Won’t you take me to the strangest of places?

Every Sunday I solve your puzzle and read your commentary, and it makes a big difference hearing the behind-the-scenes story.

If you take the letters from the same numbered squares in the grid (circled in the solution above), you spell out the bonus ...

and I had to rely on too many deep-cut names and phrases for comfort — the inevitable result of frantically trying the year prior to start and finish a Sunday-size crossword in a few hours.

Today’s puzzle may seem unusual right from the first glance. The grid has been stretched into a rectangular 19-by-23 shape, but more important, there’s a long row of black squares dividing it ...

Let’s see if I can remember how this whole “writing crosswords” thing goes since ... 122A: [Elliot James Birnholz, e.g., whom Captain Obvious is addressing in this puzzle] is CHILD.

I have a fairly extensive word list for building crosswords, but I needed a quick way to find all the words in my list that could be anagrammed to find other valid words. That’s something that ...