SUNDAY PUZZLE — Honestly, pity the speed demons who just cannot help themselves and have to competitively rip through a Sunday grid like this one by Finn Vigeland. It’s like listening to a symphony at 200 rpm. I love a solve with a variety of slow realizations and delicious layers, some of which sneak up on you, as well as eccentric flourishes along the way. A constructor that takes advantage of the large format and really stuffs it all in.

Mr. Vigeland, incidentally, graduated this year from the Harvard Graduate School of Design with a master’s degree in urban planning, and he’s now working to improve the transportation system in Washington, D.C. He did a stint in New York City and I hope he comes back, given his skill with and apparent affinity toward the weird and the complex.

Tricky Clues

I solved this on paper, as I almost always do since I’m working in advance, and I have to say that for such a lighthearted, pleasurable diversion, my grid was a scribbly mess by the time I got through. There were a bunch of misdirects — my personal failures were “mote” for IOTA, “sheet” for WHEEL in one of the theme entries (that slowed me down considerably), “spot” for SLOT, “limit” for LEVEL … in other words, I had a lot of other words. And yet there were also a lot of delightful clues in my bailiwick that made me laugh and feel especially clever, like IGUANA, SKI CAP and CAT CAFE, so my frustration level was undetectable today. If anything, I came out of a summer’s-end doldrum while solving this.

I found some tricky little bits that encompassed historical references (MEDE, INXS), short names (HAE, JLO, SIA, LOIS, MELC and ROE, not “Doe”) and modern vernacular (WOO was new to me, though I should have known, to be true, as it’s ubiquitous on social media).