Kevin Patterson author page

★ What the L?!

(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

What a neat mixing of crossword genres! The Ls made of black squares pop out as grid art, five answers turn corners, and the grid art letters are inserted into those five answers. Some of the most creative concepts result from hybridizing genres, and this is a wonderful example.

In case you haven't picked out the five themers yet:

• NAI(L)EDIT
• FOODCO(L)ORING
• GRAMMARPO(L)ICE
• POTDEA(L)ERS
• NUC(L)EAR

Note how every one of the final chunks is a valid crossword answer. Neat way to further obfuscate the trick.

Gridding around turning puzzles is hard. Gridding around five sets of nesting, turning themers is not for the faint of heart. Kevin didn't quite get to NAILED IT, what with a few rocky TWOD (2-D) and AVIEW regions, but it's well done given the extreme constraints.

This is a rare case where I enjoyed the theme enough that I would have loved it expanded into a Sunday 21x21. That might have allowed symmetry along a diagonal axis, too — if the legs of each L were equal length. I loved Liz's bold Guggenheim swirl, but today's almost-but-not-quite symmetry left me with in an uncanny valley.

Even with that hitch though, I loved how Kevin successfully swirled together so many different established concepts to make something different. Whatever the kids say that means the opposite of TAKE THE L, that's what I say for Kevin today.

"Perimeter puzzle," SILVER / LINING indicating that the answers around the edges all should be preceded by SILVER. Some answers left no doubt, like the Christmas classic is clearly not BELLS, but SILVER BELLS.

However, Jim Horne and I worried that some solvers might see [Second-best era] and decide that although AGE is a slightly wonky answer, it still works. So Jim fixed up the answers (below) for our database, and as an added measure, he colored in the perimeter answers silver.

I'm sure we'll still get confused emails …

We've seen so many perimeter puzzles by now that Will Shortz has increased his standards. Ten years ago, he told me that one of mine needed to have intersecting answers in all four corners, so at first, I was surprised to see two corner black squares slip by on this one. However, after searching the limited pool of SILVER ___ entries, this seems reasonable. SILVER TONGUE is such a great phrase, much more so than SILVER MINES or SILVER ARROW.

Still, it made me wonder if intersections in all four corners was possible. I would have loved ADO and STEIN worked in somehow.

Perimeter puzzles are notoriously difficult to fill since the corners are so rigid. Even if you can make them all work, knitting them together can be a bear. I'm impressed by Kevin's grid. I hesitated at BFS — boyfriends? — but otherwise, so smooth. Great job keeping the solving flow wide-open, too, not choking any of the corners off from the middle.

Not a lot of snazzy bonuses, not a SILVER BULLET puzzle, but a well-executed example of a well-established theme type.

My kids have these terrible jokebooks that they subject me to. One of their favorites: what are three keys that open no locks? Answer: donkey, monkey, turkey. Maniacal laughing! Never mind that they don't exactly know what a donkey is!

What a bunch of malarkey.

I enjoyed how well Kevin disguised the keyboard keys. Even with the stars on the themer clues, I couldn't figure out what was going on. Part of it was that I was sure that FRANK OCEAN was tied in somehow — he was the guy behind the Ocean's 11 caper after all!

What? That was Danny Ocean, not Frank Ocean?

Me no likey.

Also neat, interlocking BIRTH CONTROL into LOW KEY, with LOW KEY in a perfectly apt position within the grid. Not only that, but Kevin pooh-poohed the usual constructor's trick of sectioning off that area (placing a black square at the E of ALLEGRO). Such colorful bonuses in that constrained region, POWER GRIDS giving the grid some electricity.

I've seen a lot of keyboard key themes, including a KEY WEST revealer and an innovative SHIFT KEY one. Although this one didn't wow me with its novelty, LOW KEY is a great revealer for this concept. It might have risen to POW! consideration if all the selected keys were physically low on a keyboard, i.e. ESCAPE isn't exactly low-key since it's usually at the top left corner—

Fine, I'll stop. Crikey.

★ It's been so long since we've had a "warp" puzzle (words warp from the right side back to the left) that I was pleasantly bamboozled. "Name That Theme" quickly went off the rails, today. I guessed that MUS / LIT was MUSLIM ... with one letter changed for some reason.

LET/TOI … LETTOR? As in, a person who lets?

BON/CAR …

Okay, I got nothin'.

Even after hitting WRAPPING PAPER, it made no sense. Usually, this sort of "wrap" thing indicates that MUS and LIT "wrap" the row, meaning that they bracket the inner contents.

Great moment of realization when I finally figured out that the words started on the right and "wrapped" back to the left (LIT/MUS, TOI/LET, etc.). I also appreciated how Kevin chose four examples of well-known paper from different walks of life. All of them containing exactly six letters was a nice touch, too.

There was a lot of interesting fill. It's HALFTIME, BEER ME! SODA POP, AMULET, RICHARD GERE's full name, PRESTO! It's true that the theme allowed for more flexibility than most themes — ending in LIT and starting with SUE aren't tough constraints — but Kevin executed well.

There was some ACRO ASST ATOI (tough to avoid this one) ENE ANOWL, but it was mostly minor. Whenever you have so many overlap regions, you're bound to need some crossword uglies. Most important thing is to make them as unnoticeable as possible, and Kevin did well in that regard.

Entertaining debut. Newer constructors often ask me what types of themes they ought to work on, and my answer is the maddeningly vague "something different and interersting." I enjoyed how Kevin misled this veteran solver, but did it in such a way that all the pieces were there for me to inevitably figure out what was going on.