LAT Wed. 6/3 Peter A. Collins

[magus]

GOOD ONES!

"Place to crash"   PAD
"Took another plunge?"   REWED
"Ran through"   SPENT

I carped Monday about calling Gene Krupa an "old-time drummer," but "Old-time actress Bara" seems right for THEDA, who was a silent film star.  The difference between the stars may have been only ten years.

Law, silence, honor, and ethics are related to cryptographers, but just how is cryptic to me.  I wonder for how many cruciverbalists it is plain.  I suspect it's some code to which cryptologists suscribe.     

[Mamselle]

Thanks for revealing what the circled letters were.  (I did the puzzle online and therefore couldn't see the circles.)

I'm thinking that the theme refers to the phrases: code of silence, code of honor, and code of ethics.

I've heard of the civil code, the criminal code, and Hammurabi's code, so I guess "code of law" makes sense too.

[Doorbell]

Yes, like 60A in the puzzle says: BROKENCODES.  The letters of the codes are "broken" by the other intervening letters in the theme entries.

[magus]

But words like silence and ethics are not codes, so breaking them up doesn't break a code.  And as MAMSELLE points out, there's the problem of law. 

[Doorbell]

I really don't see the problem.  Since the puzzle gives a hint to the theme as BROKENCODES, I think it's very crosswordpuzzle-ish to assume that you can read the theme words as "Code of ...". And certainly "code of silence", "code of ethics", and "code of honor", are familiar phrases.  A "code of law" is the same as a civil code, a codified body of statutes.  And "code of law" gets over 150,000 hits on Google, so it's not just me who thinks it's a familiar phrase.

I don't think the BROKENCODES type of theme would ever be used in a commuter puzzle, or in USA Today, or in a tabloid newspaper.  But the LA Times provides us with high-quality themed puzzles, thank goodness!