Jacob McDermott author page

Whoa, a tough 66-worder on a Friday! It's relatively rare to have quad-stacked entries in two corners and even more rare to have them in all four. When we do see them, they're almost always on Saturdays, because they can be so difficult to break into — few short gimmes to provide toeholds.

Quad-stacks can often suffer from lack of color, so I love what Jacob did with cheater squares in the upper-left and lower-right corners. Some editors don't like this aesthetic, but I don't mind them much. Although there's something to be said for a more stark approach, with huge swaths of white space, I'd much rather take the cheater square hit if it allows for four entries as strong as PLOT HOLES over EASY READ and DR SEUSS, a combination that gets my PULSE RATE up!

Opposite corner came out well, too. HASHTAG / TALL TALE / FAN LETTER / IT SUPPORT sounds like a story my neighbor might tell (he reports directly to Elon Musk). We here in the Northwest would have accepted [Galloping ___ (nickname for the Tacoma-Narrows bridge)], but the dinosaur faintly rang a bell.

The other corners didn't ROCKIT as much. I'm not enough of a skier to speak to MINI-SKI, nor is my tennis to the level where I could ace ON SERVE. ONE SOCK doesn't aggravate me quite as much as the lone socks my kids are spawning.

4x7 chunks are a challenge to fill with both color and cleanliness, and when you fix a long entry like WISECRACKS in place, it's even harder.

Excellent gridsmanship, but with entries like AKELA / AESIR and difficult clues, this would have been difficult even for a Saturday. Huge relief to finally finish, after having to put down the puzzle twice.

Great concept for 2/22/22! We've done the connect-the-dots (below) to give you the big picture.

Rebuses are super common, but there have been fewer than ten on Tuesdays. Oddly enough (or should I say, evenly?), one of them was a 2 rebus.

Incredibly difficult layout, with those TWO rebuses offering no precious flexibility. It's not nearly as smooth as I want an early-week puzzle to be — FSIX is rarely written out like that, and my having to guess between QANG and QING made my Taiwanese mother SHIRR in embarrassment — but a TUESDAY = TWOSday pun, with so many layers, is a fantastic way to celebrate 2/22/22.

"Both words can precede X" type theme today. Will spaces these out since they've become a bit overused, but today's has a neat revealer helping to set it apart. POWER COUPLE is a great phrase in itself, and it perfectly describes the idea: SUPER power, STAR power, FULL power, STEAM power, etc.

Nice themers, too. MUSCLEMAN is a colorful, fun one — a few months ago I attended a muscle-building contest with friends (one of their employees was competing) and had a lot of fun. (A point of advice: at one of these events, it's not a good idea to walk around with your arms out, flexing your neck in mock poses.) SUPERSTAR and HIGH HORSE are both solid, too. FULL STEAM, though … it's like playing the penultimate chord, leaving out the resolution. Or saying "Shave and a haircut," just daring someone not to yell "two bits!"

AHEAD! Ahem.

I like that Jacob's layout gives the solver no across answers longer than the themers — hard to confuse theme/fill that way. And I bet there were so few choices in themers that Jacob was just glad to get something to work. I've made these types of puzzles in the past, always starting with a giant list of individual words before running through the (huge number of) pairs, insanely happy when something made sense.

Check out 31D: UNCAS. What else are you going to put into a U?C?S slot? "Jacob should have swapped the themers around to get a more flexible start to the puzzle," you might smugly say. But wait — what would you have swapped? Oddly enough, three of the four themers have U as their second letter … and those same three all have A as their penultimate letter! Not a lot of options. UNCAS I think is a fine answer, as it's straight out of history and literature, but perhaps crossing it with non-proper nouns (NIN and LOA) would have been better.

The NW and SE corners perfectly illustrate the constructors' constant trade-offs. Clean NW, but without much sizzle. Sparkly SE — CLAM UP / KIGALI / SPANKS is a great triple — but with ESE, EPIS, and a tough AGA / KIGALI crossing. There's hardly ever a perfect solution. Ah, the eternal struggle.

★ What a fantastic theme today! Years ago, I had toyed with BETWEEN YOU AND ME as a revealer for a puzzle, but mostly around phrases starting with U and ending with ME (USERNAME, UNWHOLESOME, etc.). It had never occurred to me to develop a theme the way Jacob did, and I bow to him for the spark of genius. YOU TALKIN TO ME; I love it. Very well done.

And generally such a clean puzzle! Jacob is fairly new to the construction game, which made this puzzle even more impressive. It's really hard to make a smooth puzzle, especially when you're working with five themers. And I loved hearing about his desire to push the envelope, stepping outside his comfort zone to include two long downs. Hopefully he'll continue this trend, next aiming for two or three sets of long downs. Possibly even a 74-word puzzle with a quantity of quality long fill.

I was absolutely loving the puzzle, having quickly cottoned to the clever theme and the awesome revealer, really appreciating the cleanliness of the fill...and then I hit BLAU. "When a four-letter word hasn't been used in the NYT xw crossword since 1998, there's usually a good reason," I thought. Luckily, Jim asked me why my reaction was so negative. I thought about it for a long time and decided that BLAU really isn't so different from AZUL, or even ETE/ENERO/NIE. Should those entries be more acceptable, simply because they're used all the time in xws? If that's the only reason, then my reaction shouldn't be such a knee-jerk one. Seems to me that I overreacted.

Out of curiosity, let's take a look at that region and see why BLAU occurred. The challenge starts with needing a four-letter word ending in U; only about 30 decent options available. Then, the adjacent I????A pattern (19d) is also pretty limited, IBERIA, ICE TEA, IMPALA, ITALIA being some other choices. Finally, the open area of parallel 6s in the NE is hard to fill in itself. Everything taken together, all those constraints cascade into that BLAU region, giving limited options. I absolutely love the fill in that NE corner, with BLOTTO, BONNET, and three-card MONTE, but BLAU still feels like a high price to pay.

Anyway, enough picking of nits. When it comes down to it, the crossings of BLAU are all fair, so it is what it is. The rest of the puzzle is so finely tuned, so well-designed, so clean. I appreciate the obvious care and time Jacob put into it. Overall, a finely executed puzzle with a clever trick and well-chosen themers.

Congrats Jacob on your debut and excellent work coming up with such a cleanly-filled puzzle!

A nice example of the "both words can precede X" theme type. Note the "pinwheel" arrangement which typically allows for easier filling, since each themer has its own quasi-contained quadrant of the puzzle. The trade-off is that this pattern makes it more difficult to work in fun longer fill. Jacob has some nice stuff (ROTGUT, BATH OIL, MARBLES, VOODOO) but it's usually nice as a solver to get longer (8+ letters) fill.

Compare and contrast today's puzzle with last week's Tuesday. Similar theme types, but last week had more really good long fill with a higher overall difficulty level, while today's is likely more accessible to newer solvers. I'm glad to have both ends of the spectrum.

Finally, a tiny nit to pick. Even though the puzzle is squeaky-clean overall, the east section contains ARA, which I would love to see less of in early-week puzzles (GET IT? / AKA / GIN / BEDS could be an alternative). ARA isn't a "bad" entry, but I prefer for early-week puzzles to contain no "crosswordese" (answers seen much more frequently in crosswords than in real life), because for me, it provides a more elegant and satisfying solve.

This is a subjective matter though, since a case can be made for ARA being something people ought to know. As a further example of crosswordese's subjectivity, I'm perfectly fine with an answer that some constructors hate, OBI, because I've seen OBI on Japanese friends before. Now if it were ADIT (old term for a mine opening), the gloves would be coming off. =]