Jerry Miccolis author page

Jerry got in touch with me after several submissions and resubmission to Will and Joel on this idea. I was lukewarm on the triply-doubled letters concept, as I had seen it once or twice before, but Jerry hooked me onto the project with the magic words: "Will thinks it might just be too hard to fill a grid like this with high quality."

I'm so darn predictable!

Jerry's original grids definitely had too much crossword glue for my taste, but more importantly, there weren't enough themers for my taste (four, plus TRIPLE DOUBLE), and some of them didn't hit my ear well. HEEL LOOPS I wasn't familiar with, but that did appear to be a real thing. WOOD DEER was the one that threw me. It took a lot of Googling to find enough examples of famous WOOD DEER carvings to be able to shrug it off as passable.

Even then, I felt like the puzzle needed more meatiness. A quick Python script helped uncover a few more, including one that I wish we could have incorporated: QUEEN NOOR. Ah well.

Putting the grid together took roughly eight hours over two sessions. I kept on ending up unhappy with some little corner, some piece of long fill, or both. For a while, I wondered if Will was right — even more so now that I had added two more themers to the original set.

I've had some luck with stacking themers for high-density puzzles, so I experimented with that. When I hit upon the arrangement you see, everything seemed to test out well. Plus, three themers in the top and three themers in the bottom makes for a double of triples … or TRIPLE DOUBLE!

(Sort of. More or less. If you squint a little.)

The rest of the grid was just a matter of trying out a few hundred possibilities in each corner. Not so bad.

I'm still not 100% sold on WOOD DEER, but if you aren't either, the other themers will hopefully help you forget it!

Jerry wrote to me with this idea a while back. I thought it had potential, but I felt it was too easy to make theme phrases using just about any short word. Without something to link them all in some interesting way, I estimated only a medium chance of acceptance.

Shows what I know!

THREE ROLLED INTO ONE was my favorite. It sounds natural, and it's a nice description of TRIO. It's not perfect, as "rolled" feels off compared to "harmonized." But it gave me a smile.

AID TO LOCATE A STREET worked much better than the original Jerry proposed, but it did feel like an awkward dictionary definition. And does anyone call MARS a SPHERE? (Maybe poets?) And wouldn't one say SWIMMER WITH (AN) ARCHED NECK? (Says the annoying grammarian in me.)

Anyone have natural-sounding ones they've personally made up? I'll publish the best one below.

Any Sunday 140-word puzzle is difficult to build with smoothness and snazziness. Jerry gives himself a slightly easier than average task, incorporating only six themers (most have seven or more these days).

Jerry does a good job of spacing out his themers — note how there are at least two rows of space between each pair. He also uses left-right alternation — look at the placement of MOSTLY ARID RED SPHERE and AID TO LOCATE A STREET — a strategy that minimizes overlap between themers.

Mostly decent fill, although I wish Jerry had gone up to 140 words (he uses 138) to smooth out the north section. That ABOLLA / DOTARDS crossing … both are words that I'd worry about as a constructor. I hate eliciting grumbling from solvers. Crossing them together accentuates their presence, if not making for an unfair crossing.

As a solver, I don't mind some minor IOC, DAR, ECUA — short offenders that are figure-out-able — but with the addition of EVAH, ATNOS, TARARA, RAPA, etc. the crossword glue dragged down my solve. I would have liked to see a revision for better overall smoothness. Jerry's a hard worker — I'm confident that his next puzzle will have less crossword glue.

Overall, I liked that the concept spurred me on to think about what would make for some perfect examples.

Congrats on the debut, Jerry!

I agreed with Nancy that the basic idea — describing one movie with two others smashed together — was clever, so I went back and forth with Jerry through 50ish emails, helping him brainstorm and ultimately settle on a set I felt Will would go for. I particularly liked TITANIC SKYFALL to describe "Armageddon."

I was mighty surprised to see the cluing changed to a more generic language. [… about baseball-sized hail?] for TITANIC SKYFALL doesn't do much for me — cramming just about any two movies together could form some wacky phrase, right?

I proposed a grid skeleton to Jerry, but he decided to go his own way and asked me to review his work. 140 word Sundays are so tough, especially for novices, but Jerry got pretty close on his own. There was way too much crossword glue in his first attempt, especially around that ALIEN CONTACT / TITANIC SKYFALL region, so we went back and forth a few times to work things through.

Given the difficulty of how much overlap there is between ALIEN CONTACT and TITANIC SKYFALL, I would have personally preferred a total reboot in order to achieve better spacing between themers. But scrapping a full grid can be disheartening. It's no surprise that even after some massage, that region contains the crunchy LGS / GNMA crossing as well as the deep crossword glue, ORLE. What with the AS YE, ME IS, EEE, EIN TER, TYES, EXEUNT, I GOT, etc. in the rest of the puzzle, I thought there was still well too much overall.

But as a constructor, you have to stop at some point. And some of the nice long entries like MEAT CASE, PIPE ORGAN, NERDIEST, help make up for some of the roughness.

I think this puzzle would have been much more memorable with the initial clues — it's a real shame. Just FYI, here are the movies that had been referenced:

• FROZEN WATERWORLD = Ice Age
• ALIEN CONTACT = ET The Extraterrestrial
• TITANIC SKYFALL = Armageddon
• BIG CONSPIRACY THEORY = JFK
• SAW THE DEPARTED = The Sixth Sense
• ROCKY SLEEPER = Insomnia
• NOTORIOUS KINGPIN = The Godfather

ADDED NOTE: My apologies to Will — he mentioned to me today that the manuscript he received did not actually contain the theme clues as I listed above. Not sure where things got lost in translation.