Simon Marotte author page

Jim here, sitting in for Jeff Chen who is playing on his Slip 'N Slide.

If you're going to create a themed crossword, you typically have to cram four or five connected answers into Across slots and then find some way to fill around them. Mondays are particularly tough because that fill must be easy for new solvers.

But before you get to that point, you have to dream up a theme, and like trying to find an available URL for your new project, uniqueness gets harder over time. Jeff remembered an earlier puzzle this year with a similar take. Well, it was in a different venue, and the "strikes" were at the beginnings of the words not the ends, but same idea. My philosophy on such repetitions is different than some: I don't care.

Another admired theme aspect is "tightness". If your theme is names of mountains and the world has more than a couple of dozen mountains (I haven't checked) then a random set of five seems inelegant. If they're the five tallest or the five most active volcanoes, then it's a tight set. I have a bit more sympathy for this notion.

Mr. Marotte's theme set today might not feel tight, but it is. There aren't a lot of "strike a" phrases, and Simon picks up most of the good ones. But, if I need to do a web search to confirm that, does it really matter?

I didn't know what MICROSLEEP was, so I looked it up. It's "uncontrollable, brief episodes of sleep" lasting from a fraction of a second up to several seconds. This can happen while doing repetitive tasks like, say, driving. Yikes.