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Tribute puzzle celebrating NORWEGIAN WOOD's 50^th anniversary. Well, almost. It's such a shame that this was published two days shy of that occasion. Dec. 3, 2015 is a Thursday though, and this theme isn't nearly tricky enough for that day of the week. Rats!

I used to be a big Beatles fan, so that first line, I ONCE HAD A GIRL (very waltz-y, sing it in 3/4 time!) came easily. Hoo boy, the rest wasn't so easy. Pretty cool find that the first three lines happen to break so nicely, so as to fit into a crossword grid when NORWEGIAN WOOD is the revealer.

Sometimes people come to me with theme ideas with 12-14 letter themers, and they wonder why I cringe a little. Entries of this length can be so inflexible, causing spacing issues. Usually you want to put your revealer in row 13, which helps you keep two or three rows of space between themers. This gives you so much flexibility in placing blocks as you trying to separate themers.

Check out how Dan's themers are squished toward the center of the puzzle. Pretty tough when OR SHOULD I SAY and SHE ONCE HAD ME have just one line separating them. Dan does quite well given this constraint, although IRES is kind of a wonky word in the present tense verb, and I always wonder if ARTY shouldn't be "artsy."

As tribute puzzles go, I liked the fact that Dan found a fortuitous split of the lyrics. That's much, much better than having a listing of THE BEATLES, something about the song, something else about the song, and NORWEGIAN WOOD. It would have been cool though to aim for the actual anniversary, and figure out a way to add in a Thursday-ish layer (not sure what that is, but it'd be fun to try to riff on NORWEGIAN WOOD somehow). As it is, it felt slightly thin to me, like I wanted a little something more to chew on.

– puzzle by Dan Schoenholz

I interned at NASA during my senior year of high school — I even got to fly aboard the Kuiper Airborne Observatory! — so I found it enjoyable to get these kooky interpretations of astronomical terms. I've heard RED GIANT as a wacky clue for Mao many times before, but SUPER NOVA was fun (apparently some people call Nova lox just Nova), as was LIGHT YEAR.

I wasn't as wild about POLE STAR — do people refer to Obama or Angela Merkel as a "star"? — and RADIATION BELT is pretty deep into astronomy, even for me.

Alan has worked with very low word count puzzles for a while now, and while this one isn't nearly as difficult as some of his other attempts (notably the 132-word Sunday puzzles), it's still tough. Five themers, with a central 13-letter one splitting up the puzzle, is tough enough to do in 78 words. Lower that to 74 and you have a giant challenge. Generally Alan does well, getting such goodies as TAX HAVEN and JUICE BAR and even FEISTY for not much of a price.

It's too bad that one of those prices is two partials. Rich Norris of the LA Times limits partials to a max of two in a weekday puzzle, and I like that criterion, since partials feel very inelegant to me, one step away from [___A] cluing YMC. And to have A JAM kick things off ("stuck in A RUT" is more common, yeah?) is doubly unfortunate. Still, to keep the gluey bits down to that pair plus some OBI, SLO, is decent.

I liked the idea behind the ACROBAT clue: [One going head over heels?]. But don't most humans go head over heels, i.e. they stand erect?

I also found the CELT clue to be off — calling Bird or Ray Allen anything but a CELTIC seems off.

For this science dork, these types of themes are very welcome. But I can see how some people would have a rough go of it, not really understanding what a RADIATION BELT in space is. Without grokking what the base phrase is, it's harder to appreciate the wordplay.

– puzzle by Alan Arbesfeld

★ Neat idea, requiring two steps to figure out what was going on. After uncovering the IV in the central themer, I had a feeling Roman numerals were somehow involved, but it was a neat a-ha to discover that IV was interpreted as FOUR, which is part of FLAGS O(F OUR) FATHERS. Sort of a multiple-square rebus in a way, but also sticking to the usual one-letter-per-square criterion. I can't remember seeing something quite like this since Francis Heaney's incredible FLAG DAY puzzle, so I really enjoyed the novelty.

I've fixed up the database entries below, so you can see exactly what the themers are, post-decoding.

Because the idea was so interesting, I liked getting five themers, each one a treat to figure out. It was nice that Patrick managed to work in a little bonus fill too, TRUE GRIT being an incredible movie (and book — highly recommended!) and PELICANS pretty colorful too.

I would have liked more order in the themers, though. While having a random set of numbers (not in sequence) does make the puzzle even more challenging, the idea of going from I to II to III to IV to V (in order) is so appealing. I suppose THREE is a pretty tough string to incorporate into a phrase, as is FIVE. Even having random numbers but going in ascending order would be nice.

I also would have liked the four corners to be less cut off from the rest of the puzzle. The NW and SE are better, since two answers flow into each, but the top right and the bottom left have only one entry in. Although I love AZIZ Ansari ("Master of None" was a surprisingly moving series), I can see how that corner, especially the crossing with ZZZ, might cause some solvers to get really stuck and frustrated. Interesting fact that [Last entry in the Random House Unabridged Dictionary] is ZZZ — "a representation of the sound made by somebody sleeping or snoring, often used in cartoons." Curious that it's actually recognized as a word!

Loved the concept here, and as with most all of Patrick's puzzle, strong execution. Very enjoyable trick to uncover.

ADDED NOTE: Patrick mentioned that he had a different "order" in mind — one "trick" square in the first themer, followed by one, two, two, and then three. Clever idea; lulling the solver into thinking that maybe there was just a normal rebus going on.

– puzzle by Patrick Merrell

MAS gives us a colorful selection of entries in the quad-stack, CELESTIAL EMPIRE my favorite. I should have known that one, being Taiwanese and all, but it's such a snappy answer I really wanted to look it up. (It was in use during the 19^th century.) And I CAN SEE FOR MILES is such a catchy song.

I also liked APPLIED RESEARCH, although I would have preferred a more colorful clue, i.e. how Jaeger manned robots were born from APPLIED RESEARCH. (My grasp of reality is tenuous.) I'm glad DAYTON TENNESSEE (population less than 10K) got clued with respect to the Scopes Monkey Trial, which makes it gridworthy in my eyes.

