BG 8:35
LAT 7:18
NYT 6:35
PI untimed
CS 3:49
Patrick Berry's second Sunday variety puzzle 9:49
Patrick Blindauer and Andrea Carla Michaels' New York Times crossword, "Made for TV-Movies"
The title monkeys with the usual hyphenation of made-for-TV movies because each of the five 21-letter theme entries is a mashup of TV and movie titles (Jeopardy! "Before and After" category style), clued accordingly:
The theme didn't resonate much for me, but I liked a lot of the fill and I wasn't in the mood for a tough puzzle that worked my head so Andrea and Patrick's easy offering was right on target. Before moving along to the highlights, allow me to grumble about 93D: [Something you love to play with]. NEW TOY feels like a contrived phrase rather than a solidly in-the-language term. And now, on with the show:
A couple other comments: 124A: TANAKA is the answer to [Tomoyuki ___, creator of Godzilla]. I'm sure some of you comic/sci fi nerds knew that one, but I didn't. I'm talking about the folks who instantly knew that AQUAMAN was the 14D: [Superhero with an octopus named Topo]. 118D: [Stumblers' sounds] clues ERS, and I just grumbled about that in the Saturday LAT. When is there ever a reason to pluralize "er"? "Wow, that was a lot of ers in your lecture. You should have practced more"? Er, no. Sure, I'm used to this in crosswords, but "ambulances take people to ERs" seems like a more natural plural, doesn't it?
Updated Sunday morning:
Henry Hook's Boston Globe crossword, "Grad Tidings," in Across Lite
The most impressive part of this puzzle—in which 12 recipients of an HONORARY HARVARD DEGREE are presented—is the upper right corner where SEIJI OZAWA is stacked atop VACLAV HAVEL. Can you believe Hook found workable fill that crossed those two answers? Some of the crossings were know-it-or-you-don't stuff, like TRECE (Spanish for "thirteen," or [Unlucky "numero"]) and KAZAN (["On the Waterfront" director]), that won't give much help to solvers who can't spell SEIJI OZAWA or VACLAV HAVEL without blinking.
My toughest crossing was where CANIO meets OH KAY—one ["Pagliacci" role] I don't know crossing a [1926 Gershwins musical] I've never heard of. Second gnarliest crossing was [PCS file suffix] EPS providing the P in RIPSAW, clued with [It cuts with the grain]. I don't know what the EPS file type is.
INCAN is clued as [Vintage Peruvian]. I read at the Library of Congress's Exploring the Early Americas exhibition that the Incan Empire occupied a larger swath of land than any other empire in history, but the map here shows much less territory than the British Empire had in its heyday.
Merl Reagle's Philadelphia Inquirer crossword, "Truly Cheesy Puns"
Merl unleashes his inner punster (and his outer one) with a set of cheese puns:
Favorite clue in the fill: [Life partner?] for LIMB, as in "life and limb."
Edgar Fontaine's syndicated Los Angeles Times crossword, "Initial Exposé"
Fontaine takes seven famous people who use initials in lieu of first and middle names, assigns them familiar phrases that could be expansions of their initials, and clues them accordingly:
Moving beyond the theme, I raised an eyebrow at 6D, ["God Bless America" inning]. That's the SEVENTH, but at Wrigley Field, the seventh-inning stretch is when we sing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." Is this an L.A. or New York thing? The DIK-DIK (39D) is an [Antelope named for the sound it makes when frightened]. Anyone hit the skids where OTHO the 19A: [Emperor aftr Galba] met SHOGI, which is 3D: [Chess, Japanese-style]? There's a G-STRING at 9D: [It doesn't conceal much]. And in the category of Old-School Crosswordese, we have the THOLE, or 82A: [Pin on a rowboat]. My Mac's dictionary tells me THOLE is also a Scottish or archaic verb meaning "endure (something) with without resistance or complaint; tolerate." I thole crossword fill like THOLE.
Martin Ashwood-Smith's themeless CrosSynergy "Sunday Challenge"
The king of triple-stacks ponies up a pair of triple-stacks in today's relatively easy puzzle, with the following 15-letter answers:
Five quick hits from the rest of the puzzle:
Patrick Berry's variety crossword, "Ringing Endorsement"—the NYT's second Sunday puzzle
I hope the Magazine section made space for this puzzle because it's brilliantly conceived and executed. If the millions of people who get the Sunday Times but wouldn't bother to dig around online for a puzzle miss out, they're...really missing out.
