Stu Ockman author page

Pretty image of a TABLE TENNIS table and its NET! Neat way to employ shaded squares in a crossword.

I get a lot of people asking me about their TABLE TENNIS theme. It's almost as if they knew Will Shortz was nuts about the sport.

There was another TABLE TENNIS theme from a long time back that I loved. Similar to today's, such a great use of circles to create the sensation of a ball actually bouncing.

Why a BACKSPIN SERVE in particular, though? It mostly works (my ridiculous physics-based qualm: wouldn't a backspin serve result in an asymmetrical path?). But I'd have liked something more generalized — THE BOUNCING BALL was so perfect in that previous puzzle. I wouldn't have minded the same thing today, using THE BOUNCING BALL roughly where Stu has BACKSPIN SERVE.

Not much theme today. BACKSPIN SERVE does take up a lot of real estate, what with it bouncing all over the place. But 13 letters + 13 in TABLE TENNIS / NET + 8 in PING / PONG is only 34 total theme letters. Thin, thin, thin. It'd have been great to work in a few more entries like PADDLES and RACKETS, or better yet, something related to BALL..

Impressive work up top, what with so many constraints imposed by BACKSPIN SERVE. Great use of black squares to not only trace the ball's path but to facilitate best fill. No one likes NEER or EEE, but the presence of NEWSCAST and IMPINGE and MEMOREX — along with no other crossword glue! — makes it a smash hit.

Wish I could say the same about the bottom. What with PING and PONG the only constraints, it should have been much smoother. EDS ULAN ESTER SRTA NSW? Oh (bus)man, that's rough. Granted, it's a little tricky what with the biggish regions to fill. But if it's so tricky that you have to end up with so much glue, do something different. Perhaps take out the black square between PLUS ONE and ANATOLE, and put two new ones where the Ns are in those two entries. Use more cheater squares. Don't call it good when it's not.

Thankfully, a lot of excellent clues to help keep up my interest. As a bridge fanatic and a former mechanical engineer, I loved the misdirect of the [Bridge experts] clue.

OO! OO! I know what this theme is!

Sorry, I couldn't help myself.

GOO GOO EYES is a hilarious term. At first, I wasn't sure if it described the theme well enough, though. Doesn't OO look more like "surprise" more than "puppy-dog adoration"? And why two pairs of eyes in each themer?

But sometimes you have to just go with it. Sure, why not.

I liked Stu's themer choices, all strong phrases in their own right. Especially nice to get the extra-long TOO RICH FOR MY BLOOD. It's not every day that you see a 17-letter phrase in a weekday crossword.

In that vein, it would have been nice to get more of them — perhaps CUTTING ROOM FLOOR (16), HOOCHIE COOCHIE MAN (17), SHOOTS FOR THE MOON (16), etc.? Maybe go even bigger with CHATTANOOGA CHOO CHOO 19 — with three pairs of goo goo eyes!

That speaks to a lack of tightness issue. In my quick search, I turned up hundreds of words / phrases with double-double-Os. It would have been nice to narrow the options down somehow, with an extra layer of cleverness. One example might be to use DOUBLE O SEVEN as a revealer, and pick phrases with OOs … related to spies!

But overall, a solid rebus offering. I liked that Stu even had a few good crossing OOs, like BASSOON and OO LA LA! All too easy to rely on shorties like OONA and DROOP to make things work.

Also impressive that there was relatively little crossword glue, given the high theme density (I like the as-published grid much better than Stu's original). I'd have preferred one fewer themer in exchange for less AREAR IFI OCTO IDEE, but I can understand why others might like the fifth themer, at the price of a little inelegance in execution.

Beautifully eye-catching pattern! There have been very few puzzles that have sectioned off the grid into two (or more) separate pieces, and the best ones have a deliberate and clever reason for doing so. I liked the idea behind this one, THE TIES THAT BIND explaining that there are four types of "tie" that serve to sort of connect the two subsections. MAKE CONNECTIONS isn't that snazzy of an entry — most people say "network" — but it does the job to reinforce THE TIES THAT BIND.