I've appreciated MAS's efforts to make his fill cleaner on these wide-open grids, which is no mean feat. Given how tough these constructions are, limiting the gluey bits to things like CTR, ISE, SHA, SNO, RTES is impressive. I'm always mixed on INO (Greek mythology) and APIS (Egyptian mythology) since they're not nearly as recognizable as Zeus/Hera/Isis/Ra, but if the crossings are fair, this mythology-lover tends to look the other way.

I've also appreciated his efforts to create flow, using a ton of white space to connect all areas of the grid. It's fantastic to get entries like LONG STEMMED and DETOX DIETS running straight through the stack. One of the knocks I have on puzzles built on grid-spanning entries is that there's often not much else besides those long entries. Not today!

I was so impressed by the sheer feat of construction and eye-popping visual impact … until I hit THREE TENS. Now, I'm not usually one to judge a grid by its weakest entry, but this one left a sour taste in my mouth. I researched it to see if THREE TENS was some special holding like a Dead Man's Hand or Pocket Aces, so badly wanting to turn up something, anything that would redeem the entry. But, no. If it had been some tiny arbitrary entry off in a corner, that would have been one thing. But THREE TENS is essential to the stack.

Still, an entertaining solve.

– puzzle by Martin Ashwood-Smith

Neat mini-theme in JIMINY CRICKET crossing PINOCCHIO. After reading the [His first major screen appearance was in 1940], I was worried that it'd be an old-timey actor whose name I'd need every cross to piece together, so it was doubly fun to finally crack it. For my money, we don't get nearly enough of these mini-themed themelesses — they add so much to my solving enjoyment.

With not a lot of long material, David had to rely on his 7-letter entries for color. I love stuff like SHOT PAR as entries on their own, and entries like MINARET are made even better with a piece of trivia like [The world's oldest one is in Tunisia]. PRIVATE and CAPABLE are, well, capable entries, but they didn't add much spice to my solve. ILL USES … is that something anyone actually uses? Googling (in quotes) turns up only 16K hits.

I can see why something like ILL USES is in the grid — the SES ending facilitates filling a big chunk of space in the lower right. But struggling with an isolated corner and turning up something like that is such a hollow victory.

JANET Yellen shout-out! As the first woman to hold the Fed chair, she's perhaps one of the most influential people in the country.

My gut was that UMA THURMAN is very gridworthy (iconic "Pulp Fiction" role, famous actress), but after making a bad assumption about OLIVIA POPE a few weeks ago (about 800K Google hits), I wanted to double-check my assumption. Thankfully, Uma gets 10M Google hits. Oddly enough, Zooey DESCHANEL (another proper name I recently commented about) also gets about 10M. I knew Deschanel was popular, but I didn't know quite the extent of it. Curious.

I didn't know the AVESTA, but the clue made me want to look it up. Interesting to read about Zoroastrianism, one of the world's oldest religions. Thank goodness each of the crossing words made AVESTA easy to piece together!

Some great clues:

• Funny to tie John Cleese and Richard Gere together, as they both played LANCELOT.
• [Position papers?] referred to the positions job seekers are looking for, and the RESUMES that are thusly required.
• SECT is something that comes out of a split decision, or a decision to split.

– puzzle by David J. Kahn

Sound change puzzle, this one using pairs of words connected by a drawl. MORE to MOWER, HEIGHTS to HYATTS, WRITERS to RIOTERS, it's fun to see the transformations of one real word into another real word.

Ah, except SURE to … SHOER — that's not as much of a real word in usage as the others. I give that a pass though, as the resulting themer is funny: PRETTY SHOER as [Attractive blacksmith at a stable?].

As with all PB puzzles, the execution is clean. Very few gluey bits, only the minor kind of GOGH (feels partialish compared to VAN GOGH) and PRU sort of thing. Executing cleanly on a Sunday grid is perhaps one of the hardest construction tasks out there, and PB does it so well.

I appreciate that PB almost always sticks to a 138 or 140 word grid. It's so difficult to get down much lower than that without compromising cleanliness to a level which starts to take away from my solving enjoyment.

PB's puzzles tend to have a "classic" feel to them, a timelessness, a sense that someone could pick them up ten years from now and still enjoy them. That's very different from the puzzles with a "fresh" or "current" feel to them. Both have merits, IMO, and it's fun to get the variety. While I love seeing long fill like CV JOINT, EPICENTER, and PET NAME, sometimes I do feel like I want something with a little more personality out of his longer fill. Then again, my solving enjoyment is almost always made even higher by his stellar cluing:

• [Bass organs] made me think through all the different types of church organs out there before I stumbled upon GILLS (bass being a type of fish!)
• POLE VAULT is an [Attempt to pass the bar?] in a kooky way.
• I've seen variants of [Cold shower?] for SLEET before, but I still like the wordplay.

Some of these might be Will or Joel's clues, but I tend to see a lot of outstanding wordplay in PB's puzzles in general. Just a few of these dotted throughout any puzzle increases my solving pleasure tremendously, and that's even more important in a Sunday-size grid where my attention often wanders.

– puzzle by Patrick Berry

I'm loving the trend toward "meta-crosswords," i.e. puzzles with a secret answer to be figured out after you've filled in the last box. Matt Gaffney is the master at this, and the WSJ recently launched a weekly puzzle as well. I hope the NYT considers jumping in — what better way to engage your audience with contest and a prize drawing?

Today's crossword would have made for an excellent (easy) meta. With TROY, HOMER, ACHILLES, and PARIS, it wouldn't be hard to come up with the ILIAD if the meta question read "Today's meta answer is the name of a famous book." I like the idea here, with TROY, HOMER, and PARIS sneakily hinting at three famous people (the author and two famous participants). ACHILLES HEEL is way too overt for my taste since it's directly about Achilles himself, but it certainly would have made the meta-puzzle drop dead easy.

I enjoyed collaborating with Jason on his debut puzzle, and it's great to see his solo debut. I thought he did a nice job with his fill, although I would have preferred more cleanliness in the lower left corner. That combination of RASA, SARI, IRENIC and ARON (I don't think should a novice solver be expected to know Elvis' middle name) wasn't worth the long downs to me. ELECTORAL and SOPHOMORE are two fine words, but I'd much rather have one stellar long entry and a cleaner corner.

