Daniel Raymon author page

HÄAGEN DAZS and VOLKSWAGEN … brands with umlauts! "Name That Theme," defeated!

Wait. MAGEN DAVID? Unlikely to have an umlaut.

And now I realize that VOLKSWAGEN also doesn't have an umlaut.

The HIDDEN / AGENDA is easily "make fun of Jeff's stupidity."

What isn't easy is finding such a long hidden word, split across words of a phrase. I'd seen AGENDA inside HAAGEN DAZS before, and I was vaguely familiar with the term MAGEN DAVID, but I would never have guessed that three hidden AGENDAs were possible. Creative find in VOLKSWAGEN DASHER. I appreciated that the clue nudged to the correct answer since that car dashed into the night decades ago.

Some tough vocab for an early-week puzzle — my newb friends will be texting me. ARRANT seems like a pirate's version of ERRANT, ENNEAD's prefix is much less common than hexa- or octa- or deca-, and I recognize KETONE from chem college classes but would have no idea how to define it.

Any one of them might be fine on its own. All three being six letters long … 666 … could it be ...

Puzzles full of proper nouns can be divisive. PENZANCE will elate some, confuse others. Throw in upwards of 20 others, and it's the most proper-heavy property in recent memory.

"Hidden words" themes are a tough sell these days, especially when you repeat the same word over and over again. However, embedding such a long target word helped.

Day 3 of the CUJO (Cracking Up Jim Horne with Overthinking) show!

(inside Jeff's head as he valiantly tries not to embarrass himself)

Okay, Jeff. This theme is what an overthinker's DREAMS are made of. BLANKET OF SNOW, SHEET OF ICE, BED OF ROSES … solid "X OF (nature thing)" theme. It works. But FIELD OF DREAMS as a revealer? How does that work? DREAMS aren't something occurring in nature.

Or are they?

Could this be a meta-answer? DREAMS do often involve SNOW, ICE, ROSES. Especially when your daughter is obsessed with "Frozen," forcing you to watch it over and over, "A Clockwork Orange"-style.

According to the clue, FIELD OF DREAMS is a hint to the other themers. Why?

Because … BLANKET, SHEET, BED are things that are around you when you dream?

Because … oh! Because you can have a SNOWFIELD, an ICEFIELD, and a — drat. ROSEFIELD isn't a thing.

What a minefield.

Does FIELD refer to the field of dream analysis? Or perhaps psychoanalysis, which I'm clearly needing after this rambling brain vomit--

Jim: Ahem. You've been silent on the phone for 78 minutes now. Have you figured it out?

Jeff: Well ... you see ...

Jim: Don't worry, me neither.

It's a valiant attempt at doing something above and beyond. Both Jim and I got more confusion than a click from the FIELD OF DREAMS revealer, though.

The layout also made it hard to connect the dots. As much as I enjoy mirror symmetry, regular symmetry would have been better. The beddish set of black squares didn't work well enough to justify the herky-jerky presentation of themers.

I do love TOSCANINI and TEEN IDOLS as fill. However, with so many themers in short slots, those great long bonuses murk up what is theme and what is not.

This is a near-great set of findings, the three X of Y themers described by FIELD OF DREAMS in a myriad of different ways. Unfortunately, none of those multiple ways were spot-on, almost tangling each other up, leaving me with not such a dreamy overall impression. Overall, though, I'd rather constructors shoot for the stars, striving to do something above and beyond, even if it doesn't end up having the desired impact.

Anagrams. Some people love ‘em, some heat ‘em.

My wife, Jill, used to be a talented Scrabble player, but she sometimes kept herself up at night, her brain anagramming the snot out of random seraphs. Probably a good thing she gave it up.

I fall somewhere in the middle. I've seen a lot of anagram concepts in crosswords, so I'm mixed on meth.

I appreciated the consistency Dani showed today, each themer following a consistent "(name) + [apostrophe] S + (anagram of name)" pattern. Nice change of pace to get a full set of female names, too, all too uncommon in a heavily male-leaning crossworld.

