Molly Young author page

Anyone remember the outcry when Apple unveiled the name "iPad"? People cracked derogatory tampon-related jokes, but those quickly went away after the product became a huge success. Molly gives us a fun play on Apple's naming convention — iPod, iPhone, iPad, iMac, etc. — by twisting regular EYE- into i- phrases.

I enjoyed many of them, with iSHADOW my favorite. Not hard to imagine Apple releasing some sort of Google Glass type of espionage device! And the iDROP as a skydiver's device was amusing too.

Actually, my favorite was iSTRAIN, but not as it was clued (as a colander). Imagine, if you will, a toddler who goes under the table to take care of — ahem — some, er, tough business. The hilariously strained faces she makes!

I'm a terrible parent, I know. But I take the pooping-face pictures anyway.

A remarkably smooth grid, given Molly's comments about gridwork. There's not a ton of fill that's exceptional — BEDREST, BLOOPER, and RAPPORT are pretty good — but there's a lack of crossword glue that I would have expected after reading Molly's comments. Just some minor IN A, ARIL, TWEE stuff that many would consider passable or even perfectly fine.

Well, there's BOTA. After trying to cram WINESKIN into those four squares, I gave up and let the crossings work for me ... except that they led me to B O T A, which had to be incorrect. Apparently not! According to several sources, BOTA bag is another name for a wineskin. Curious inclusion — I wonder if Molly had to knit some sections together in the middle, or if BOTA is special to her in some way.

Speaking of bags, the HOBO purse was another curious one. I was sure that had to be some niche fashion term, but millions of sites disagreed with me. They're also called "hobo bags." After seeing pictures of them, I realized how common they are. Fun trivia that they're so named because they're saggy and slouchy, like the bundles hobos sling over their shoulder in cartoons.

I'm also not a huge fan of Apple products, but I enjoyed the wordplay, regular EYE- words twisted in an amusing way.

Debut! Fun facts about famous people who turned down awards, like I did with my Emmy Award and my Fields Medal. If anyone in Oslo is listening, I'm pre-turning down my NOBEL / PRIZE too. So there.

I didn't realize the brilliant JEAN PAUL SARTRE turned down a NOBEL / PRIZE. Or DAVID BOWIE a KNIGHTHOOD. Or GEORGE C SCOTT an ACADEMY AWARD. Crazy! And awesome.

The layout felt confusing to me, as all the cross-referencing discombobulated me. I finally realized that people and their turned-down awards were placed in symmetrical positions, so that helped ... until I got to JEAN PAUL SARTRE. I've color coded the answers below to help out.

It would have been helpful for the person and their award to be closer together in the grid, but I couldn't figure out how to make that happen with this set. Maybe if there had been a set of four people who had turned down the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony)? But with this collection, the presented layout seems like the only possible execution.

With seven themers spread throughout the grid, there are many places where across answers have to run through two themers — causes all sorts of constraints. I really like upper right, with JALOPIES and EYEBALLS running through JEAN PAUL SARTRE and NOBEL with just an ESS as a minor blip. Strong work there.

The middle is a perfect example of trade-offs that must be evaluated. With so many across answers running through two of DAVID BOWIE, JEAN PAUL SARTRE, and KNIGHTHOOD, it's going to be tough to get that center perfectly smooth. The I??L pattern is tough, IDOL one of the few good choices. But UNSOWN is already in the way. So ICEL it is, crossing the not-as-well-known-as-it-should-be NCR.

Overall, a tough set of constraints, especially for a debut puzzle. And I quite enjoyed the factoids about rejection — I'm thinking about pre-rejecting Will for a few puzzles of mine he's now considering.

JUST A JOKE HA HA HA! Please accept my puzzles, grovel grovel.