I debated whether TROY AIKMAN is gridworthy. I know him because I'm a 49ers fan, and he destroyed so many of our seasons.

PROS

• Hall-of-Fame QB
• Three Super Bowl rings

CONS

• Only 550K Google hits (in quotes) — that's not a huge number
• Could cause grumbling from solvers who already complain about having to know too much sports
• He's a hated Dallas Cowboy

Ultimately, I decided I'd rather have something like TROY OUNCE, which can be worked through etymology (AIKMAN is impossible to get if you don't know him), but I think he's passable (pun intended). The low number of Google hits surprised me, but his heyday was in a time where the internet barely existed, so I'm okay with that.

– puzzle by Jason Mueller

After a two year hiatus from the NYT puzzle, Neville's back! Standard theme type today, BREAKFAST interpreted as BREAK FAST, i.e. phrases starting with FA and ending with ST. I liked the consistency of always doing it FA/ST, as well as the strong choice of themers — FAIRY DUST, FAMILY CREST, and FALSE ARREST are colorful answers. I'm not familiar with FATHER KNOWS BEST, but the clue made me want to go look it up. Kids named Princess, Bud, and Kitten = weirdly hilarious.

Great job of working in those Xs so smoothly. SEX TAPES is a nice answer as is IDEE FIXE, and the short stuff is all solid: XOXO, EXTRA, XENON, UNIX. I like seeing rare letters (JQXZ), but only if they're worked in fluidly, without resorting to ugly gluey answers. Neville does a great job of this.

Very nice long fill, too. Fun to get BLUE STATES and REDSHIRTS in symmetrical spots — Neville uses all four of his long slots so well. Even I CONCUR and LAB FEE are nice additions.

Pretty good short fill. NET WT is on many cereal boxes exactly like that, so that's not bad. DARER … okay, that's to be avoided. I also liked the clue echo with ABE and RAO prime ministers.

Ah, but that brings us to what I saw as the weak spot in the puzzle, the crossing of RAO and ROBB which Neville acknowledged to be troublesome. I think RAO is fair game — NYT solvers really ought to be able to piece together world leaders given fair crossings — but intersecting it with Charles ROBB is awfully rough. Just like Neville, Will, and Joel, I unfortunately can't see an easy fix. I'm really particular about this sort of thing in early-week puzzles, so I might have rebooted with a different grid skeleton if I had been forced into that RAO/ROBB crossing.

Love the ELF clue, referencing the "Sparklejollytwinklejingley" song. I loved the movie, and it's neat to see a musical made of it.

This standard theme type is getting a bit past its prime, but it's nice to see an example executed generally well.

– puzzle by Neville Fogarty

★ I haven't loved a Wednesday puzzle this much since one of Jacob's a few months ago. He has such a nice puzzle voice, flavored by poetry, world history, literature, and foreign languages. Today's reveal was so cool — finding out BARAK, ÉCLAIR, and BLITZ all meant LIGHTNING in foreign languages was one of those "I can't wait to share this with someone!" moments. Somewhere in the back of my head I knew about BLITZ ("blitzkrieg" meaning "lightning war") but the others were new.

I did wonder about EHUD BARAK. That's a tough name to piece together, especially crossing another proper name, Pablo NERUDA. With only 450K Google hits, some might argue that BARAK isn't worthy of being a feature entry. I can understand that perspective, but I think major world leaders should all be fair game. And given his necessity in making the theme work (can you think of anyone else famous with the name BARAK?), my conviction that it's fine is even stronger.

The BIRMINGHAM BLITZ wasn't familiar to me, but it's such a colorful name with an interesting WWII clue that I wanted to look it up. Given that this was just one of many bombing attacks during WWII, I don't think I would feature this entry in a themeless grid, but it works as part of today's theme.

There wasn't a lot of long fill today, but EXIT VISA and I SUPPOSE are bonuses. And Jacob pushes his 6-letter fill to do a lot of the work in making the grid colorful — AFL-CIO, BEAM UP with a Star Trek clue, Catherine of ARAGON, MOSHED all pepped up my solving experience.

I don't love seeing the DTS, which sounds pretty old-timey, but that's minor. Terrific execution on short fill.

Even if there had been less colorful long fill or a few more gluey bits, I still would have picked this one as the Puzzle of the Week. I love it when a crossword theme wows me.

– puzzle by Jacob Stulberg

Can't remember a tougher Thursday! I was still hitting my head at the 30 minute mark. Such a relief to figure out that STUMBLING BLOCKS were interpreted as ER hidden inside four black squares. I've fixed up the database answers and added ERs (in white) below to make things more clear.

Check out all the interlock. I'm usually not one to be impressed at themer crossings, but there's so much of it I could barely get my head wrapped around it. I highlighted all the theme answers (in blue) below to give a better picture of it. Granted, Tim did have a lot of flexibility because there are many phrases/words starting with ER, but wow. Audacious construction.

I would have liked all the short themers to be more solid, though. NETH(ER), DIN(ER), CHATT(ER), (ER)ROL, (ER)ASURE are all fine. (ER)NES, SHO(ER), even (ER)IE PA felt weaker. Tough to do, especially since there aren't nearly as many words starting with ER as there are ending with ER. Perhaps a little less interlock would have facilitated better short stuff like (ER)IN, (ER)OS, (ER)DOS, etc.

As if his task wasn't hard enough, the grid layout — featuring shorter answers — meant that he had to work in a lot of long fill. AXIS OF EVIL is colorful, and HYGIENIC is pretty nice. ULTRAHOT feels slightly made-up, like ULTRA NICE or ULTRA SMART or something.

ANNE SEXTON doesn't get as many Google hits as I'd like to see (500K), but I'd argue that winning a Pulitzer makes you crossworthy. I'm not wild about that final N though, crossing ASANA. ASANA is a yoga term I see all around Seattle (we're a yoga town, but I think that crossing sets up too many solvers for a pure guess. For a puzzle that's already ultra hard (ha) to solve, I'd want to make more sure that people who stick with it are properly rewarded.

It was tough for me to remember which black squares were the ER ones, so it would have been nice to have them distinguished somehow. How cool would it have been if those four squares were somehow made to look like they were stumbling! Not sure how to do that, but fun to think about.