13-letter themers are tough to work with. Note how LAUREN'S UNREAL forces a long down in WELLS FARGO. Dani could have broken this up by blacking out TAS at 45-Across, but that's a visually unappealing option. I don't mind WELLS FARGO, but it didn't do a lot for me giving their recent banking scandal.

Not a lot of other options there, though, the W??L???R?? pattern only returning a handful of alternatives like WORLD WAR II, WILLOW TREE, and from our private list, WALLY WORLD, WORLD B FREE.

(A certain crossword editor fits that pattern, but he's said he never wants to feature himself in a puzzle.)

Those two long downs, WELLS FARGO and EVEN BETTER (which is even better than Wells Fargo — what bank isn't? *rimshot*), force the only dabs of glue in the puzzle, OTO and ELY. A strong result given the layout Dani chose.

I'd have liked some rationale to counteract my anagrannui, but I couldn't think of anything besides WOMENS LIB, which feels outdated, and LOOSE WOMEN. Any blogger stupid enough to even mention that last one should get flamed to hell and back. Talk about a big GAS BILL!

Nice bonuses in GAS BILL, NFL GAME, COMPASS, TOP DOG. Along with a polished grid, it all came together as a solid early-week offering.

I like a sound change theme, done well. Q-sound changes / additions have been done several times before in different venues (sorry Dani!), but just as long as the results are amusing, there's room for another one.

TRENCH QUOTE (from "trench coat") as a quote from a guy in a trench? Funny stuff! ORDER IN THE QUART (from "order in the court") as a request for ice cream delivery? Amusing.

There was only one that didn't kite — er, quite — do it for me: QUERY WASHINGTON. It works fine from a technical standpoint, deriving from Kerry Washington. But neither the resulting phrase nor its clue carries any humor — no entertaining images elicited. A shame to kick off the puzzle with your weakest themer.

No doubt that humor is subjective.

Fun to get all the Qs throughout the puzzle. It helped my solve, as once I was onto the theme, I kept asking myself what down answers were likely to contain Qs. [Trophy alternative] had to be PLAQUE. [Hard-shell clams]? I confidently plunked in QUAHOGS without any crossing letters.

Fun when a theme helps with the rest of the solve! Made me feel kick on the draw.

Er, quick.

Good gridwork overall, especially considering how many Qs Dani had to work around. Some of those Qs came at a price, req'ing SEQS and ESQS. But that's not bad at all.

I hitched at some of the ERY REDYE ETHNO IDEO YEO stuff, but it wasn't much different from other Sunday 140-word puzzles.

ROHAN … even this LotR fanboy had to squint at that one a few times before moving on.

APACE ANNOYER stretched me a bit further. Darn it!

But ultimately, it was a reasonable set of trade-offs given the level of difficulty.

The only real wince I had was RWR crossing SHAWNEES (and ESURANCE to a lesser degree). I pieced it all together — SHAWNEES had to be more right than SHAHNEES or SHAYNEES, and I should have recognized SHAWNEES more immediately — but who is RWR?

Ronald … Reagan? Since when does anyone refer to him as RWR? Or even Ronald W. Reagan? Huh.

Overall, great to get all those Qs, in amusingly kooky phrases. Fun finds.

I'm not sure how to describe today's sound change theme. FORD to FJORD, BOOTY to BEAUTY, FOOD to FEUD, COUP to QUEUE … the last three are all "ooh" to "eew," nice and consistent. That first one though — FORD doesn't have the "ooh" sound, nor does FJORD match the "eew" pattern. I spent a long time trying to figure out if there was perhaps another way these all connected, i.e., a consistent spelling change, or letter substitution? Alas, no.

Or was there! I was complaining to Jim about the one inconsistent themer, and he asked why adding a Y sound was inconsistent in FORD to FJORD. D'oh! I'm curious how many other people biffed on comprehending the theme concept.

