Tuesday, December 5, 2023, Nate Cardin

It's a new day in NYC, and in the couple of hours I've been up, I have yet to get stuck in an elevator. That might be because I haven't used one yet. We'll see.

It's been a while since I've seen one of these types of themes. I'd heard that Will Shortz had put the kibosh on the X goes well in front of both A and B, when A + B make a separate theme answer. The mathematical way of putting this is a little dry, so here's how today's theme works.

The revealer is 54A: Irritable ... or how you might describe all the words in the answers to the starred clues? (OUTOFSORTS). Questionable that they highlighted the squares for "out of," but it shows how each of the words can go along with that phrase to make a new one. Thus, PRINTORDER leads to "out of print," and "out of order." I am amused at the reparsed revealer. The idea of calling these words "sorts" makes me chuckle for some reason.

All four theme answers are well recognizable phrases, so the theme works very nicely. It's also impressive to squeeze so many of them into a 15 x 15 grid. The black squares are set up so that only two answers have to go through three theme answers, and they are strong entries, with ROCKJOCK and the well-clued FREEGIFT, drawing attention to the redundancy built into the phrase.

I'm betting that constructors are so happy that the Oreo brand was extended to cereals. OREOOS... all those vowels in one entry.

I'm not sure about SNORTY, but otherwise I have no complaints today. Also no tricksy or clever clues, typical for a Tuesday. Nice work!

- Colum