– puzzle by Timothy Polin

Barry gives us a dose of computer lingo today, with SPAM FILTER a colorful 1-Across. It was interesting to uncover EVERIFY, which looked kookily like EVER IF I, and CYBER WAR. I like when mini-themes crop up in a themeless, although I find it more elegant when those answers are in symmetrical spots. Still, having E VERIFY crossing SPAM FILTER is pretty fun.

I thought I had learned all the E-FILE, E-READER, E-TAIL kind of stuff, so I wanted to look up E-VERIFY. Interesting that almost half a million employers use it now. I kind of wish I hadn't looked it up, as it seems to be steeped in controversy around illegal immigration issues.

CYBER WAR … is that "a thing"? Google says it is, although it has an old-timey feel to me, akin to saying "cyberspace." Feels like there's a more colorful term emerging for CYBER WAR, but I'm not sure what it is. Ideas?

Speaking of mini-themes, I really liked the idea of placing two Greek states across the middle. After uncovering SPARTA, I pumped a fist and plunked in ATHENS. Dang it! Well, ITHACA seemed to work better ... no. By the time I got to the correct answer of ATTICA, I really, really wanted some historical tie between it and SPARTA. I found all sorts of information about the rivalry between Athens and SPARTA, but only that ATTICA encompassed the city of Athens. Sigh.

Barry gives us a good amount of colorful long material like SEEK ASYLUM, STARRY EYED, and even FOOD WEB, but it does come at a price. I think most of it is minor, like ISS(ue), the discontinued Olds CIERA, ACR(oss), Mel OTT who shows up in way too much compared to his level of actual fame because of his crossword-friendly name, and the religious inscription INRI. I'd be curious to know how many Christians would say it's a gimme.

– puzzle by Barry C. Silk

Byron is one of the most creative constructors when it comes to new entries. So many of his puzzles contain phrases I have to stare at before deciding if I love them or think they're bizarre. Or both! I was worried to hit [Angelina of Hollywood] since I only know one Angelina. It was so curious to uncover JOLIE to start … and what a great a-ha to finish it with PITT. (She officially added his name after getting married.)

[Targeting the Fourth Estate] had to start or end in PRESS. ANTIPRESS ... huh. It's in the dictionary, but it gets very few Google hits. I do think it's fair — it's inferable from the clue and word etymology — but it didn't give me the same feeling of satisfaction as uncovering JOLIE PITT.

I worked out the end of [One of the currencies replaced by the euro in 2002] = POUND, but figuring out which pound was challenging. I was thankful for all the fair crossings + the neat trivia that Ireland used to have a distinctive pound currency. Such a shame to lose the beautiful artwork.

[Balcony address?] had to relate to "Romeo and Juliet," but I could not figure out where the opening O should go. So it was a disappointment to fill in ROMEO ROMEO and see that my "knowledge" yet again failed me. Or did it! I was happy to find out that I did have the quote right — and not happy to see ROMEO ROMEO as a snippet cut out of the full quote. Didn't seem like a complete phrase.

Love his innovative and colorful stuff like SCAMPER AWAY. POST SALES … not so much, not even for this capitalist.

Byron always has great clues. Here are my favorite today, which really pep up the short entries.

• [Skilled forger] makes you think about check fraud. Nope, it's a (metal)SMITH.
• STENO has an old-timey feel to it, but the [Pool party] clue is great (office pool of stenos).
• [New seal] had me thinking about state seals. Turns out it was a young PUP.

– puzzle by Byron Walden

I imagine BANDS TOGETHER inspired the puzzle theme, two pop bands glommed together to make either a real or a wacky phrase. My knowledge of pop music is woeful at best (huge jazz and classical fan, along with old-school rock and rap) so I'm glad Tracy and Acme used mostly giant-name bands. I still had to look up TRAIN, FUN, and FREE, but a quick Google search tells me that they are indeed bands. Huh.

I dug the neat discovery of RUSH THE DOORS. It's a phrase I've heard before in relation to Black Friday sales, so it's fortuitous that it just happens to be two bands put together. BOSTON CREAM pie is one of my favorites, so that was fun too. EAGLES WINGS and YES NO DOUBT also seemed like legit phrases in actual use.

I wish there had been more consistency though, as the rest of the themers are pretty made-up sounding. It's perfectly fine to have a crossword where every themer is as wacky as FUN SMASHING PUMPKINS or POISON FREE, but the mix of spot-on real phrases and kooky ones didn't do it for me. And ONE DIRECTION TRAFFIC ... it's neither real nor very kooky.

With any Sunday 140-word puzzle, there are bound to be a few minor gluey bits of the LAI, AUST, TGI, HOC variety. Pretty easy for me to overlook these short and common offenders. But throw in a few more AGTS, OAST, OGEE, ORIG, OLEIN entries, and it starts to affect my solving pleasure. I can understand why Tracy and Acme might have gone to 138 words in order to reduce their number of 3-, 4-, and 5-letter words (like Will's been looking for), but I'd much rather have more short words that are cleaner, than fewer that are gluier. Sticking to a 140 word count can help achieve that.

Some very nice long fill added to my solving experience, ISAAC NEWTON, UTTER ROT, and PRIMROSES my favorite. (PRIMROSES reminds me of Prim, Katniss's younger sister in "The Hunger Games," who Katniss sacrificed herself for. Hey, we get PEETA in the grid too!) A couple of neat single words were bonuses too, APTITUDE, INDIFFERENT, STALWART all adding ELEGANCE.

– puzzle by Tracy Gray and Andrea Carla Michaels

Terms derived from US PRESIDENTS today; a fun set of colorful answers. So many options to choose from when it comes to BUSHISMs! My favorite will always be:

"There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

Where to even begin ...

Sad that Hoover — the only President to come out of Stanford — is known for 1.) HOOVERVILLEs and 2.) being near the top of many people's "Worst Presidents" list. Sigh.

At first, I thought this puzzle was too much of a listizzle (list + puzzle, akin to a "listicle"), but I was surprised that I couldn't find any other terms akin to these. Sure, there's the NIXONIAN era and the (warning: die-hard Seinfeld fan alert) VAN BUREN BOYS, but nothing that would actually fit in this theme. Nice that it's a complete set.

