September 11/12: Hey hey hey!/Just Add Water (Brooke Husic, Puzzmo)
October 29: Repeat Stuff (Ada Nicolle, Luckystreak Xwords)
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Hey hey hey!/Just Add Water (Brooke Husic)
Last year on September 21, I published a puzzle for Vox with this grid:
TONES was clued as ["Earth" follower], SWEPT as ["Wind" follower], and EMBER as [Fire follower], so the puzzle was a little tribute to Earth, Wind & Fire's "September." If I can toot my own horn a bit, I liked that it rested on a simple observation (that a song by Earth, Wind & Fire has a title ending with a word related to fire) and turned that observation into a theme in a consistent way.
Brooke's tribute to "September" has a similar genesis - she noticed that the phrase "how we knew love was here to stay" in the lyric "Remember how we knew love was here to stay" has a satisfyingly symmetrical set of numerations: both halves start with a 3-letter word and end with a 4-letter word, with 2- and 4-letter words (not necessarily in that order) in between. Many constructors would be satisfied with putting those words in a grid in an aesthetically appealing pattern and calling it a day, but Brooke went further. After all, the word "remember" is in that lyric too, so Brooke created two grids with the same pattern but different fills, both of which have the words "how we knew love was here to stay" in the same positions. Those two puzzles ran on consecutive days, so on the second day, the words could be unclued, in effect asking the solver "Do you remember?"
I've been playing around lately with puzzles that are really pairs of puzzles whose interrelationship results in more than the sum of their parts, and this is a fantastic example. Crosswords are generally a pretty ephemeral art form, and it's rare for the solver to remember much about the layout or fill in a crossword a day after solving. That's particularly the case for features that don't call attention to themselves, like the hidden lyric in the first of the two puzzles here - the clues don't tell the solver that they form a song lyric, so the solver either notices it as a sort of Easter egg, or doesn't realize it retroactively until the second puzzle reveals it. So it functions as a kind of invitation to solvers to dwell on the puzzles they solve, to look closely at their patterns and to understand what makes them tick. You never know if there's more to the puzzle than meets the eye (and even if there are no extra layers, there's always craft to appreciate).
An extra elegant touch: aside from the lyrics, the only word that's the same in both grids is REVEAL, which of course gets an innocuous clue in the first puzzle, but is clued as [Big moment for someone who constructed a two-part crossword] in the second puzzle. A cheeky reminder that cluing is everything: even the big REVEAL doesn't reveal anything unless the constructor chooses to make it reveal something.
Repeat Stuff (Ada Nicolle)
I posted recently about my admiration for Ada's themeless style, and she's certainly primarily known as a themeless constructor. But she mentioned to me recently that she's being trying to flex her theme muscles, too, and has been posting more themed stuff, with stunning results. It's kind of like if Michael Jordan had actually turned out to be an elite baseball player, too. What I like about Ada's recent themed puzzles is that they always give me a "wish I'd thought of that" feeling. Admittedly, that's partly because the themes have tended to be right up my alley. For example, she's had a couple of linguistics-adjacent themes lately, including a GREAT VOWEL SHIFT theme and a PERSON-FIRST LANGUAGE theme featuring languages that start with words for types of people (MANDARIN, GALLIFREYAN, GUYANESE CREOLE).
"Repeat Stuff" is no exception. I'm on record as enjoying themes that cheekily violate the no-dupes rule, and I also love themes that play on crossword lingo. This puzzle does both: the revealer, RUTHLESS DUPE, is a term used in crossword circles for an entry that shamelessly repeats or closely echoes another entry in the grid. Here, Ada literalizes that phrase, including BABY RUTH next to BABY and BABE RUTH next to BABE. What really takes it to the next level is that those two pairs also dupe each other ruthlessly, since BABY and BABE are basically the same word. This could've been spun into a 15x15 puzzle featuring, say, RUTH BENEDICT and BENEDICT, RUTH HANDLER and HANDLER, etc. But this version packs a minimalist punch that a larger puzzle wouldn't: it has precisely as much as is needed to execute the concept with maximum elegance, no more and no less.
