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.

(Wednesday is my favorite day of the week (because that’s when the Thursday puzzle comes out.)) I figured out that I had to reverse the shaded squares, without understanding that I was flipping birds. To answer Sam’s question: I would have had a VERY tough time with just the revealer and no shading — probably would have gotten stuck fairly early.

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.

Great puzzle, with a minor technical glitch: On my iPad the clue for 65A was a row of squares, but on my phone (Android) it was a row of slanted squares (which I gather from the comments are meant to be italicized squares). They should have made sure that the clue was consistent across platforms. I started the puzzle on my phone, and when I got to 65A I confidently entered RHOMBI. I eventually fixed it from the crossings, though I didn’t understand XBOXES until I read the comments.