It felt odd to have PRESIDENT as a "revealer." Perhaps I give Monday solvers too much credit, but getting hit over the head with such an overt explanation felt like too much. Maybe crossword symmetry forced the inclusion of PRESIDENT? But with all entries with odd-numbered lengths (9/11/7/11), it could have employed L-R (mirror) symmetry.

A ton of nice long fill. ITS ON ME is SO much better than the usual ON ME, and FUEL ROD / SOFTBOILED / RED OCTOBER / INFIDELS / SWAGGERS are so swaggery. I even appreciated having GOLEM in there (if you haven't read "The Golem and the Jinni," it's one of my recent favorites). I think this is how much snazzy long fill every puzzle ought to have. Granted, Tim is one of the best grid-designers out there, but nonetheless, adding in good long fill is almost always possible.

As for short fill, a friend of mine in school administration swears that EL-HI is in widespread use throughout the education system, so I give that a pass. So, well executed, and if the puzzle hadn't conked me over the noggin with its revealer, I might have given it the Puzzle of the Week.

– puzzle by Timothy Polin

BOBS UP AND DOWN = a fun revealer, with famous BOBs going up, down, up and then down through theme answers. Bob DYLAN hiding in CANDYLAND (what a weird mental image) and Bob HOPE in SMOOTH OPERATORS = great finds.

I couldn't quite recall Bob Fosse or Bob Vila, but it was easy enough to figure them out from the theme answers, plus the crossing answers were fair enough. It would have been nice if these two had been as uber-famous as the first two — I was curious what other Bobs could have been placed in the "up" direction. Bob SAGET? Not unless you include some racy words (think of the -GASM ending, ahem). Bob DOLE offers more possibilities. Tough to find others!

I found the cluing a bit odd on PRINCESS OF WALES. That's a perfectly legit entry, but [Elton John's dedicatee for "Candle in the Wind 1997"] clearly indicates LADY DI or PRINCESS DI, yeah? I would have much preferred something like [Lady Di, e.g.].

Tough grid arrangement, with five long themers. Of course, the conceit forces the themers to be placed vertically, but that has the unfortunate side effect of giving the solver the revealer very early in the game. I always find it more satisfying to wait until the end (or at least the middle) before I'm handed the concept. It would have been tough to run BOBS UP AND DOWN horizontally since the four themers would have had to intersect it, but I wonder if that could have been possible.

A handful of gluey stuff is to be expected given the high grid constraints. Most didn't bother me, but things like ORA, TES, ESA, ITE and SOG all added up. SOG especially seems so ... odd. When a three-letter entry of common letter has only been used six times in the Shortz era, that's a bad sign.

Not a lot of long fill — just USED TO BE and PEKOE TEA — but David does well with much of his mid-length stuff like ERSTAZ, Sinatra's FEDORA, JOLSON, IN A JAM. Nice bonuses as I solved.

– puzzle by David Levinson Wilk

Interesting to see how different Paula's and my interpretation of this theme were. I remember starting with a giant list of words that can be preceded by DEAD, then going through a systematic process of matching pairs to see what sounded colorful to me. I can't say I ever would have picked out WOOD DUCK or BODY WEIGHT (and I'm kicking myself for missing SEAHORSE!). Neat to see how Paula's personal preferences led to such a different end result. Vive la difference!

I also appreciate Paula's addition of fill that I wouldn't have considered or thought of myself. SAUTERNES is vaguely familiar even to this anti-oenophile, and GOOD FAT is a snazzy answer. Along with other entries like JET BOAT, ON THE MAKE, SHALLOT, and even CAB IT, it feels like a very Paula-voiced puzzle.

I wasn't a huge fan of the grid segmentation, the NW and SE corners virtually cut off from the middle. This does help in filling — especially since there are so many themers, all jam-packed in — but it made for a choppy solve. Additionally, shortly after starting, I dead-ended in that NEO / ONE-D / BENE / EDU section. Gave me the opportunity to study all those short gluey answers concentrated into the corner. Not ideal.

Speaking of short entries, that SAL / LOEB crossing feels nearly like a killer. I wonder how many people know the mule SAL from "I've got an old mule and her name is Sal / Fifteen years on the Erie Canal"? And if you're not from New York, LOEB Boathouse seems like a guessing game. I suppose you could argue that SAL / LOEB is the only reasonable possibility, but for beginning solvers, I could see SAM / MOEB, SAN / NOEB, even SAK / KOEB. I think most all puzzles, especially early-week ones, should set up the solver to ultimate prevail. Crossings like this make that tough.

Good to get another of these "both words can follow" or "both words can precede" themes every once in a while — and getting one with such theme density + great long fill is nice — but they do feel like they're on their last legs.

– puzzle by Paula Gamache

★ There seem to be two camps when it comes to rebuses — the haters and the lovers. Given that there have been SO many rebuses, I lean slightly toward the former side, but I really like when a rebus is not just a rebus. David's interpretation of DIE + DIE = DICE made for a highly entertaining solve.

Not only was the concept really fun, but I loved David's selection of themers. BO(DICE) RIPPERS was my favorite, evoking images of Harlequin Romance covers. PRIDE AND PREJU(DICE), CAN(DICE) BERGEN, and LONG ISLAN(D ICE)D TEA are all great picks, too. It would have been nice to get one more where DICE was broken — perhaps COME(DIC E)FFECT or NOMA(DIC EMPIRE)? — but there are a very limited number of phrases breaking like that. And a second D / ICE break would be tough since not much starts with ICE that wouldn't have the same etymology as ICED.

I also liked how David only used DIE once by itself in the fill, in DIE OUT. Hiding the rebuses in RUSH(DIE), (DIE)TS, GRENA(DIE)R avoids duplications. With so rebus-filled entries required for this puzzle, it's impressive to not dupe DIE.

I also liked the big, open corners in the NE / SW. Sometimes this sort of thing is optional, but today David used so many black squares in the middle of his grid — necessary to partition all the various DIE entries — that he was forced to keep the corners wide open. They came out well, with some nice long stuff like INCENSED and ABROGATE, with very few gluey entries like ASSOC.

