Puzzle #22: If I Could Turn Back Time

I thought of doing something with this title a while ago, but my initial idea was to take titles with a month in them and shift it back one month, so BORNONTHEFOURTHOFJULY would become BORNONTHEFOURTHOFJUNE, for example. I guess it didn’t excite me much, since I never made that puzzle, and instead have now used the title more literally, by putting increasing units of time backward in the grid.

This grid ended up being more closed-off than I usually prefer, with only 3 small connections between the upper and lower halves. The most constrained spot, and therefore the spot where I started, was M??U. I wasn’t able to get a clean enough fill in the SE without adding a black square, which necessitated redoing the NE. NADER over VILA in the E is tricky, but hopefully the crossings made it solvable.

I had fun with the ARTS clue (a JFK quote from his inaugural address) and learned the real name of AMTRAK. Writing clues can be a chore, but I find that digging into them for new and interesting tidbits makes it go by much faster.