NYT 10:40
WaPo 10:37
LAT 9:52
BG 6:40
CS 4:18
(updated at 9:40 a.m. Sunday)
Ahh, is there anything more glorious than clear blue skies, the air finally warming up in April...and spending three hours at Chuck E. Cheese? (My son's seventh birthday party.) Then we emerged from the House o' the Giant Rat into a beautiful 72-degree afternoon and drove home to our lakeside neighborhood...where it's a brisk 62. Had to close the windows because it was getting too chilly inside. Ah, microclimate!
So I came home an hour before crossword time and worked on taking my brain from the Chuck E. Cheese setting back to its default mode. I think the NYT applet went ooky and wouldn't let me type anything in, but it's possible that was my brain's doing and not the technology's fault. I do love the applet like a junkie loves her drug of choice, but Across Lite ain't half bad, either, so that's where I solved Vic Fleming's puzzle, "For April—National Poetry Month." Now, Vic loves quote puzzles and I usually can't stand 'em, so it was with some foreboding that I embarked on solving this quote crossword. I felt like Mikey on the old Life cereal commercial—hey! I really liked this puzzle. It differs from the typical quote puzzle in that this theme contains six different quotes accounting for eight theme entries (two longer quotes are split). Each quote is a poet's statement beginning, "Poetry is ..." (Well, I don't know if Joseph Roux counts as a poet. Google turns up mainly sites that gather his noted quotes...so maybe he's more of a quoet?) From a solving standpoint, I think piecing together six different quotes about poetry is far more interesting than assembling one long quote. Favorite bits in this crossword: the BUS LANE; the [Love letters?] SWAK (sealed with a kiss); [Japanese band?] for OBI; SAY I DO (though that sounds more nuptial than inaugurational); MR. KITE from the Beatles song; [Sing "gladly the cross-eyed bear," say] for GARBLE (though actually, that doesn't sound garbled at all); NEWBIE; ALL GONE; [Beachwear] for THONGS (meaning footwear or buttfloss?); ["Zounds," e.g.] for MILD OATH (with EGAD toward the bottom of the puzzle); CHORIZO; [Really, really] for OH SO; and [Wasted gas] for IDLED. A couple things I absolutely did not know: The French town EPINAL, and the Spanish ACA, [Here, in Juárez].
Updated:
Patrick Blindauer's Washington Post crossword, "StoP," changes words starting with S to ones starting with P in the theme entries. For example, [Marx Brothers fan, maybe?] is a PUN WORSHIPPER, and [Lack of a platform?] is a PODIUM DEFICIENCY. Good puzzle!
If yesterday's tough NYT and Newsday crosswords left you bruised, try Harvey Estes' CrosSynergy puzzle today for a more pliable challenge.
If you can piece together famous marches (music), Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon's Boston Globe puzzle, "Marching in Columns," should also offer a particularly light challenge. There are only five theme entries, so the bulk of the crossword has sort of an "unthemed but easy" vibe.
John Halverson's syndicated LA Times crossword, "Adding Debt," inserts IOUS into each theme entry, turning P Diddy into PIOUS DIDDY, and Ted Turner and Victor Borge become TEDIOUS and VICTORIOUS people. Liked those name-based entries better than the ones that played on non-name nouns.