The 15x15 grid has no black squares separating the answers in a given row or column, and sometimes the crossing answers have a conflict because a square needs a different letter in each direction. How clever is it to have those intersections marked by the always-there letter O as a ring around the other letter? And how on earth did Patrick Berry manage to not just fill the grid with workable answers but also get those O-plus-another-letter crossings to fit just so and to get the circled letters to spell something out AND to include theme entries as the first and last Across answers? The mind, she boggles. And then the title is "Ringing Endorsement," a familiar phrase—and the theme is "an endorsement of sorts." This puzzle is so elegantly wrought.
Will Shortz, please beg Patrick Berry to make a bunch more of these and publish them in the Times. Patrick Berry, please get to work on a sequel to Puzzle Masterpieces and include more of these puzzles. I recognize that the "Ringing Endorsement" title wouldn't necessarily be an apt description for other puzzles in this vein, but that's OK—I just want more of these challenges.
The [Speaker of this puzzle's endorsement] is O. HENRY, and [What this puzzle's endorsement refers to] is NEW YORK CITY. The circled squares spell out this: "It'll be a great place if they ever finish it." I found I'd missed a couple of the ringed O crossings when I was reading the circled letters, having not checked every crossing clue, but it all came together in the end, wrapped up in a bow.
August 08, 2009
Sunday, 8/9
January 25, 2009
Monday, 1/26
BEQ 3:58
Sun 3:41
NYT 2:43
LAT 3:38 (Flash version)
The New York Times crossword applet seems to be out of commission this evening, but luckily the Across Lite version of Timothy Powell and Nancy Salomon's puzzle downloaded just fine. The theme is embodied in the clue for all three long answers: ["Bad idea!"]. How else can you say that? LET'S NOT GO THERE, for one. YOU MUST BE JOKING. Or perhaps I DIDN'T HEAR THAT. What I like best in this puzzle are the longer Down answers, all four of them so lively:
KIBITZ is also a great word, meaning to [Offer advice from around a card table]. There's one shorter answer that I have seen on the internet plenty, but it grates every single time: HE HE, a [Gleeful giggle]. No. The giggle would be HEE HEE. HE HE is a pair of pronouns, a pair of chemical symbols for helium, or a pair of matching Chinese names.
Tougher clues include ["My sweetie" in a 1957 hit for the Bobbettes], or MR. LEE; [Instrument with 30+ strings] for ZITHER; and ["___ River" (song from "Show Boat")] for the two-word OL' MAN, which looks like a mystifying OLMAN in the grid.
Updated:
Tony Orbach's 15x16 Sun puzzle, "Roman Wrestling," leaves out my great uncle Roman (he used to give me a silver dollar every time we visited—a surefire way of being remembered by a child is to make a habit of giving her unusual money) but includes five more famous people who have a first or last name that's an anagram of "Roman." Two have last names in this category—ERIN MORAN, who was very genuine on that Scott Baio is 45...and Single show, and SUZE ORMAN, who is skewered on SNL. The other three are former Cub and Mia Hamm helpmate NOMAR GARCIAPARRA and two actors of yore, NORMA SHEARER and RAMON NOVARRO. Man, I misremembered that last name in so many ways. Alvarez first, then Navarre, then Novarre, and finally Novarro with crossings. I liked the profusion of names in the puzzle—there are about a dozen in the non-themed fill, and plenty of other words (BRAD, BOND, HAZEL, IRA) that could have been clued as people.
