Not a great result, but also not unexpected, considering JOKE and JOB were fixed firmly into place.Īnd those two lower corners. I had a feeling something odd was going on when I started the puzzle with OPE crossing OPEL. Granted that Richard needed 12 phrases to pull this one off, I thought he did well overall with the theme, especially considering that he found 12 that could be worked in symmetrically. (dirty) LAUNDRY, yes! (dirty) MONEY … okay, but not as great as (dirty) HARRY. Some of the theme answers worked better than others for me. I've highlighted the twelve "dirty" entries below to help them stand out. Who would have guessed that there are 12 phrases having DIRTY as a first word? Some cool finds like (dirty) RAT, (dirty) LIAR, (dirty) MARTINI helping to play on THE DIRTY DOZEN. (You might notice that multiple other words could have been used instead.) With news this week of Adam West's passing, I would rather dedicate both the clue and the answer to his memory. Postscript: If pressured, I might admit that the answer to 57-down was intended to subliminally influence the opinion of certain NYT crossword reviewers. I hope the gimmick doesn't reveal itself too early, and that solvers enjoy the end result. Many thanks to Will and Joel for their steady and patient advice. If I had a choice to reclaim one clue, it would be "Carrie Underwood hit that includes Ajax as a lyric" for "Dirty" LAUNDRY. But Will and Joel appropriately took the cluing up a notch, while still leaving the spirit of most of my original clues intact. I felt my accepted submission was geared to earlier in the week. So while "glue" like SLYS, RRS, OPP and OPE were less than optimal, I am content knowing I considered countless alternative options.įor those who want to keep score, other "dirty words" used in earlier failed submissions included: POLITICS, LANGUAGE, DANCING, SHAME, MIND, RICE, POOL and DOG.įast forward to this week: I was very pleasantly surprised to see the puzzle run on a Thursday, the actual anniversary date of the movie. Squeezing in all the theme material also required 9 of the 13 entries to intersect with each other in some fashion.
The statistician in me points out that only ten words in the final grid do not contribute at least one letter to a theme entry. The challenge was not so much a matter of selecting good fill, but more a function of finding "any" fill that might work. This puzzle was by far the most difficult and time-consuming of my limited work to date. My next submission came back with "almost a yes," and after a few more tweaks, my work on this one was finally over. At one point in the process, Joel even commented that "the massive amount of theme material might make this too tough to construct cleanly." With the 50 th anniversary date looming, it finally occurred to me that using mirror symmetry might provide less constraining grid designs. So started a steady cycle of submissions, rejections, and complete rewrites.
Almost an "I dare you to try and fit 13 theme entries into a 15 x 15 grid!"
When my muse first dropped this "dirty" little idea on me several years ago, it was presented as more of a challenge than an opportunity.
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