Jim Holland author page

Jim came up with a theme idea Will liked, but he had trouble with the construction, going through three grid submissions with none of them accepted. Producing a basic Sunday 140-worder is hard enough, and to spice it up with a few strong entries, while keeping it relatively free of ugly gluey bits, is a formidable task.

So Will put Jim and me in touch. I liked the theme pretty well — GOLDING DIGGER tickled me — and I have a hard time resisting a grid-building challenge. With Jim's offer of a collaboration, I dove in.

Even after many years of making Sunday puzzles now, they rarely come together easily. Nothing different with this one. It took about 20 iterations before finally sensing that this fortuitously interlocking arrangement (SQUARE ROOTING crossing FASTING FORWARD) might be a good direction forward.

Even though I've worked with Will for years now, I'm always learning more about his preferences. I have picked up that one of his least favorite type of entry is the little-known acronym, because these are impossible for some solvers to figure out. For example, there's no way to convey the real meaning of MMPORG, is there? (Massively multi-player online role-playing game.) So it shouldn't have come as a surprise when Will kicked back the grid we finally submitted, which depended on OBO ("or best offer," in classified ads). My spidey sense actually did tingle a little when I put it in — I should have listened.

OBO was unfortunately right in the middle of the grid, so Jim tasked himself with redoing the middle section. It was a very tough region, so he ended up with a few things like RELOST, which I wasn't fond of. The final product you see today was the result of yet another redo.

I still like OBO better than OSE (which replaced it), but I think Will has a point — OSE is something people can figure out based on sucrose, fructose, etc.

Never easy, these Sunday 140-worders.

Add a "T-" for kooky results. I liked that the base phrases (MOBILE HOME, SQUARE ROOT, etc.) had their meanings changed fairly well by the addition of the initial T-. I also liked the consistency of always adding that T- to the first word.

For straightforward themes, I like to get some additional material as a solver. ALLEGORY, GOOD TO GO, LAST LEG, NBA STAR serve that purpose (although don't get me started on Kobe's terrible FG% and its effect on my fantasy bball team this year). It would have been so great to convert the other longish slots into that type of material — RE-EDITS feels neutral at best to me, and SNIPE AT isn't much different than SNIPE.

Hmm. BIMBO, really? I wonder if derogatory words like this have any place in a mainstream publication, especially when they target groups already facing societal disadvantages. Good for Will/Joel for cluing it as a bad movie stereotype, but how about not allowing it in the first place? Especially considering that section required an old-school gluey bit, ETUI, I would have liked a redo.

I would have also liked to see less sectioning of the grid. See the two black squares at the ends of OMIT and YET? If you shift the first one to the left, and the second to the right, you open up the grid, letting it breathe. Sure, that would have destroyed NBA STAR (like Kobe destroyed my first two fantasy weeks before I cut him), but it might have allowed for something awesome in place of SNIPE AT.

Overall, the "add-a-letter" theme was made more interesting with the "T + hyphen" consistently added to the front of base phrases, but there were some areas of fill I personally didn't care for.

Answers starting with THREE IN A ROW letters, i.e. a run of ABC, KLM, and XYZ. Thomas Jefferson was one of my childhood heroes, so I've always been fascinated with the XYZ AFFAIR. Code named diplomats + a quasi-war between the US and France = why hasn't anyone made a movie about this? Big opportunity there!

KLM AIRLINES is a solid answer, albeit not as flashy as the XYZ AFFAIR. But ABC ANCHOR … that feels too arbitrary to me. NEWS ANCHOR, yes. ABC NEWS, yes. These both get Google hits in the millions (when entered in quotes). ABC ANCHOR gets less than 100K, and it opens up a Pandora's box to ABC CAMERAMAN, ABC STORY, etc. Granted, it's tough to find something to match length with XYZ AFFAIR, but ABC SPORTS might have been more in the language.

Not a lot of long fill in this puzzle, but I did appreciate the mid-length MANSION, SCONCES, UNTRUTH, and BAZAAR. No multi-word entries there, but all four are pretty interesting to me.

With only four themers and not much long fill, I would have liked the puzzle to be a little smoother. Starting with I GOT in the upper left isn't great. It does make for an easy fill-in-the-blank clue for the beginning solver, but partials in a grid feel so inelegant to me. There's a reason why editors specify that these gluey partials be kept to a minimum.

I don't mind IS TO as much, as it's almost a stand-alone phrase when used with respect to analogies (remember those X : Y :: ___ : Z SAT questions?).

Nice concept, but it would have been so cool to find another themer, as three examples of THREE IN A ROW felt a bit thin. Unfortunately, the only other one I could think of was the QRS COMPLEX, part of an electrocardiogram. Well-established medical term, but it sure would have pushed the puzzle into very late-week territory!