Apt Word to Follow

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TUESDAY PUZZLE — So there I was, on the bus to work the other day — minding my own business, in my own seat — when a man boarded and sat down next to me. We exchanged pleasantries (“Good morning, oh yes, very cold today …”) and I turned back to checking my email on my phone.

Those of you who use public transportation probably know what happened next. He closed his eyes, sighed and proceeded to widen what seemed to be his entire being. His shoulders slumped, his arms fell to his sides and his knees fell open. Into my space, so that I was crushed against the frosty window. And since I am both a lady and a delicate flower, I huddled selflessly against that window for the rest of my ride and let the poor man get his beauty rest.

No, that’s what we’d like to think happened, but we all know me better than that. A series of gradually louder “Excuse me!”s followed, until he had retreated back behind the invisible boundary between seats and dared not expand his knees even an inch farther.

Because I have no tolerance for MAN SPREADing, which, by way of a segue, would have been a spiffy theme entry in today’s puzzle by Jim Hilger.

Today’s Theme

Mr. Hilger returns with a theme that asks solvers to supply a word that would be appropriate to follow the words made from the circled squares when reading them across. That word, revealed at 68A, is SPREAD.

As an example, at 17A, the circled letters going across on that row spell CHEESE, and if you followed that with the word SPREAD, you would have a CHEESE SPREAD, which is delicious. Do that five more times, and you will have an assortment of spreads, none of which are edible.

I had a tough time with this one, because I kept hitting speed bumps like ORANGE RIND at 3D. I knew it had to be ORANGE something, and I wanted it to be ORANGE PULP because I was thinking about the inside of the juicer where the pulp gets left over, but yes, the RIND gets left behind on the outside. I also had a hard time wrapping my head around a word like WHERESOEVER. GARS have been in the puzzle often enough for me to know them, but I missed that one. And I had a devil of a time remembering OBOLI. There was enough easy stuff in here to make it almost feel like a Tuesday, but then I kept running into things I didn’t know or couldn’t remember, and the solve felt bumpy to me.

Tricky Clues

16A/25D: I got TAKE pretty easily and wanted 25D to be NOTES, but TAKE A MEMO is better as an “office request.” A fairly outdated one, but more appropriate.

30A: Mind your alphabetical gaps! When you see the word “connector” or “connection” in a clue and are given two letters, you need to fill in what’s missing in that string. So, “T-X connection” would be the letter string UVW.

27D: If there are any psychiatrists out there, please correct me if I’m wrong: I think this is clinically incorrect, but when read as a casual barb (“Man, you’re such a narcissist!”) it’s passable. A clinical narcissist actually has little to no self-esteem, and therefore requires an insatiable need for validation.

Constructor Notes

Hi to everyone. It’s great to have a crossword in The Times again. I built this puzzle in the fall of 2016. The published version looks very similar to what I originally submitted, but with some clues simplified for a Tuesday-level solve. (Clue that survived: “Rear admiral’s rear” for STERN. Clue that did not survive: “TX separatists, loosely speaking?” for UVW.)

I remember reworking the bottom of this grid just barely before submitting it, once it occurred to me that I could not only have the SPREAD revealer, but could reuse its “E” to unfold a BED SPREAD in the bottom row. Somehow, that “Aha!” moment made the puzzle an extra fun one for me to have constructed.

Hopefully, the circled answers will result in spreading some fun “Aha!” moments among the solvers, and they’ll figure it out somewhere around mid-solve.

Your thoughts?