Edgar Fontaine's LA Times crossword wasn't posted in Across Lite at Cruciverb.com yet, so I bit the bullet and solved it in the interactive Flash version on the newspaper's website. I blithely type things in without looking at the grid, instinctively behaving as if the Flash cursor moves like the Across Lite one, and it doesn't. So I think that slowed me down some. Anyway, the theme is a tribute to the late, great PAUL NEWMAN. The theme includes two of his most notable films and the role he played in both of them:
A handful of answers seem a tad beyond Monday-grade. ABEAM is an old nautical word meaning [Perpendicular to the keel]; it crosses its fellow nauticalisms ALEE, or [Sheltered, at sea], and BILGES, or [Ships' seepage collection areas]. LISLE is a [Stocking thread]. [Ab ___: From the beginning] is the Latin phrase ab INITIO. [Caustic potash] clues LYE. The French POEME is clued as [Verse, in Vichy]. [Devereux's earldom] is ESSEX.
Updated again:
Whoops, I forgot Monday was one of the Brendan Emmett Quigley crossword days. In Brendan's accompanying blog post for this one, he says constructors want every solver to grasp the theme, even if it takes a good long while for the "aha" moment to hit. His test-solvers had delayed "ahas" with this one, and I am still in the midst of my delay. The theme is the WATCHMEN comic/upcoming movie. ALAN Moore wrote WATCHMEN, which is a PHENOMENON [in the graphic novel world]. The WATCHMEN clue says the WATCHMEN members are hidden throughout the grid. Great, research required to see a theme—I know nothing about the characters. Wikipedia to the rescue! The characters are clued without reference to Watchmen and include OZYMANDIAS, NITE / OWL, Doctor MANHATTAN, The COMEDIAN, RORSCHACH, and SILK / SPECTRE—two of them spanning two sequential entries apiece. That's a cool way to hide them—and the two-worders diverge from thematic symmetry, so the hiding places are more...hidey. Do these characters do a lot of hiding in plain sight? I have no idea. The puzzle kinda left me cold since I have zero familiarity with the characters.
December 22, 2008
Monday, 12/22
Sun 8:57
LAT 5:04
NYT 4:07
CS 4:00
(Updated at 9:30am Monday)
Hi, everyone. PuzzleGirl here. If I had only done a little better on the Sun puzzle, you probably would have thought I was Orange. I mean, 4:07 is pretty good, right? Okay, I realize it's not Orange good, or Howard good ... or Tyler good, or Dan good, or ... Oh whatever — I'm holding my head high today! 4:07!
Lynn Lempel's super-easy New York Times crossword — and I only say it's super-easy because of my incredible time — has theme answers that start with hopping animals. We start out with John Updike's Rabbit Run, which I haven't read. Trying to remember if I've read anything of his. Oh sure, Witches of Eastwick. I understand the sequel, Widows of Eastwick, has just been published and it's supposed to be pretty good. Next, we move on to CRICKET PLAYER, which is a [Batsman at a wicket.] Have I offered you my obligatory "Sports Night" reference in the last few days? No? Well, here it is. All I can remember about the episode "Ten Wickets" is that Jeremy hears about a phenomenal accomplishment by a professional cricket player and everybody's like, "Okay, sure. Great, Jeremy," because they know absolutely nothing about cricket. The summary for the episode also says that "Natalie continues to refuse to break up with Jeremy," so I guess Jeremy is not having his best day. Moving on to the next hopper — ooh! that would have been cool to have Dennis Hopper in this puzzle somewhere! — a holder of an unfair trial is a KANGAROO COURT. Well, that's odd. I thought the proceedings themselves were called the kangaroo court. Who is the holder exactly? Man, I can get caught up in the minutiae. I think we'd better move on. Next is TOADSTOOL. Apparently, there has never been a consensus on the exact difference between a mushroom and a toadstool.
What else?
Today's Sun crossword raises the question on everyone's mind: What the heck is a Triple Crown in baseball? Okay, maybe not everyone's. Peter Gordon, for instance. I'm sure he knows. For those of you who, like me, were trying to think of a horse with a three-letter nickname, let me look it up for you. According to Wikipedia, in baseball the Triple Crown refers to "1. A batter who (at season's end) leads the league in three major categories — home runs, runs batted in, and batting average, and 2. A pitcher who (at season's end) leads the league in three major categories — earned run average, wins, and strikeouts." The triple crown for batting is less common than the triple crown for pitching. In fact, the last time someone achieved it was in 1967 and guess who! Our buddy Carl Yastrzemski, otherwise known as YAZ. The last time a batter lead both leagues in the three categories was 1956. Anyone have a guess who it was? That's right, Mickey Mantle. The only two-time winners of the Triple Crown are Rogers Hornsby (1922, 1925) and Ted Williams (1942, 1947). Are you bored of the baseball talk? Sorry about that. What else is going on in this puzzle? Oh yeah, the theme! I'm not really sure how to explain it coherently so I'll just give you the theme answers and you can figure it out on your own.
