Evan Romer

What a wonderful puzzle! I had almost the whole puzzle completed, leaving all the circles blank ... with a nagging suspicion that I was missing something. Why "double or nothing"? All the circles are empty. Where's the "double"? But then I wanted a double D for "long odds," and a blank for "skied" ... but wait, "skidded" works too ... and then I see O M G they *all* work that way. 5 downs and 5 acrosses, clued so that they work with doubles or nothings. And good, fair clues. Wow. Delightful!

I notice that (at the time I'm writing this) both commenters who tried to make a comment with alternating vowels and consonants made a mistake and broke the pattern. Makes one appreciate more the difficult task the constructor set himself. And he had to worry about all the crosses. And he managed to do it all without a lot of arcane fill.

A quibble: a NOVA is not an exploding star. A supernova is an exploding star, but a supernova is not a type of nova -- it's a different kind of stellar event.

A minor point, and it didn't impede my solving, but OXO isn't a losing line in tictactoe. It's more of a not-winning-yet, not-losing-yet line. A final grid filled with OXO, XXO, etc. is a tie.