April 21, 2007
Sunday, 4/22
April 13, 2007
Saturday, 4/14
Reagle 6:55
LAT 6:17
Newsday 4:35
NYT 4:11
CS 3:48
(updated at 9:30 a.m. Saturday)
Hey! What's this Friday puzzle doing in the Saturday New York Times? Usually Sherry O. Blackard's one of the toughest themeless constructors I encounter, but this crossword seemed quite pliable. 1-Across yielded immediately, and 1-Down followed—and that's not how most Saturday NYTs kick off. [Dessert preference] shouted A LA MODE at me, and while I'm no expert on poetic feet, I do know that ANAPESTIC starts with an A. From a construction standpoint, I reckon it's tremendously difficult to fill a grid like this one (just 60 words and 24 black squares) without making use of a number of common letters at the end of the entries. People and things with an -ER ending here include PAMPERER, NONUSERS, REGRETTERS and SIGHERS (aptly abutting), SILENCER, SENDERS, ANIMATERS, and a RECTIFIER—all of which make it easy to fill in a couple squares as toeholds. My favorite tidbits: [Proof provider] for ACID TEST; [So-so series] for OCTAVE; [Benjamin's love in "The Graduate"] for ELAINE (not because it's a tough clue, but because I like being reminded of that movie); the words CASTIGATES, STRAIGHT-EDGES, and MUDPIES; EGOMANIA (I would dearly love it if someone would write a limerick rhyming egomania with Romania); [Novel price, way back when] for TEN CENTS; [Places to put some bags] for TEAPOTS; [Not gauche] for ADROIT; [Nejd natives] for ARABS (I was guessing it was Slavic until the crossings helped me out); and [Single component] for SIDE A. Also, note that this grid has just two 3-letter entries and four 4-letter entries. That's impressive, Sherry! (But Will, you should have run this one on a Friday even though the empty grid looks fearsome.)
Updated:
Randall Hartman's CrosSynergy crossword, "Mixed Martial Arts," has a theme of 11-letter anagrams. Fun!
Doug Peterson's Newsday Saturday Stumper was fairly straightforward, though one entry was a complete mystery: the answer to [Vic's wife] was SADE. I Googled up the Wikipedia article on the old radio show, "Vic and Sade"—it began in 1932 and eventually found its way to television for seven weeks in 1957...before my time. If I could choose one kind of pop culture to eradicate from crosswords, it'd be old-time radio shows.
Vic Fleming and Bruce Venzke's LA Times themeless contains TIRAMISU, and who doesn't like that? (Well, I don't. Coffee, ick.) [Near failure] had me trying to think of a noun for far too long, when the answer was D-MINUS. And [Red crawlers]—not ANTS, but EFTS! Here's a red eft. Here's some info about the red-spotted newt—after the egg and larva stages, this newt has a "terrestrial eft" stage that lasts for 2 to 7 years before the eft metamorphoses into an aquatic adult. And the eft—so small! Today's long-overdue lesson (I really should have looked this stuff up years ago) about the top amphibian in crosswords is brought to you by no-longer-an-Eft Gingrich.
Merl Reagle's Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer puzzle ("Zip! Nada!"), which I couldn't access during yesterday's solving/blogging session, has Seinfeld's IT'S ABOUT NOTHING plus 24 theme entries (unless I miscounted) with fill-in-the-blank clues that include the word nothing, zip, or zero. These theme entries, which range from 4 to 15 letters apiece, are not all symmetrically placed (though the long ones are), but the theme clues are CAPITALIZED so they're easy to spot.
January 27, 2007
Sunday, 1/28
LAT 10:19
NYT 8:55
BG 7:33
WaPo 7:23
CS 4:24
Vic Fleming and Bruce Venzke's Sunday NYT crossword, "Having Pull," has a smattering of pop culture clues, but less than yesterday's puzzle. These were mostly gimmes for me: STARSKY of …and Hutch fame and ALLIE of Kate and… fame, daytime TV's Linda DANO, and the discotastic GIBB. There was nowhere in this grid for A FAST ONE, YOUR LEG, or STRAIGHT A'S, but there were 10 other "things that can be pulled" (including the pair of 7's crossing in the center of the grid—and one of those, MUSCLES, is crossed, aptly enough, by TONED UP). [Appeared] was a rather bland clue for CAME OUT, given what "coming out" means in the vernacular. Seeing [Lincoln, maybe] (as a clue for TOWNCAR) reminds me of something my son said at Chuck E. Cheese today—there was a Mount Rushmore mural on the wall, with five faces (four presidents plus the titular rodent). "Chuck E. is not the president!" he said, aghast. Speaking of presidents, I loved the clue for VIRGO: [Lyndon Johnson, by birth]. Favorite theme entries included ALL-NIGHTERS, WISDOM TEETH, and the OLD SWITCHEROO. Anyone familiar with the usage that teams [Kick] with BEEF?
