Evan Birnholzs March 24 Post Magazine crossword, Life Cycle

Hello from Stamford, Conn. I’m at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, this time as a tournament constructor and official. I won’t give spoilers about which puzzle I wrote in case you plan to solve the puzzles online or in print from home, but you can follow the standings here. By around 1 or 2 p.m. today, we should know our winner.

Today’s puzzle has a rather small amount of theme material compared to what I normally do. Considering the subject, though, maybe that’s appropriate.

The theme revealer is at 69A: [Phrase about spreading sickness (and, more literally, this puzzle’s circled squares)], which is THERE’S A BUG GOING AROUND — a stroke of luck that it turned out to be 21 letters long. The six sets of circled squares feature a CICADA, reading either clockwise or counterclockwise, and the letters rotate around each successive ring so that C is the top letter of the first ring, I is the top letter of the second ring, and so on.

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Two other long answers round out the rest of the theme: 3D: [Cycle for a species of this puzzle’s featured creature] is SEVENTEEN YEARS, and 55D: [Sphecius speciosus wasps, to this puzzle’s featured creature] is NATURAL ENEMIES. Those wasps are more colloquially known as cicada killers.

It’s not the most complex theme ever, but I don’t mind running an easy puzzle now and again. As I found out, there just wasn’t that much room for other theme answers; that’s because triple-checked letters (that is, letters used to spell out three answers) have a way of constraining your options real fast.

I did consider using different kinds of insects with an even number of letters besides the cicada, but as I discovered, not all of them are technically considered “bugs.” There’s an order of insects known as the true bugs, and many of them just have the word “bug” in their name. Other insects like the beetle don’t belong to this order, and so I didn’t know if it’d be apt to include them.

Some other answers and clues:

• 9A: [Pizza chain that’s an anagram of 16 Down] is SBARRO and 6D: [Vine-lined lattices] is ARBORS. Just trying to help out there, folks, since I didn’t know if the O of SBARRO would make for a tough crossing with 14D: [“Hamlet” courtier], which is OSRIC.
• 20A: [Term for the comparison between the large number of replies to the much smaller number of likes and retweets a tweet gets, on Twitter] is RATIO. That’s a long-winded way of getting to an answer which normally has far shorter clues, but basically, the ratio is a way of knowing if someone made a really, really bad tweet. If a user tweets something and the tweet gets, say, three retweets and 15 likes but 500 replies, that user is said to be “ratioed.” Even Merriam-Webster published an essay on this relatively new usage.
• 55A: [Glass home?] is NPR. The clue refers to the longtime NPR host Ira Glass.
• 60A: [Beetle that may have a wing, e.g.] is CAR. Well, if I couldn’t use beetles in the theme, I could still throw them in another clue elsewhere. The “wing” is a device you put on the back of a car to increase drag.
• 77A: [Apple store?] is MARKET. My favorite clue today.
• 77D: [Shortest month in Paris?] is MAI. It’s the shortest month because it has fewer letters than other months in French, just like May does in English.
• 116D: ["___ got a golden ticket” (lyric sung by Grandpa Joe)] is I’VE. Just an excuse to link the video from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.”

See you next week!

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