So you don't need me to come up with actual words to explain that. You've got it, right? Good. You know what? There's lots of good stuff in this puzzle, but I got so distracted with the baseball info that I'm pretty much done for today. Go ahead and fawn over this puzzle in the comments. TECATE and GO-GO GIRL crossing COCO CRISP and RAVEL? Good stuff! I'll be back later with the rest of today's puzzles.
(Updated:)
Edgar Fontaine's L.A. Times crossword pays tribute to the classic Rock, Paper, Scissors game. My husband calls the game rochambeau, which I had never heard until I met him, but shows up quite prominently in the game's Wikipedia entry. I also recall reading an article once about how people in Japan use this game in otherwise serious social contexts with strangers — for example, two shoppers might play R-P-S to determine who gets the last ... I don't know, Indiana Jones action figure on the shelf at Target. Do they have Target in Japan?
A couple tough ones for a Monday:
Sarah Keller's CrosSynergy crossword reminds us that today is the first day of Hanukkah. It defines [MENORAH] as a CANDLEHOLDER, [DREIDEL] as a SPINNING GAME, and [LATKE] as a POTATO PANCAKE. All things associated with the FEAST OF LIGHTS. In the spirit of this puzzle, I'd like to share with you an ... unconventional version of the Dreidel song. Enjoy!
I'll be back tomorrow with your Tuesday puzzles. PuzzleHusband has been lobbying hard to "help" me blog tomorrow, so come on back and see what kind of foolishness he wants to talk about.
January 09, 2008
Wednesday, 1/9
NYT 6:03
Tausig 4:38
Onion 4:30
LAT 4:something
NYS 4:18
CS 3:50
I am operating at a double handicap tonight—not only have I just returned home after pub trivia, but I'm using a new keyboard. It's darling, really—this wee, wispy wireless Apple keyboard is about a quarter inch thick, and the arrow keys are in an altogether new location, and the keys are spaced a little differently. So I thought I'd go ahead and try the new keyboard on the NYT applet and see how it works. Not so hot, I think! Will just have to get used to it. I lost under a minute searching for a typo, so the rest of the supra-Wednesday time factor may accrue to the keyboard. Or the pub. Or both.
The Wednesday New York Times crossword is by John Farmer, and there aren't really any theme entries per se—the theme is the abbreviations for the DAYs of the week, spaced out at the beginning, exact middle, and end of seven differnt entries. Monday lurks in MAJOR IN, TUE in TV GUIDE, and so forth. The days are given in order from Sunday to Saturday. Favorite entries: Rebecca ROMIJN; TV GUIDE; THE HUTU; WHOLE WHEAT BREAD; and Susan SONTAG (Sonntag is German for Sunday, in a nice bit of synchronicity). Those are just a few highlights—really some terrif fill, just marvy (to use two laudatory words from crosswords). IRISH is parked atop the CELTS of basketball—more synchronicity. Toughest clues for me: the neighbor on Mama's Family was named IOLA; [Intrigue] is AMOUR; and right under that, [Wry faces] is POUTS. Now, I've pouted, and I've made wry faces, and I don't think they're the same at all. The Mac widget dictionary doesn't seem to think they're the same, either. What say you?
Updated:
Still getting used to the new keyboard this morning—I keep finding the caps-lock key by mistake, pressing the wrong arrow key, or pressing the shift key above the up-arrow key.
Patrick Blindauer's CrosSynergy puzzle, "C-SPAN," has 61 theme squares spread over five entries, each a phrase or word that starts and ends with C. CHENIN BLANC and CREATE HAVOC are particularly nice. It would appear that Patrick's tugging the CrosSynergy team one notch towards the new-generation crosswords (e.g., Onion, Ben Tausig's Ink Well, Jonesin')—the fill includes EEDIOT with a Ren & Stimpy clue. ALFRED U. also takes a somewhat unexpected form here. I hope to see more such tidbits of freshness.