Oof, the fill. Oof, I repeat. Let's study one corner and figure out what happened.

The SW stood out for me, with STORERS an awkward word taking up valuable real estate, along with RATA (hard to clue in any other way besides [Pro ___]), a prefix in DYS, ORI partial, and not just ESSO but a second gas brand, AMOCO — this one (mostly) bygone.

FAR CRY felt partialish, but I can give that a pass. ACCT NO is something I see on documents, so okay by me although not great.

As a constructor, you have to be brave to put YECH in your own puzzle.

Why so much, so concentrated? The CO of CORD does fix some things into place. The bigger issue is that the 6x4 space is already tough to fill on its own — I try to find ways of avoiding big spaces like this — and when you run a long themer through it AND fix two other letters into place, you're asking for trouble.

I don't see a good way to fix it, though. There are already so many 3-letter words in the puzzle, making the solve feel choppy, that the usual solutions — moving the black squares under ORI to the left or adding black cheater squares — would make that problem even worse.

I did like some fill — HUMOR ME and LEOTARD in particular.

It's an innovative concept, but I'm not sure it's possible to execute it elegantly enough to live up to NYT standards. I did appreciate reading Stu's thoughts, and how hard they worked in a valiant attempt to get there.

I'm mostly in agreement with Stu. 66-word grids are no joke — so tough to get both smooth and sparkly. There's a reason so few constructors regularly dip their toes in these waters. I wouldn't call this one FREAKING AWESOME, but I certainly wouldn't call it IN DIRE NEED either.

It's a tough call — to me, AS FIT, SONE, and LIEF are pretty bad. The last one is especially egregious — if you need to clue something as "old-style," probably best to go back and rework that little section.

Normally I don't look carefully at the "before" grids, but this one was interesting. The corner as published is so, so, so much better than the original. I have a feeling I would have leaned closer toward the IN DIRE NEED side if the original had been kept. AGENAS and ANAG … oof and double oof!

Overall, this 66-worder exhibits a lot of characteristics shared by other 66-worders:

• Some great stuff (ICE DANCERS, PIED A TERRE, LIBEL LAWS, excellent!)
• A good number of short fill compromises
• A bit of wasted space (DROWNED OUT)
• A couple of entries with questionable crossworthiness (ON A PLATE? PAY EXTRA?)

I'd be interested to see if the puzzle could have been made POW!-worthy by breaking up IN DIRE NEED and DROWNED OUT. Those two entries didn't do much for me anyway, and if this change could have eliminated AS FIT, ARMAS, MEESE ... man, that would have been a big improvement.

Big, wide-open spaces like the NW and SE can make for a tough Saturday challenge. I don't find them as satisfying as slightly smaller regions more densely packed with great material, but it's worthy of a change of pace.

Love that wide-open middle, highlighted by the awesome DEMOLITION DERBY. That answer is elevated even further by such a great clue — of course, a DEMOLITION DERBY would require a "crash course"! Along with TAP DANCERS misdirecting toward business-type instead of dance-type companies, MINCEMEAT, FATCATS, IDITAROD, that's a lot to admire.

I wondered if MALIA OBAMA was crossworthy. Of course, her first name gets used all the time in crosswords, and first family members are fair game. But I think about Michelle Obama's reaction to her kids being listed in 25 Most Influential Teens." Great quote: "They have done nothing to gain any influence." So, I personally wouldn't use either full name in a themeless, unless it served to hold other stronger entries together.

So much of the puzzle was nice and clean. If it hadn't been for a few offenders ... but some of the offenders are serious red flags. Stu pointed it out already: BOLES to me is a Maleskan-era puzzle-killer, a throwback to the bad old days of crosswords where only people who memorized dozens of crossword-specific terms could even attempt them. Just as with ESNE or ADIT, I wouldn't have let a puzzle be published with BOLES.

