THURSDAY PUZZLE — I was of two minds about Tracy Gray’s puzzle.
On the one hand, I like Ms. Gray’s puzzles thus far and her theme today, while I feel like it has been done before, is pleasant enough for a Thursday. Ms. Gray has taken common phrases that end in “ON” and set the first half ON top of the second.
On the other hand, there is some pretty gnarly fill in this grid, and it makes me wonder if a different grid design might have enabled her to fill her grid with entries better than AAHED AT or AT ONE, both of which sound awkward to my ear. There’s also the particularly tough crossing of TEASELS and SAHEL. Instead of cluing the new phrases — which would have increased the entertainment value of the puzzle, because the resulting phrases are all sort of based in reality — the puzzle is rooted in Thursday level by cluing the theme entries “literally.” Mostly, this grid looks, to me, like an immense struggle had taken place not to duplicate fill. I’ve enjoyed solving Ms. Gray’s other puzzles much more.
However, I did like the entries SMACKER, SCARFED and KISSCAM, which makes its debut today.
Clue(s) of the Day for me were “It’s a wrap” for ROBE and “Flip over,” a nice bit of misdirection, for ADORE.
Constructor’s Notes:
The idea for this puzzle came to me right off the bat … Baton Rouge, that is, which my constructor mind parsed as BAT-ON-ROUGE – two legitimate words separated by “ON.” I then found many other phrases including JACKS-ON-FIVE, WAG-ON-TRAIN, NIX-ON-TAPES, and DICED-ON-IONS, and I began building my grid with the first word literally (over) “ON” the second word.
In a perfect constructing world, I would have been able to keep some of my favorite phrases. But, with the constraints of five stacked theme entries and symmetry, I struggled with the fill and had several grids going at one time, moving the location of the theme letters above and below each other and swapping out various theme entries. Eventually, I was able to fill a grid successfully but still decided to beef up the center of the grid and changed my seed entry BATON ROUGE (3 over 5 letters) to SURGEON GENERAL (5 over 7 letters).
I want to thank Will for keeping my original wording of “literally” in the cluing of the theme entries, but for editing them all to a Thursday level difficulty. For example: My cluing for CARSON CITY was “Literally … Capital of Nevada” and Will edited it to “Literally … a Western state capital” — which is ambiguous and definitely more Thursday-appropriate.
Also, with the recent discussions of how long it takes to get from acceptance to publishing, here is the info: Mailed July 16, 2014, accepted Sept. 10, 2014, published Nov. 13, 2014. Thanks, Will and Joel!
Your thoughts?