I wasn't a fan of the lower right corner. Yes, there's a lot to work around with two DIE answers and a relatively big corner, but HEIL … yikes. Maybe I've grown too sensitive over the years. At least clue it to "The Producers" or something? And A DUE / ASA / CTRL / TSURIS are all fine(ish) on their own, but they sure pile up in that corner.

Perhaps a little too easy for a Thursday puzzle, but it sure provided me with a lot of entertainment. Well done.

– puzzle by David Kwong

I think I sometimes underestimate themelesses featuring grid-spanning entries. I tend to count an asset as one point, no matter if it's eight letters of 15. Today's GO INTO OVERDRIVE and NO MORE MR NICE GUY felt like they should count for more than just one point apiece — both gave me a burst of "hey, cool!" when I pieced them together. I'll have to rethink my internal scoring system.

There wasn't a lot of other long material, but NO LOVE LOST, ALOHA STATE, even PANOPTICON added to the quality of my solve.

I did hitch upon solving the duo of WONDERBRAS / UNLADYLIKE in a male constructor's puzzle. The latter especially — a debut to the NYT — gave me a strange vibe I couldn't quite explain. They're not crass in the way that I found PLAYBOY MANSION / TOPLESS DANCERS to be. So I was extremely glad to read Andrew's thoughtful commentary — nice to hear his take on the charged nature of UNLADYLIKE and how WONDERBRAS empowered Herzigová.

I like SETH MEYERS as a comedian, and he gets millions of Google hits due to his SNL and his Late Night gigs, so he seems worthy of being a feature entry in a themeless. But this puzzle had so many other proper names that all in all it felt like too much. INGA. CASS. KIROV. AILEY. ROREM. TSO. OHARE. LYLE. LE CID. HAYS. AGRA. I like some proper names in a puzzle, but too many and it starts to feel like a trivia match instead of a crossword. Most entries are significant enough that NYT solvers really ought to know them, but some seem debatable.

A couple of clues that are likely to stump some (they stumped me!):

• How is AGRA an [Indian drawer?]? Think about "drawer" as "something that draws … tourists" (and then groan)
• TOED apparently means "driven obliquely," as in a nail.
• "Tennie" is slang for a singular SNEAKER, as in "tennies" (aka "tennis shoes") for SNEAKERs.
• ITT Tech might not be as famous as Cal Tech, but Google shows it's quite a sprawling for-profit institute. Plus, Caltech is usually represented as one word.

Loved the clue for ASH — [Camel droppings?] as in "droppings from Camel cigarettes." Hilarious!

– puzzle by Andrew Zhou

I often find that themelesses heavy on 7-letter entries are not very colorful — I find that a very few people (Tim Croce is a good example) can really pack a grid with great 7-letter entries — but I like Damon's work today. It's usually too easy to slip into using neutral entries like ARBORED and DISEASE (and NABBERS, I see you), so I was pleasantly surprised to get a ton of great OZZFEST, SKYWAYS, TELL-ALL, COLUMBO, even "MERLIN'S Beard!" Nice save on that last one — usually a pluralized name is much worse when there's only one famous instance, but MERLIN'S Beard is in the Harry Potter world and reasonably inferable.

Weaving in a few long entries helped too. Entries like BELLY LAUGH, WIFFLE BALL, ARENA ROCK, and YOU GO GIRL! spiced things up. Even the usually neutralish LEGAL PAD becomes an asset when given such a great clue: [It contains rules for writing]. ("Rules" refer to the ruled lines.)

Working in the long answers creates an interesting layout. The grid has nice flow, everything well-connected, but each of the six mini-sections can still be filled one at a time (more or less). It's a great balance between high solving flow and ease of filling for the constructor.

That lower left corner is so beautiful, with EX-WIFE, XYZ, GAY ICON, and WIFFLE BALL — that's GOLDEN! The EAZY E / OZZFEST crossing might cause grumbling, but I don't have any sympathy there. Ozzy Osbourne (over 10M Google hits) is famous enough that OZZFEST ought to be solvable even if EAZY E is a mystery. Plus, EAZY-E is pretty darn famous himself — a whopping 8M Google hits!

I wasn't so much of a fan of the south section, with the pile-up of the awkward NABBERS, the tough OREN Ishii, General TSOS. I appreciate Damon's sentiment. What can you do given the delay on publishing themelesses is (sometimes well) over a year, and the bar for themelesses is rising so quickly?

All in all, though, quite a colorful puzzle.

– puzzle by Damon Gulczynski

Famous ad slogans, "corrected." Neat finds; so many companies using grammatically incorrect slogans. I liked the ones which created ridiculous-sounding phrases. Funny to imagine a poor marketer arguing why DO YOU HAVE ANY MILK would make for a bad campaign.

The others were so similar to the base phrase that they didn't do very much for me. I found it more fun to have a completely ridiculous "correction." Additionally, THINK DIFFERENTLY and EAT FRESHLY had the same correction — and they were the first two themers I uncovered. I wasn't a fan of that duplication.

I was befuddled by YES WE HAVE THAT. Something like "We got that" sounded vaguely familiar for … Office Depot? Kinko's? Ah, it's Staples, and it's "Yeah, we've got that." The rest of the themers were very familiar to me — I wonder if this one is an outlier, or if I'm just not tuned in at all to the office supply sphere.

Some nice fill as I'd expect from Peter — STAR JONES, RETRONYM, JOSTLE/FJORDS, BODES WELL, etc. helped keep up my interest level. Peter's spot-on when it comes to Sundays being very tough to cleanly fill — we'd rarely see AH SO, SKED, MST, etc. in one of his themelesses. Still, it's strong gridwork.

A couple of things that might be confusing:

• LEED apparently stands for "Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design."
• How is BACON [Earnings, so to speak]? Think of "bringing home the bacon."
• Who the heck is ALIG and what is "Booyakasha!"? Inserting the space to make ALI G might clear that up. (I can't stress how much I loved this clue!)

– puzzle by Peter Wentz

List of terms people use to mean "thingie" = fun for me, as we mechanical engineers love our specific terms for doohickeys — ratchets, pawls, involute spline gear teeth, four-bar mechanisms, you've already nodded off. (We Mechanical Engineers are delights at parties.)