Crosswords have come a long way over the years, and terms like this need to be left behind in order to build new audiences.

Minor dabs of crossword glue like LA LA, A TOY, SALAS (Spanish for "rooms"), STER are par for the course when it comes to wide-open white spaces. These days, however, the bar for themelesses is so high that it felt like the grid wasn't that polished. I would have happily given up TREE STUMPS, breaking up that answer by placing a black square at the first S, in order to get rid of STER, ESALEN (especially with the rough OVETT and ODILE — crossing each other! — already in the grid), and ALAR.

So many great long entries, HOPE TO GOD, BELOW ZERO, playing KEEPAWAY, ALTER EGO, etc. A shame about the little flaws to go along with the really big one.

Word trivia is a gold mine for crossword themes. I ran across the DESSERTS / STRESSED reversal a few years ago, but it was nice to learn that it was the longest common word showing this property. Nice to have the flexibility to put it in the grid as either one of the two words!

UNCOPYRIGHTABLE was another one I learned of in my years of crossword research. There are other 15s — HYDROPNEUMATICS, DERMATOGLYPHICS, and MISCONJUGATEDLY — but it'd be hard to argue that any of them are common.

QUEUEING and SPOONFEED are really interesting finds. I hadn't considered "the most consecutive vowels" or "all letters in reverse alphabetical order." Alphabetical order, yes, with CHINTZ and BIJOUX being nice ones. But cool to find a long reverse one in SPOONFEED.

TORTUROUS was a little more, well, torturous for me. The last 12 letters of the alphabet … doesn't that seem awfully arbitrary? Feels like it was supposed to be "... the last half of the alphabet" and then someone found a longer one including the letter N.

I like the effort to put in six long themers. This is a tough layout, with GLASNOST and ROSE TOPAZ abutting. This parallel down structure has the tendency to result in 1.) neutralish entries like LOSE OUT ON and/or 2.) gluey crossing fill like USLTA and IDLERS and OMOO. I do really like RABBIT FOOD, such a colorful answer. But I would have liked perhaps just four long pieces of fill and more cleanliness, given that there's already some ESOS / OTROS / SO I / DYERS kind of stuff around the rest of the grid. Each one of these is a pretty minor offender, but taken as a whole, it felt like a lot.

Some interesting finds; I especially liked the QUEUEING one.

It's rare for me to not figure out a puzzle's theme. Sure, I miss certain elements maybe once a month, but it's pretty rare that I can't figure out the gist of one altogether. I scratched my head for several days about today's before admitting defeat and asking Jim — he wasn't sure either. We finally decided it was "examples of types of rhetoric," hyperbole, oxymoron, litotes, and simile being some of the major ones. (I couldn't explain the word rhetoric if I got beat over the head with a figure of speech, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.)

Some fun theme answers, ITLL TAKE FOREVER and NOT UNATTRACTIVE not unattractive at all. I wasn't aware of MAKE HASTE SLOWLY, but it was fun to learn all about Kikkoman's story. Then there was THICK AS A BRICK, which rolls off the tongue. Er, AS THICK AS A BRICK, where the first AS feels thick as a brick. Or something to that effect. All in all, some pretty colorful phrases.

72 words in a weekday puzzle is almost always an audacious undertaking. It can be really cool when a weekday constructor tackles the challenge, because these low word-count puzzles have the potential to 1.) offer juicy fill as well as 2.) up the difficulty level by presenting the solver with wider-open areas than usual. Breaking into a themeless-type grid is often tough, and the added challenge today was welcome. Check out those big open spaces in the NW and SE, after all.

But the construction feat gets lost on me if there isn't that much snazzy fill — I personally will take a higher word-count grid any day if it means that I get more colorful entries. I like GALLEONS. I love OLD IRISH. FIVE WS was fun, too. But I didn't get quite the bang for the buck I would have liked in terms of spotlight entries. Sometimes low word-count grids require a lot of neutral entries or even liabilities to hold them together, and that to me usually is a more challenging but not as rewarding solving experience.

