Paul Hunsberger author page

I'll admit, I had no idea what was going on until well after I filled in the last square — those [… X / Y …] clues befuddled me. But, a nice click when I realized that Paul put together a great word chain, using strong base phrases.

Here's an example: DOUBLE BACK and COURT CASE are both peppy phrases. But so is BACK / COURT … as hinted at by the last part of DOUBLE BACK's clue, and the first part of COURT CASE's clue! I've seen plenty of word chains in crosswords, but I don't remember this cluing mechanic. Entertaining (once I finally grokked it!).

I liked that Paul worked in so many bonuses in the fill — that way, if the theme didn't appeal to you, some of SATCHMO, DRUM PAD, MIX-A-LOT, I HEAR YOU, TOMMYROT might. And as a huge "Parks and Recreation" fan, I love PAWNEE.

A couple of dabs of crossword glue to make it all happen, though. Those "parallel downs" (EPISODIC / CULTURAL and I HEAR YOU / TOMMYROT) are tough to pull off without some compromises. I don't mind a bit of TYRO to get the latter two fantastic entries. The price of IPUT and CFL does seem high for the more neutral EPISODIC and CULTURAL though.

(Paul is Canadian, so I did smile a little at CFL … once I remembered that it stood for the Canadian Football League.)

It's so tempting to incorporate parallel downs, especially when you can make one side work as great as the lower right. They're so hard to do both smoothly and snazzily, that it's not uncommon for one side to pale in comparison. It can be such a constructor's dilemma — feature one great side at the price of a less-than-stellar other side?

Finally, MIMEO (outdated), IN PEN (a bit partialish), and EIN in one region wasn't great. But thankfully, that was the only area with such a high concentration of goop.

Nice spin on a word chain, though — I like it when someone takes a tried and true idea and makes it a little different.

★ I had the good fortune to meet Paul at the ACPT this year; what a nice guy. When everyone was giving me dirty looks about my difficult Puzzle #5 (Will said he needed a "bastard puzzle" and thought of me. Thanks … I think?), Paul smiled and said he was looking forward to it. (Then again, I didn't see him after the puzzle session ...)

I don't know much about art, but a docent once mentioned how some famous painting did an amazing job of capturing kinetic motion. Not being able to recall the painting or even the artist, I obviously wasn't paying attention, but the idea stuck with me. Paul's puzzle reminded me of it today. What a neat concept, representing an ELASTIC BAND (that's what they call rubber bands in Canada, eh?) stretching, stretching, and then SNAPping. Cool to see something actually "moving" in the puzzle.

And Paul's longer fill added so much to my solving experience. BET IT ALL and SWINDLED, both colorful entries. There's a reason I've seen "Ocean's 11" 21 times. And ISOMERS ... I'm awed by at nature's persnickety behavior, like when the R-isomer of a drug is active in a molecular target, while the L-isomer is inactive or even toxic. Crazy stuff.

Totally confused by [Big prune?]? Clever clue; "prune" and "lop" being synonymous verbs. And for those of you WHIPPERSNAPPERS, "Three's Company" was one of the many sitcoms I watched as a latchkey kid. It's such an offensive show! But man oh man did I love it.

I would have preferred not to have CASITA cross ITA. Yes, ITA got disguised as IT A, but it strikes me as inelegant, since CASITA is a Spanish CASA + diminutive ITA. And REEARN by itself is passable — REEARNing someone's trust is almost as good as "earning back" trust — but adding in RESALE made it feel like too much. Finally, seeing a DRAGON in the lower left isn't quite worth getting both an AGR and ENS.

But today is a case where Jim's viewpoint won me out; a really neat theme far obscuring the little nits I had to pick. Great solve today.

Neat idea, trying to form the shape of a shoe by using shoe components: HEEL, SOLE, ARCH, SOLE, TOE, TONGUE, and LACES. I especially liked the ARCH forming the shape of an arch — a beautiful little touch.

Diagonal theme entries are notorious for being difficult to pull off. Fixing two of them in place — and right next to each other! — is usually a recipe for disaster. One of them constrains the across and down fill so much, and two of them wreak havoc on your flexibility and freedom. But Paul does quite a nice job here, even working in the NBA's D-LEAGUE into the mix. EERS is an ugly piece of glue to be sure, but to get away with only that in the center is not bad at all. DEUCEDly good, I might even say.

Visual puzzles are tough to pull off, especially in a 15x puzzle where the canvas is very limited. Even after finishing, I wasn't sure what I was looking at. It's sort of shoe-like. The TONGUE and LACES are both sort of in the direction they usually are, perhaps in a hiking boot or something. But both of them together made the picture awfully busy. I wonder if just having the LACES would have made for a convincing pic? Perhaps it would have been better to use shaded squares instead of circles to form the shoe?

Ah, what about the GUM, you might ask? That quirky little finish to the puzzle was simultaneously fun and icky. Not a huge fan of being reminded about all the times I've stepped in gum. But why not reverse the shading and circles? Might have been fun to have the GUM in circles; a sort of bubble(d) GUM, if you will.

Not sure I buy the partialish IN THE EVENT or the "have I heard that before?" COLLEGE MEN, and I didn't care for the shared etymology of OVO and EGG CELL. I can understand the difficulties in the first two, trying to come up with anything that would fit into those slots given the constraints. The last one felt eminently preventable.

So some hitches here and there, but I like the pushing of the boundaries to do something different.

Nice change of pace to see a rebus puzzle on a Wed. Paul did something unusual, using the rebus to incorporate not just one but two entries which are longer than the usual 15-letter weekday limit (SHORT ATTENTION SPAN and ONCE BITTEN TWICE SHY). Neat how constructors are continually thinking of ways to bend the rules.

I also appreciate how he eschewed entries like PUP TENT, ones where TENT is a separate word. Consistency results in elegance, and the fact that Paul either breaks TENT across two words (guTEN Tag) or hides it in in one word (peniTENT) is pretty good. Having strictly one or the other would have been fantastic, but that's a lot to ask.

One aspect that threw me off was the fact that there were several answers longer than the rebus entries: VENGEANCE, TAKE A HINT, ABOLISHES, and TEMPLETON. All nice to excellent answers, but typically the rebus entries are the longest ones of the grid so that they stand out. The other side of the coin is that throwing off the solver can be seen as a positive, in that the puzzle gains an additional level of challenge.

The grid construction is a toughie, especially given those big corners in the NW and SE. Typically these L-shaped corners are only seen in themeless puzzles because of the difficulty in filling them. Throw in the fact that each corner is further constrained by intersecting theme entries and the result is a real challenge. This arrangement of black squares does make filling the NE and SW corners easier, but a price is paid, in that the NW and SE corners are not quite as clean as I like to see.

How cool would it have been if the five tents actually formed the shape of a tent, in the same style as this puzzle by Patrick Merrell? It's awfully hard to draw a tent shape with five squares though, so perhaps it would come out looking too much like an upside-down V or a teepee. Especially for me and my 1st-grade level drawing skills.