Glad that Bruce mentioned the lack of DOOHICKEY, which I was searching for as I solved. But I was impressed to see such a wide variety of terms — getting seven of them was pretty cool. THINGAMAJIGGY and THINGAMABOB are more highly scientific terms than THINGAMAJIG, but we'll let that one slide. I wasn't sure what a DINGUS was, but it checks out fine as a synonym for "thingie." Just don't look it up on Urban Dictionary. Ahem.

Impressive execution given so many themers. Yes, many of the themers are short, which makes this task easier, but seven themers of any length is a challenge. Bruce did a good job of keeping his fill clean. The places that would typically be the hardest — around MONA LISA and CREDITOR, which pass through three themers — are pretty darn good. IN RED usually sticks out like a sore thumb as a partial, but given the Santa clue, I give it a holiday pass.

Since some themers are very short, just six letters, it would have been nice to lay out the grid so that the longest across answers (including fill) are only six letters. DEADEYE and STUDIOS make for nice bonus material, but they do make it harder to pick out where the theme answers are. (I highlighted them below in blue, to make them easier to see.)

Great clue for LOGOS! I had to read [Shell's shell and Chevron's chevron] a few times before getting that. I forgot that Chevron's logo is a set of "chevrons"!

So, a good grid execution with just a ONE (A) - TWO (EGG) punch of gluey bits. (And TWO EGG is (mostly) fine; I just couldn't resist the joke.)

– puzzle by Bruce Haight

There's a lot I appreciate about Jim (Horne), and one aspect that continues to amaze me is how differently we see puzzles. I missed some aspects of this puzzle the first time around, and it wasn't until Jim and I talked shop that I started to really appreciate it. Tom uses a great revealer — SINGULAR — to mean "a term used in the SINGULAR." But he also uses the second definition of SINGULAR — atypical — to describe four words rarely used in their singular form.

PAJAMA PARTY is the perfect example. This is a widely used phrase, and when else are you going to say "pajama" in the singular (besides PAJAMA TOP or BOTTOM)? Same goes for SCISSOR KICK. (Well, there's SCISSOR LIFT (mechanical engineering) the SCISSOR COUP (bridge, or course!), the SCISSOR GRIP (wrestling), but none of these pop quite as much as SCISSOR KICK.)

Jim and I still disagree on TROUSER PRESS. I admit my knowledge of clothing is poor, but PANTS PRESS sounded like the more common term. Google sides with Jim, with many more hits for TROUSER PRESS, and on Amazon.com, they have a "trouser press" section … but most of the products are listed as "pants presses." Hmm.

I would say I need a new "lens for my sunglasses," not a new "sunglass lens," but I can see people saying both. Anyway, fun to discuss these issues.

I usually really admire Tom's math/sci bent. The clue for SUM looked too confusing, though, and I skipped it. Thankfully I went back to it to decipher its meaning! What the clue is trying to say is that if you want to SUM the numbers from 1 to n, you can use a formula: n*(n+1)/2. For example, the SUM of the numbers from 1 to 100 = (100*101)/2 = 5050.

There's a famous myth about the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss — one of his teachers wanted to keep him occupied and gave him the task of adding the numbers from 1 to 100. Gauss supposedly finished in minutes, using mathematical reasoning. Pretty darn cool.

So, a lot of interesting aspects to this puzzle, with some nice bonus fill in LEAP SECOND, I THINK I CAN, etc.

– puzzle by Tom McCoy

GOD / BLESS / US / EVERY / ONE = the last words of A CHRISTMAS CAROL = an excellent way to put solvers into the holiday spirit. Very fun to get the bonus of TINY TIM, the speaker of the quote … as a (TIM) rebus! That's a ton of theme material.

I enjoyed finding those five hidden words. BLESS inside NO(BLESS)E is a good one — tough to hide that letter pattern. EVERY in TH(E VERY) IDEA too. PUSSY GALORE was hilarious to me as a kid, and I do still find it somewhat funny. But it felt somewhat out of place in such a Christmas-y puzzle.

I normally am not a big fan of circled letters / shaded letters puzzles unless the hidden words aren't obvious. Here, uncovering GOD BLESS US made it pretty clear what the last two words would be. Also, given that these are the last words of A CHRISTMAS CAROL, I really wanted GOD / BLESS / US / EVERY / ONE to be the last words of the five themers. I don't think that would have been possible, since what phrase ends in EVERY? Or BLESS? But how cool would that have been! Given the constraints, I like Jim's choice to "hide" the five words.

I really liked the single rebus square idea — getting TINY TIM worked in, with TIM as the "tiny" rebus square is a great idea. IT would have been spot-on perfect to have that TIM square at the very bottom corner, but that certainly would have made for a harder grid arrangement. The only thing I could think of is TINY (TIM) crossing VIC(TIM), but that would make for a bigger SE corner, much harder to fill. As it is, there's already a rough crossing in MONA / FRODO — I'm a big LotR fan, but for non-believers (infidels!), I could see how MENA/FREDO or MINA/FRIDO would seem equally likely.

Fun concept, with not that much gluey fill (I LEFT, MGMT, ECTO, etc.) given the high theme density. Nice, uplifting puzzle.

– puzzle by Jim Peredo

Neat findings, famous Greeks whose names can be split up for funny results. HIPPO CRATES reminds me of Bill and Ted calling Socrates "So-crates," so that was a nice laugh. ARI STOP HANES is such a cool one, and DEMOS THE NES is fun too. Pretty darn cool that Derek managed to find three examples that work so well — and fit into crossword-friendly symmetry!

I also (mostly) liked the idea behind GREEK PLAYS, i.e. wordplay. It's a real shame though that the clue for GREEK PLAYS referenced "Antigone," by Sophocles. Why not use one of ARISTOPHANES's plays? Granted, "The Birds" isn't nearly as famous as "Antigone," but given that ARISTOPHANES is right in the center of the puzzle …

Derek gives himself an audacious task with his grid — 67 words is very low. Granted, this 15x14 layout artificially lowers the word count by two or three, but still, it's easily in wide-open themeless territory. I worried when solving the NW and SE corners, as regions that big usually come with big compromises. To start with TOSHES isn't ideal (pluralized names are inelegant, and when there are only two of them ...), but the rest of the NW was all right. I don't remember TOP COPS — I couldn't find much about it (is it a cult classic?). There's nothing amazing up there, but nothing truly awful either.