Paul Guttormsson'a LA Times crossword has three 15-letter theme answers crossed by three other shorter theme entries, for a total of 65(ish) theme squares. FLASH crosses the middle and is the word that can precede the starts of the other five. Gotta love DANCE MOVE yielding Flashdance, which evokes that Kia commercial with "Maniac." The theme isn't the most exciting type of theme, but it's deftly managed here.
Edgar Fontaine's New York Sun puzzle, "I-Catching Names," assembles five people with *I*I first names, of varying degrees of fame. I'd never heard of French dancer ZIZI JEAN MAIRE, and cartoon skunk FIFI LA FUME's last name didn't come to mind. Poor Didi Conn gets left out (and if you don't know the name, then maybe your mom wasn't taking you to see romantic comedies when you were 11 in 1977). Rather tricky to clue KIKI DEE as [Music partner of Carmelo Luggeri] when we all know her from that '70s duet with Elton John, no? I didn't know OMAR [Metwally of "Rendition"], but for a movie about the Middle East, an OMAR isn't too far-fetched a guess.
Matt Jones's Onion A.V. Club crossword adds an -ER to the end of four phrases to turn them into dogs (e.g., a HOT SPRINGER spaniel, a SUGGESTION BOXER). Favorite clue: [Piña colada garnish?] for TILDE (!). Best fill: TRES CHIC, BROADSWORD, a LIP RING, PIDGIN, and Scrabbly SKI WAXES. I also like the pop-culture literacy of clues like [Monk's affliction: Abbr.] for OCD, cartoon dog Scrappy DOO, and American Gladiators' ELIMINATOR round.
Ben Tausig's Chicago Reader/Ink Well puzzle is called "Playing With Fire." Why? I don't know. Ah! I see it now. The theme entries teach rudimentary fire safety at the beginnings of STOP SNITCHIN', DROP YOUR WEAPONS, and ROLL INTO TOWN. Good to see NGO clued as [Designation for private global grps. since 1945)—a discussion on the Cruciverb-L mailing list revealed that a lot of crossword folks weren't familiar with NGO meaning "nongovernmental organization," but it seems to come up plenty on NPR and in the NYT. Is the clue for SIMI wrong? [Sonoma wine valley] is SIMI? There's a Simi Winery in Sonoma County, I think, but Simi Valley is in the LA area, whereas Sonoma is north of San Francisco. Favorite clue/answer: [Reverse gear?] for CROSS-DRESS. Other excellent fill includes MT. FUJI, NO U-TURN, GOSSAMER, ASCETICS, and VOODOO economics.
May 07, 2007
Tuesday May 8
Hello Orange fans:
My name is Barry Weprin and you may have noticed my posts here under the unoriginal ID “barrywep”. I have been doing the NY Times puzzle regularly for six or seven years now . Only in the last three years have I become really focused on the artistry of various constructors, which I largely credit to Amy’s tutelage on this blog.
I have been doing the NY Sun puzzles every day for the last year or two since this blog got me interested in them.
Today's NYT is by Sarah Keller, whose name I recognize, but it rings no bells as to style. This puzzle has a simple theme and few surprises.
Today’s NYS puzzle by Edgar Fontaine , whose work is also unfamiliar to me, has a neat three entry theme. Like most Peter Gordon edited puzzles it has loads of fresh cluing for old fill and a few overly complicated clues for simple everyday fill which are made complicated solely for the purpose of being original. These are what I refer to as “Peter Gordonisms.” A complicated clue that shouts out the answer to a crossword veteran is less enjoyable to me than a clever clue that may have been used before. Some simple fresh new clues that Peter uses are too hard for early week puzzles.
Now that I am in charge here (at least for today) I would love to hear others’ views on the subject.
On to today’s puzzles…
The NYT theme is found in 64 across: PHASES OF THE MOON. The three theme entries :
FULLTIMESTUDENT
NEWYORKER
HALFPRICE
all start with words that are phases of the moon. Simple, huh? Not for me today.
