July linkfest

Tournament!

It's Lollapuzzoola 2! It takes place August 22 in Queens, registration is $20, and there's an all-star line-up of constructors and officials. "Beg your pardon, but what is Lollapuzzooola?" some of you may be asking. Why, it's a small crossword tournament put on by Ryan Hecht and Brian Cimmet of Ryan and Brian Do Crosswords blogular fame. Some of the tournament puzzles will have a multimedia aspect to them, the sort of thing a newspaper crossword just can't do. If you're in the New York area and dig crosswords, you have no excuse not to go to Lollapuzzoola 2. Ryan and Brian, will you be selling Lollapuzzoola 2 t-shirts there? Because those would be awesome.

Ha ha!

Crossword constructor Deb Amlen, one of the Onion A.V. Club team of puzzlemakers, has a new humor blog at debamlen.com. I subscribe to the RSS feed so I always know when a new post is up, but you can also get a heads-up from Deb's Twitter feed, @DebAmlen. Her first book, It's Not PMS, It's You is coming out next year and is about relationships, not crosswords.

A different kind of puzzle!

Matt Gaffney's latest crossword contest featured a Kaidoku (a.k.a. coded crossword or alphacode) puzzle. As of today, Alex Boisvert and Matt have a new blog called Kaidoku! They'll have a new Kaidoku puzzle twice a week, solvable via Java applet or printed PDF. I enjoyed Matt's Pocket Idiot's Guide: Kaidoku. (What's a pocket idiot?)