Sunday, November 1 2026, Kevin Curry and Zhou Zhang

Greetings everybody!  It's been a looong time since I last had the pen on this Blog thing.  Thanks Horace+Frannie+Colum for crushing it in the meantime!  

Today's puzzle was so much fun. We're presented with an unusual-looking grid, with clusters of black squares in the interior and several entries partially highlighted in grey.  Also, sprinkled throughout are several circled letters.  So ignoring all this, and the self-referential clue at 1A ("This puzzle's subject"), I just worked my way around the (quite gentle) grid in a clockwise spiral, encountering no real roadblocks along the way until the very bottom right corner, where 122A "Its famous holes are formed by propionibacteria" and 108D "'Smile!'" intersect in their last square, which happens to be circled, and is filled with the six-letter ending to SWISSCHEESE and SAYCHEESE.  That was an interesting development, given the circled squares already encountered were all filled with single letters..  

Moving along (and moving the narrative along) .. the grid got filled in and I hadn't really consulted the "theme" clues (the ones with the partially greyed answers), so it was at that point that I was able to sit back, inspect everything and appreciate the cleverness of the construction:  I already had CHEESE in the lower right; and the answer to 1A turned out to be LABRAT.  Now finally looking at those theme clues - each only cluing the un-greyed part of its answer, with the greyed part being an additional word, completely unclued, which results in a perfectly legal phrase.  For example -

• 30A "Appetizers, entree or dessert" : OBSTACLECOURSE
  
• 67D "Many a shipwreck site" : BARRIERREEF

The greyed words have something in common - they're all impediments to progress - and sure enough, if you treat them as such and view the whole grid as a maze, there's only one way to navigate from top left to bottom right - to get the LABRAT to the CHEESE (which explains the odd placement of black squares).  Collecting the circled letters along the way, they spell out WHOMOVEDMYCHEESE, the title of a best-selling motivational book.  So many layers to this puzzle!

I've gone on long enough here.  My one blip was filling in BURMESE and not SIAMESE for "Feline with distinctive blue eyes".  I looked it up - Burmese cats' eyes are yellow. Oh also!  There I am, as the answer to 53D "Pride of Punxatawney"!!

Not getting the Terseness Award for this review, I fear.  But I hope you enjoyed this puzzle as much as I did!

Cheerio and Happy All Saints' Day!

-philbo