rats! HARAJUKU GIRLS is one of those fun terms which I'm glad to have learned (although man oh man some of those "fashion" choices are highly questionable), and extra glad that all the crosses were easy for me. Woe to the solver who hasn't had a KIR Royale before though.

And as usual, there's a smattering of crosswordese to hold the puzzle together, the AGENA, SNEE, APAR kind of stuff. Speaking of the short stuff, what makes this type of grid a little more difficult to "wow" with is that it starts off with a lot of short across answers, placing a less-than-ideal first impression in one's memory. It's not really fair, but by now I'm so used to themelesses starting off with a stack of long feature answers.

A lot of great stuff, with a perspective in gridwork and clues different from any other constructor. Love the variety. Hope to see more themelesses from Liz!

Beautiful puzzle today from the master, Liz Gorski, with quite the upscale feel. HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL is such a great quote to hide within a puzzle, injecting me with an uplifting push after finishing. Not being super familiar with the origin of the quote, I looked it up and felt even more invigorated after doing so. Entertaining and uplifting, exactly what a puzzle ought to do.

Interesting construction challenge, given that ALEXANDER POPE is the dreaded length of 13. It might seem like not that big a deal for a revealer to be 13 letters, but it makes all the difference in the world. Typically, theme answers are best spaced out as much as possible, because more space = more flexibility. There's a reason why most of the time, the first and last theme answers go in rows 3 and 13.

But putting a 13-letter answer into row 13 is no good, because it forms an unsightly column of three black squares (in order to conform to the "no two-letter answers" rule of crosswords). So up the answer goes into row 12. And the challenge doesn't stop there.

Note the big chunks of black squares in the SW and NE corners. These look like "cheater squares", but really aren't, just squares that help deal with the 13-letter answers. Five black squares all clustered like that are a bit inelegant though, in that they visually take up a lot of space. There are ways around this arrangement, but each of them comes with its own challenge.

I like it when a famous quote is hidden inside theme answers. I personally find it more interesting when it catches you by surprise, either by being at the ends of the theme phrases, or by masking the word meanings. For instance, if SPRINGS had been at the end of BOX SPRINGS, that would add a level of camouflage. However, for this particular quote, there aren't many phrases ending in ETERNAL. Can't win 'em all.

Generally I prefer Monday puzzles to be easy enough that I could give them to novice friends to get them hooked, so I paused when I hit things like PAPP and CUPOLA. But the more I thought about it, the more I appreciated that the fill mirrors the tone of the puzzle. And to top it off, having fill like SPIKE JONES and a FLIP BOOK made the puzzle even more fun. Perhaps it's not my ideal Monday puzzle, but I greatly admire the work.

A tribute puzzle today, one which taught me something, filling in one of the many gaps in my sad knowledge of history and geography. Being an inveterate West-coaster, I had never heard of the LINCOLN HIGHWAY, but after looking it up I cringed at how famous it was. Not knowing it seems a bit like mixing up Wyoming and Wisconsin (hey, I was tired!).

As with most of Liz's puzzles, neat visual. I was vaguely aware that the circled pairs were all states, but after finishing and going to Google, I sat back, impressed that the placement actually reflected the path of the Lincoln Highway. Pretty cool!

Note her use of L-R (or mirror) symmetry. Liz is one of the few constructors who uses L-R symmetry regularly, and I love seeing it. Yes, traditionally xws have called for rotational symmetry because there's an inherent elegance and beauty to the symmetry, but I'm glad Will and others have adopted the stance that L-R symmetry is just as elegant. Note how this allows Liz to place LINCOLN / HIGHWAY wherever she wants, instead of it being in the middle row the grid, as would be required in a puzzle with traditionally symmetry (if she wanted to keep those answers together). The fact that she can offset LINCOLN / HIGHWAY allows her to 1.) place them toward the bottom to give them more impact as a revealer, and 2.) keep them out of the way of the 13 states, making for a much easier fill.

Liz has used L-R symmetry to come up with some of the most visually stunning puzzles during the Shortz era. Her holiday puzzles are always a treat, this gingerbread man one was particularly memorable for me.

Interesting to note that there has only been one instance of up-down symmetry in the Shortz era. I've sent Will a handful of up-down symmetry puzzles, and he's politely said that they just look too strange. It took me a while to figure out why that was, but now it makes a great deal of sense: if human eyes were arranged one atop the other, up-down symmetry would be commonplace. Sadly, the tyranny of left-right human eye placement may take some time to overcome.

(shakes fist at the universe)

Will's note this past week regarding how far fill has come in the past four years might be relevant today. There are so many constraints in the grid, what with four 23-letter grid spanners plus LINCOLN HIGHWAY and 13 states, which makes the construction inherently very difficult. There were enough entries like TREN, A DATE, CCCL, AGLET, NISI, EAR TO, ONE I etc. that it bogged down my solve a little. Overall though, always a treat to see Liz's byline at the top of a puzzle.

I'm hesitant to say anything, because how could I be wittier than Liz? =] I'm in complete agreement with her; I attempted a much simpler perimeter construction, a puzzle where AROUND needed to be appended to the perimeter answers. It took me dozens of revisions over the course of more than a year, and I think I lost a little of my soul to it. Call it a personal horcrux.

The difficulties in this type of construction are two-fold. First, each corner has fixed two-way constraints, making clean fill difficult. Compounding the problem is the second issue, the fact that the perimeter answers will be relatively short, so the puzzle must contain longish fill in order to keep the overall word count under the editor's maximum. It's one of the hardest types of constructions I've undertaken.

You would think I'd swear off this type of construction for life, but I like the challenge. There's a fine (line) between clever and stupid.

Now consider Liz's puzzle. Not only did she 1.) have fixed placements in the four corners and 2.) have to incorporate longer fill to keep under the maximum word count of 140, but she 3.) also had three interlocking theme answers in the center. Bravo to her for the puzzle and even more so for her entertaining commentary!