Speaking of liabilities, NENE with an extremely tough clue, LUKAS, and RITT felt like a tough combination of names. I probably should know the latter, and I'm glad to learn a thing or two, but when KASDAN gets thrown in from the same walk of life, it makes me hitch. A few more not super-well-known names in UTHER, RALPH, JACOB, KEW … toss in the odd duck of KUE along with DPI, the arbitrary AT NOON, ANIS, UNE, RAF, SNO ... and the effect was too much for me.

Some fun themers, which might have been made more fun if there had been some entry tying the phrases all together in a tighter fashion.

Ah, triple stacks! So tricky to pull off cleanly. Stu had me hooked at THE GOBLET OF FIRE, a beautiful entry for this Harry Potter-loving fool (although Severus Snape is and will always be my favorite character). Along with the beautiful CLEAN AS A WHISTLE and IT TAKES ALL SORTS, that's some good marquee material. So much of a triple stack is the stack itself, so it's critical to choose your seed 15's wisely. I liked these stacks quite a bit.

Stu and I had a nice conversation after his last puzzle was published, discussing the merits and drawbacks of various word lists and software issues; fun to talk shop. It was really nice to read his comments above — that high priority on clean fill for themelesses is so key. I would extend this to all types of puzzles (early-week themes, Sundays, crazy Thursdays). Glad that Stu has taken this emphasis on fill quality to heart. I hope that all constructors will take up his example: introspection and listening to constructive criticism, leading toward continual improvement.

I like to be tough on fill quality, but by no means are my criteria fixed in stone. For instance, if the construction has an extremely high difficulty level, I think a little more junk can be overlooked without losing the overall effect. So I tend to give triple and quadruple stacks a little more leeway when it comes to short, ugly stuff, since it's a harder technical feat of construction.

So let's see how the balance comes out. Very few people like to see EIS in their puzzle, even if the English translation ICE is also in the puzzle. And seeing CAS and HAME, pretty weird stuff, isn't great. But overall, the stacks are nice enough that I can appreciate the puzzle as a whole. It would be my preference to see less esoteric stuff all in a single puzzle (LATAKIA, SCACCHI, MIA SARA, RESNIK felt like a lot to take), but again, with triple stacks you almost always have to take the bad with the good.

Overall, a nice Saturday workout.

I really like when rebus puzzle have a good reason for multiple letters to be shoved into one square. This puzzle is an example of that, since it has literal CALL boxes along with CALL BOX at 14D. Clever! 1A/38A/67A are fantastic entries; not to mention, who doesn't like a ST PAULI GIRL and a RAPSCALLION in their puzzle? =]

I winced a bit at MONGST and AMARO, both of which I needed every cross to get. SPATLESE is fine in retrospect (and is something I'm happy to learn about), but it also took me every cross. Out of curiosity, I tried to see if there was a quick fix to get rid of the first two answers, but I didn't find any easy way of working around them. Perhaps Stu will start a campaign to get a thoroughfare in Philly (his hometown) renamed to MONG ST.? =]

So I wondered how difficult would it really be to get rid of MONGST and AMARO and decided to roll up my sleeves to dig in. I tried changing ROLL CALL to COLD CALL, but that didn't help much by itself. After another hour of trial and error, I realized that shifting the location of one set of black squares really helps. Those giant open spaces in the NW and SE are so tough to fill that shrinking them ever so slightly really helped.

This is the grid I finally worked out (empty regions should be easy to cleanly fill) after several hours. It has the benefit of two fewer 3-letter words, which is nice, but it does contain the clunkers ROLEO, EENS, and FER (amongst others) so it's not clear that it's a "better" grid. Perhaps I could improve it with a few more hours work, but I don't know. It's a testament to the difficulty of Stu's task!