FINGER FEUD was a winning themer for me, evoking a funny image. BEAUTY CALL was a so-so resulting phrase, but I enjoyed getting the base phrase of BOOTY CALL in my crossword. Love it; in total agreement with Dani.

MILITARY QUEUE felt too much like a real thing — aren't there a lot of lines in the military? — and I've seen FJORD EXPLORER in different crossword contexts. So these two didn't do much for me.

I enjoyed the bonuses Dani worked in, LION TAMERS, AGGREGATOR, MACUSER looking like a fun Scottish name, and even BIG IF and DOG IT. Unusual for me to notice short fill in a good way!

A couple of EVAS, URB, EZIO (perhaps he's more familiar to an older generation?) dabs of crossword glue, but nothing egregious. Pretty well-executed grid. I think EVAS could have been removed fairly easily, though — I'm almost sure there are better options in that mostly unconstrained corner. (I know, I'm so nit-picky!)

Big ups for the EDIT clue. It's hard to make a short entry interesting, but the clever wordplay in "Paraphrase" to "Pare a phrase?" is brilliant.

After having the theme explained to me, I liked the concept. Pretty neat that all the Y-sound-additions were done with different spelling changes! But alas, the cleverness went over my head.

Sometimes people ask me why alternating vowel-consonant patterns are so prized among crossword constructors, and that upper left corner perfectly illustrates it. The nature of the English language is such that many words tend to have this alternation, and it generally makes for easy filling if you stick to it. Entries like AGATE and TRICE are not as fun as the crazy starts of FJORD and CZARS for example, but they do tend to make for an easier job.

Double L doubles today, themers where both words contain an LL. I liked CHILL PILL and MILLARD FILLMORE, but it would have been nice to have a car that was more recent than the CADILLAC SEVILLE (or to have a clue that makes the entry more playful).

Interesting interlocking pattern. It is nice to see something different than the usual all-themers-run-horizontally, but I tend to value interlock less than Will does. It is pretty neat when it can happen, but sometimes it feels like it makes the themers stand out less. Also, I wonder how many non-constructors even notice the interlock.

Jim reminded me a while ago that "crosswordese" is very subjective. I was confused when he said he was perfectly fine with AGUE, but I better understand now — he's used to seeing it in many of the historical novels he reads. So although AGUE, OMOO, HIES, STERE feel gluey to me personally, they're certainly not universally to be avoided.

A couple of nice mid-length entries in EXALTED and SCHERZO. Both of them are pretty interesting in their own right, but the clues, referencing the Grand EXALTED Ruler of the Elks and SCHERZO meaning "joke" in Italian, elevated them even higher.

Often, I prefer not to have a theme revealer hit me on the head, but today I think it would have injected more pizzazz into the puzzle. Perhaps something like HOCKEY STICKS, playing on H-E-double hockey sticks = HELL? It is sort of neat to see what these five themers have in common, but a bow on the package might have been nice.

ADDED NOTE: I missed that the theme is actually double ILL. Dagnabbit! There's no doubt I'm ILL-informed.

Congrats to Dani for his first themeless! He follows a tried and true path, essentially creating four triple-stacks (one in each corner) and seeding them with new phrases.

What makes for a good seed entry? A snappy phrase in itself is great, but I think something that lends itself to a clever clue makes it even better. CROWD SOURCE is a nice 1-Across, a strong way to start the puzzle. But the clue is straightforward, because it kind of needs to be — if the solver doesn't know the term already, any sort of wordplay will be lost on him/her. Introducing new entries into the crossword lexicon is a tricky business.

REST ASSURED is another great phrase — hard to believe it hasn't been used before. Not only is it snazzy, but it's so commonly heard that a clever clue could have been employed. A missed opportunity there, as ["Don't worry ..."] is a pretty easy clue. But then again, it is Friday, not Saturday, and I'm all for making some themeless puzzles more accessible to newcomers.

