PUZZLE #65 & Ten bullshit themes

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If you're bothering to make a themed puzzle, if you're bothering to make some kind of a puzzle for other people to solve, Lord please try and emphasize the fun stuff. A successful puzzle should make the solver feel good about themselves and hopefully make them laugh along the way. A successful puzzle should not make the solver go "wasn't that constructor being all sorts of clever?" Or even worse: the solver should never go "... that's it?"

We're all guilty. Every single one of us crossword constructors is guilty of at least one of these, what I call bullshit themes. These themes in and of themselves are lazy and lacking in any sense of imagination or creativity. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm guilty of at least six violations (2, 4, 6, 7, 8 and 10). Everybody, it's time to pull out your “WWPBD?” (“What Would Patrick Berry Do?”) t-shirts and work a little harder to make sure these never happen again, okay?

(Could any of these themes be done effectively? Depends. I mean, this is creativity we're talking about here, and rules are always meant to be broken. But you have to understand the rules in the first place in order to break them! Just blindly doing these bullshit themes does not a good crossword make. There should at least be a reason why you're doing these bullshit themes. Okay, onto the list.)

1. The stepquote. Nothing says “I don't care” more than the stepquote because you've ignored the effort to at least try and find a quote that can be split up symmetrically. And, hey since the theme runs stair step down the middle of the grid, you've left two wide open areas with zero thematic material.
   (Some people hate quote puzzles and feel they should be retired, but I say find better/funnier quotations from people who are either cool or worth citing. No more Oscar Wilde and Steven Wright quips, please!)

2. Deletion themes that don't make new words. Deletion themes are fine, but it should at least be changed into something other than entries that look like a cryptogram.

3. Anagrams of some other entry plus the word ANAGRAM. Hard to believe but at one point these babies ran on Thursdays! Glad this one died a couple years ago. FWIW, an editor showed me a rejected puzzle of this type where the budding constructor's basis for the anagrams was ADOLF HITLER. Moving on ...

4. Randomly circled letters that spell out some kind of word ostensibly making a non-theme a theme. I don't think this would be a bad theme per se if the entries that are containing the circles had something connecting everything together. To me this theme just seems completely arbitrary and inelegant.

5. Random phrases plus entry that's clued {Word that can precede/follow the beginnings/ends of W-, X-, Y, and Z-Across}. This one feels incomplete. It comes across like the constructor had the idea of phrases starting with some connecting element (parts of a bicycle, members of the Wu-Tang Clan, etc.) but then got bored and stopped halfway through.
   Having said that, I think this theme does work when both words in the entry can precede/follow a certain word. At least then it seems somewhat elegant.

6. The same word used as the clue for all the theme entries but in different sense. For example, three entries where the clues are all something inane like {BOARD}. Bored, is more like it! Equally offending is the one where the clues are gradual beheadings/curtailments/adding a letter: {PARKAY}, {PARKA}, {PARK}, {PAR}, {PA}. Lazy!

7. First-words-are-synonyms puzzles where the words are not used in any sort of alternate sense: MOMMIE DEAREST, MA BARKER, MAMMA MIA, MOTHER HUBBARD. How is this any different than a repeated word theme? This is 101 shit here. Other 101 shit: any puzzle whose theme is colors, rhymes, rhymes involving colors, celebrity's first and last name whose last name is the first of another celebrity (BRUCE LEE IACOCCA, e.g.) or arbitrary phrase (DONALD TRUMP CARD, e.g.), and finally the dreaded OLD MAN AND THE SEA/THE SUN ALSO RISES/ERNEST HEMINGWAY triumvirate.

8. Phrases that contain some repeated two- or three-letter element in the middle of them spanning a word break. Well, maybe it's not completely bullshit, but jeez, at least make it something interesting. Try using rare Scrabble-y letters or words if you're going that route.

9. The "curriculum vitae" with entry that is clued {Subject of the puzzle}, usually the “Subject ...” clue comes with: "born 100 years ago today." Nobody cares about the filmography of Emmett Kelly. Equally offending: four people with the same birthday.

10. The clue would be something like {Three dogs} and the answer would be a random list like ODIE SNOOPY RIN TIN TIN. Huh? That's it? WTF? I mean, if you're going to be that lazy with the theme construction/cluing, why stop there? You might as well clue every entry {Noun} or {Word} then. Merl Reagle made one like this where the long theme entries were makes/models of cars and the gimmick was something along the lines of bumper to bumper traffic. That's probably the only time this one's going to work. But seriously, I repeat, WTFF?

(Tip of the hat to Francis Heaney for helping me compile some of this list, as well as create some examples, specifically numbers 2, 6, 7 and 9.)