Maybe it was the pressure of trying to finish in a hurry to blog before bedtime, but "Magazine with the recurring heading 'Onward and Upward with the Arts,'with 'the'" didn't say NEWYORKER to me even with ____ORKER staring at me and me searching for a phase of the moon. A Petergordonism (sort of). . . in the NY Times!
And I read the magazine! Sometimes, anyway.
Anyway the final indignation was taking a minute to realize I had keyed PHASESOFTHEMOOD (which crossed ADDS) thus giving me a ruinously bad time for a Tuesday.
MISSAL (clued as Catholic Prayer Book) joins REREDOS from the other day as punishment for not being a churchgoer. And no Hebrew words to balance it out this time.
Country/rock singer Steve EARLE was unknown to me. Blogging his work rang no bells, either.
LOLA ("Kinks hit with a spelled out name") I know, and like.
YOWLED was my third choice for "Cried out in pain" , after WAILED and HOWLED. My two answers seem better since YOWLED doesn't normally connote pain, only sadness: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/yowling .
Cluing AFTS as "early p.m.'s" struck me as unnecessary crosswordese (partly because it took me a minute to get it even after it was all filled in). "Rears" would do as a clue for a Tuesday. CDI (clued as "401, in Roman times")is inevitably crosswordese.
Cluing constructor standby OREO as "Hydrox rival, once" , brought to my attention that Hydrox are gone and have been since 1996. Where was I?
SOFTSHOE (clued as "Quiet tap dancing"--an oxymoron?)was neat but the rest of the puzzle fill left me cold.
"Polish receivers" had me thinking of Danny Abromowicz :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Abramowicz
but the crossings gave me the clever correct fill: NAILS.
Edgar Fontaine's NYS titled "Family Affair" has three theme entries consisting of the full names of four unrelated individuals: WILLIAM DAWES, DANIEL DEFOE, ALEC MCCOWEN, and STEPHEN CRANE, each of whom shares a first name with one of the infamous (at least Alec is infamous) BALDWIN BROTHERS (the answer to 6 down). I enjoyed this puzzle and like this type of theme more than most other early week themes. I had virtually solved the whole puzzle before the theme came to me from 6 Down.
Lots of good fresh fill, although I thought "creator of some banks" for SNOWPLOW, "trial associate" for ERROR and, especially "intaglio mineral" for ONYX were too hard for a Tuesday.
These types of clues should be saved for later in the week.
This puzzle features three of what I regard as classic Petergordonisms:
"Hawaiian island that has the highest population density" for OAHU;
"Earned run average times innings pitched divided by runs given up" for NINE; and
"He was elected to the baseball hall of fame the same day as Cy and Nap" for TRIS.
The only reason not to use "most populous Hawaiian island" or some variation thereof for OAHU is that they must all have been used before. Bringing in population density needlessly complicates the clue to no useful end. OAHU has 3/4 of Hawaii's population so no other response would even suggest itself.
While I normally don't object to baseball clues, these two were overcomplicated. When I saw the hall of fame clue for a four letter fill, my (and others who knew crosswordese) only question was ENOS or TRIS?
Someone who doesn't know crosswordese should have been given a simpler clue.
Here is Tris Speaker's Hall of Fame plaque:
http://www.search.com/images?q=tris+speaker&topframe=1&page=1∫=1567&index=4
I had trouble following the ERA clue but knew the answer had to be NINE or ONE and only NINE fit. I am glad Amy wasn't around to see this clue. Talk about inside baseball, and she usually disdains regular baseball clues.
AVA, Linda G's favorite crossword actress, is not clued by a husbands' name this time. Indeed she is not clued as Ms. Gardner at all but rather as "palindromic girl's name."
To end on a positive note, I loved "major in astronomy" for URSA and thought it was Tuesday fair.
I liked "Impends as a storm" for BREWS, "____, Indiana (short lived NBC TV series of the 90's" for EERIE, and "drink by a dartboard, often" for ALE. Fresh clues for really stale fill.
The EERIE clue was too hard for a Tuesday but Peter provided lots of googling aid.
Other nice fill included NARCISSUS (clued as "self loving mythological character"), LOOSEENDS (clued as "unfinished business") and UNSCREW (clued as "turn to open). I think Peter is at his best when cluing this type of seldom seen fill.