So tricky to knit an entire themeless together without glue. It's often near impossible to get by without any at all, so I think a good approach is to draw from different types of glue to help fool the solver into glossing over the crunchy bits. If there's a partial here, a random Roman numeral there, a plural name in a corner, so be it. It's so much easier to notice when a majority of it comes from one arena.

In today's case, Dani does a nice job with the fill, but there's so much concentrated in esoteric names that it sticks out: LEBEAU, EMLEN, RERI, NEVIS, LIAT. As Will mentioned, LEBEAU crossing EMLEN will be rough on some solvers, especially because I can see people putting in LA BEAU / EMLAN. I vaguely know Dick LEBEAU but even as a rabid football fan growing up in the golden age of Joe Montana and Jerry Rice, it didn't come easily to me.

The NW and SE stacks are quite nice; always a plus to get three strong entries atop each other. Each one being a multiple-word entry is a real bonus.

Neat idea today, an elegance to the word TRIANGLES breaking perfectly into three groups of three. There's something so pretty to that. I also liked Dani's natural progression, from a SCALENE (no sides of equal length) to ISOCELES (two sides of equal length) to EQUILATERAL (all three sides of equal length). I really enjoy seeing constructor's background shine through in a puzzle.

It took me a while to figure out what the circled letters were spelling, because I have a propensity to read in a clockwise fashion. I found it to be a bit odd that the TRI / ANG / LES go counterclockwise. Perhaps that's a cultural difference? In any case, I did appreciate the extra layer. Three themers + three triangles + TRI ANG LES fixed into place = a lot of depth.

Speaking of extra layers, I would have loved to see a triangle hinted at in the black squares. If you squint really hard, you can almost see the start of a triangle in the "hill" of black squares (above FLO). It would be very hard to do, especially at the tips of the triangles, but what a neat effect that could be.

Mirror symmetry can be a great tool to have in your arsenal. It's really the only way to pull off today's puzzle, because SCALENE 7 / ISOSCELES 9 / EQUILATERAL 11 can't work with regular crossword symmetry. What a fortuitous coincidence that they're all of odd length, allowing mirror symmetry to work! Another progression that would have worked: SCALENE 7 / RIGHT 5 / EQUILATERAL 11. Hard to leave out the poor right triangle in all its Pythagorean glory, but what can you do.

Quite a few constraints today, and they force a few compromises. Rich Norris at the LAT limits partials to a maximum of two, so A TAB / OH TO / OF A is an unfortunate way to open the puzzle. I understand the constraints of the EQUILATERAL triangle — you can't move around just one of the three vertices — but the SCALENE and ISOSCELES both have enough flexibility that it feels like some of the partials plus the PSAS / ARIS / OST stuff could have been cleaned up by shifting the position of circles.

All in all, an elegant idea with some compromises in execution.

ADDED NOTE: an astute reader, Jean Cranmer, was confused because the bottom triangle didn't look equilateral to her. I smugly sent her definitions of "isosceles" and "equilateral" and then... realized that the sides of the bottom triangle are 5.83 (using the Pythagorean theorem to calculate) whereas the base is 6. I imagine this is the closest Dani could come to an approximate equilateral triangle in a 15x square grid. Thanks for the catch, Jean! (And a good reminder that I'm frequently wrong.)

Rebus with a revealer; SOAPBOX describing the four different brands of SOAP crammed into individual BOXes. In today's age of ever evolving crosswords, straight rebuses without a revealer have sort of run their course. I like that Dani has given us a reason why he's made these four rebus squares; it adds a nice touch to the puzzle.

I found it a lot of fun sussing out where the rebus squares were. Once I uncovered the central answer, it was a bit of a puzzle hunt to go seek them out (and boy, do I like puzzle hunts!). For me, the hardest one by far was TONE, because I had never heard of that brand. The others gave me a nice a-ha moment, but TONE was a bit of a head-scratcher. (And no, I wasn't scratching my head because I don't use enough soap, thank you.) It was too bad, because being a mechanical engineer at heart, I loved the PISTON ENGINE entry. I was amused to hear that it was one of Dani's least favorite themers. Funny how widely tastes differ, eh?