I was pleasantly surprised by the SE, too. Hard not to like a puzzle with SEATTLE in it. Again, there's nothing that wowed me, but with only ESSES, TARE (which is a term we use in engineering all the time), and the outdated PESETA (man, that's a giant number of A, E, S, and Ts!), the corner works. I prefer more snazzy entries — the type you'd usually see in themelesses — but this very low word-count does work as a change of pace. It is pretty cool to have SO many 6- and 7-letter entries interlocking in those corners.

A very cool finding to discover three famous Greek people that have such fun wordplay.

– puzzle by Derek Bowman

ML's great idea, making candy cane shapes out of black squares. And then when she paired CANDY CANE with ST NICHOLAS (who's tied to CANDY CANEs by legend), it seemed nearly perfect. If we could only figure out what might fit in those "unchecked" squares in the crooks of the candy canes …

The engineer in me laid out the X M A S in left to right, top to bottom sequential order (the M to the west, the A to the east, and S in the south). It should be logical and orderly, dammit! ML very tactfully pointed out that this looked weird. Being weird, I took this as a compliment.

Thankfully, ML managed to convince me that a clockwise ordering of X M A S made much more sense.

We started with a 64-word grid (the block between AL HIRT and RCA removed). I like a challenge, and going down that low — along with the puzzle already being constrained by the candy cane blocks and the pair of mini-themers — seemed like a fun adventure.

After laying out many skeletons and testing to see which would give us the most flexibility, we barreled into the east section. We had the OPERA???? pattern in place pretty early, and we tried many different things (BUFF, COAT, DIVA, FANS, GOER, HATS, SOLO, STAR, etc.) before OPERA CAPE lent itself to snappy fill. MSRP / OCT / SEP weren't great, but getting SMART CAR / NO-LOOK PASS (I was a huge Magic Johnson fan) / IT'S A KEEPER / HALF-COCKED fill seemed well worth it.

The other three corners proved more challenging. It was only after weeks of work that we finally gave in and added the black squares to turn the 64-worder into a 66-worder. This allowed us to get in a lot of nice SEA MONSTER / KGB SPIES / AD AGENCY / TELENOVELA ("Jane the Virgin" fans, anyone?) / FREE RIDE stuff without much glue, but man oh man do I hate giving up. Anyway, who cares how many words there are — what's most important is how much entertainment the solver has.

Merry X A S M! Or whatever. Weirdo.

– puzzle by Mary Lou Guizzo and Jeff Chen

Nice 70-worder from James today. I like the challenge he gives himself — big "L" corners like in the NE and SW are no joke. It's hard enough to come up with a triple-stack when the crossing answers are short, but try doing it when some of the crossers are eight letters long. Add in the fact that those long crossers have to be snazzy (since you don't want to waste any of your long slots), and it's a real bear.

I like how clean James got this grid. TROJAN WAR / LIFE COACH / CENTER ICE is a beautiful stack, with nothing remotely gluey required. WAIT A BIT and ACCUTANE aren't quite as nice to my ear, especially since ACCUTANE is off the market now, but RHETORIC is a strong word loaded with feeling.

Similar results for the opposite corner. FAT ALBERT / IN ESSENCE / CASUAL SEX all colorful (although the last one feels a bit too edgy for the NYT crossword, IMO), but SPECIFIC and ATHLETES are more neutral than assets in my eyes.

Both corners show how tough this grid arrangement is — James did a great job getting both of them super clean and smooth, but four of the 12 slots fell into neutral territory for me. This is why most people try to separate their triple-stacks, rather than having them intersect.

I'm sure there will be RIEMANN hypothesis haters out there, but I love a good mystery and I love me some math. I can't say I understand the details, but almost anything on a list of "Millennium Prize Problems" will intrigue me. And to James's point, there's such a wide variety of answers today. Something for everyone is a great philosophy.

I also liked James's use of 6-letter entries to try to spice up the puzzle more. WAVE AT is a bit neutral, but there's something fun about I NEVER and HEY NOW! Even SO VERY is kind of nice. I liked that corner a lot.

Totally stumped by ACED — [Didn't get a return from] made me think about the IRS. Great clue. And great piece of trivia about NATO's flag: [… dark blue, symbolizing an ocean].

– puzzle by James Mulhern

★ Loved this puzzle. C.C. (Zhouqin) and Don's wide range of plays on double-letters is really cool. I vaguely remembered NN as MINNESOTA TWINS from somewhere, but most of the others felt fresh. OO = the Os in ONION RINGS ("rings" within ONION) is such a clever find. PP = the central letters of SHOPPING CENTER. AA = NCAA FINALS, i.e. the final letters of NCAA. So many different discoveries, all using in-the-language phrases!

LEADOFF DOUBLE did throw me for a second — shouldn't "leadoff" mean that the double letters are at the front of the word? — but after thinking about it, it's just that the FF is a "double" within LEADOFF. It works, but the unintentional mislead made me feel like it was the weakest of the bunch.

But I'll pause here to repeat how much I loved the idea and the nine themers.

The execution was very nice, too. A 140-word puzzle is so tough to cleanly and snazzily fill, especially when you have nine themers. Not much long fill, but what great usage of their 7-letter slots. HALFCAF, AIR FARE, OH GREAT, LUDDITE, NATASHA (with a clue from "Rocky and Bullwinkle"!) = all wonderful entries. I wasn't sure what SANGRITA was (sangria, anyone?) but I don't drink much besides beer and scotch these days.

A great majority of the time, I see too much glue in NYT Sunday crosswords for my taste. It's understandable, as a 140-word puzzle is just really darn hard to put together without some glue. So to keep it to really minor ENS, EST, INTL, SPEE kind of stuff is excellent work. I really dislike DNAS, since it and RNA are rarely pluralized outside crosswords, but that's the only real standout.

Again, incredibly fun idea with a wide range of findings for those double letters. One of my favorite Sunday puzzles of the year.

– puzzle by Don Gagliardo and Zhouqin Burnikel