Crossword Fiend Forum

I was going for a Tuesdayish level of difficulty here.

4:26

Haven't heard of the theme entry, which doesn't help my theme enjoyment, but remember I'm not American. The entry GARDENGNOMES is probably my favourite, mostly though it was the clues that were fun: 27A, 35A (pretty much salvages that entry!), 59A, 46D were the best!

69-letters for a Tuesday is an astonishing amount, but you handled the constraints most admirably - some of the shorter fill is on the meh side, but there's nothing terrible, and nothing that stopped it from being a solid Tuesday difficulty.

Aside: 7D: "Hallelujah" - not a song I was familiar with from my father's early-period Leonard Cohen CD's, but I heard it while watching "Watchmen" and got a-hold of it, and have been playing it over and over for the last 3 weeks!

Having that much theme was not much help in constructing the puzzle... I'd worked on it off and on for a couple of months (on paper which made things go a lot slower than if I'd done things on a computer) before landing on that grid. I didn't even realize I could make the circled squares symmetrically placed -- that was just a happy accident! For some reason having just two acrosses on the top/bottom rows made constructing easier than when I'd tried grids with three. Goofy.

'Hallelujah' seems like it's Cohen's most famous song, to me. There's a cover of it by Jeff Buckley, which i think was later covered by one of those insufferable American Idol twerps. At least it was the first song of his I've heard.

Glad you liked what you did though! Lots of short fill in the downs definitely hurts the puzzle but the longer acrosses hopefully balance that out somewhat.

Don't want to discourage you, but it was all obscure to me, for reasons cited by G. although he liked it. The theme was meaningless to me. (To be honest, I'm also not all that fond of circled-letter themes anyway, as one can make almost anything appear by circling the right letters.) And I, too, didn't recognize the song. Like him, I had an elder relative into Cohen in his heyday, when I understood "Suzanna" (sp?) to be a hit and maybe "There Is a War." Hated them.

Here, the circled letters were at the edges, enclosing the rest of the theme entry. This is much more of a constraint than having circled letters interspersed throughout a long answer. And they're all magazine titles. Not every magazine title lends itself to this treatment. Is there a phrase that can be wrapped inside GLAMOUR or FORBES or NEWSWEEK?

[Central Beijing locale, et al.]
FORBIDDEN CITIES

[Camilla Parker Bowles, once]
GLORIFIED PARAMOUR

[Aristotle Onassis, e.g.]
NEWSWORTHY GREEK