In general, if there are only a few rebus squares, I really appreciate when they get placed into the longest answers of the puzzle, in snazzier entries. ZEST inside SEIZES THE DAY and BRONZE STAR, that's great. Really nice moment of discovery. DIAL in DIALECT... not as much. Although I did admire the craziness of LAVA in BRATISLAVA and BAKLAVA. That was pretty cool.

With essentially nine theme answers, the fill is bound to suffer a little, and we see signs of it in the awkward I HAD A (for whatever reason, several close constructor friends and I detest the five-letter partial — go figure), A NUT, WNW, WPA, ROKS sort of stuff. It certainly wasn't that bad, and definitely worth the trade-off for me.

Some solvers will not even notice though. A very nice reader, Lois Padawer, wrote in a few weeks ago with a comment after I pooh-poohed A MOLE in a grid: "I just learned about 'Whac-a-mole' a couple of weeks ago, as it was the name of an episode of The Good Wife (the name of the episode appears when you click "Info" on Tivo). TV is not usually one of my favorite categories, but you never know where pleasure will come from in a puzzle."

So yes, partials are generally inelegant, but they can serve their purposes. And it's always good to get a dose of humility, perhaps a good reminder that I don't know everything; that I always have more to learn today than I did yesterday. And that's okay.

Ahem. Note the word "perhaps."

Nice theme, changing the SK to the SQU sound. I'm not sure why I found the theme answers so amusing, but I still giggle when I think about SQUID MARKS. I recently read a middle-grade book about a young comedian who said K is the funniest sound in the alphabet, but I'd open that up to the SQU chunk any day.

The base phrases are so solid, too, more so than other sound-change puzzles from recent memory: SKID MARKS, SCARE TACTIC, SKIRT CHASER, GREAT SCOTT; each one an entry I'd be proud to include in a themeless grid. It's almost a shame to not include them into the puzzle as is, but luckily the morphed phrases are very amusing.

Dani* does something interesting with his grid today, including four 7-letter pieces of fill in the across direction. It's usually easier to break things up more, just counting on your downs for longer fill, but not always. Today, some mixed success. I really liked having TEASERS as a bonus, but the other three, OUTLAID, NEWSIES**, and THEISTS fell flat for me.

Let's look at NEWSIES and THEISTS. I'm sure a case could be made for both (if you're big into theater or religious studies), but I'd bet a majority of solvers would see both of them as average to lesser-than average entries. It's unfortunate that they sit in such constrained positions, giving few options at those locations. NEWSIES for example: it sits atop SQUARE TACTIC and intersects two nice long downs, GRADE A and MR SMITH. I'd almost rather it be broken up into two 3-letter entries, so it doesn't detract from the really good stuff around it.

And let me emphasize, there is a good amount of nice long stuff here. LANDSCAPER, SENSITIZED, Casey STENGEL, in addition to the aforementioned GRADE A and MR SMITH. But I tend to prefer when a high percentage of long fill is quality, even if that means that there isn't a huge quantity of it.

All in all, a funny sound-change puzzle that I much enjoyed. Often times, sound-change puzzles resulting in supposedly wacky phrases aren't nearly wacky enough for me, but this one did it for yours truly, still giggling like a wienerschnitzel at SQUID MARKS.

*Dani says his name is pronounced "Donnie" and is the Hebrew form of "Danny". Maybe I'll just go with "What up, D?"

**ADDED NOTE: Dani wrote that he loved NEWSIES (the movie) as a kid. I think good crosswords should elicit positive feelings from solvers, and this obviously does so for Dani. So perhaps I've underestimated NEWSIES. For any NEWSIES groupies out there, my apologies!