Joe DiPietro's NYT, by the numbers:
words: 66
black squares: 25
3-letter words: a mere 6
entries I was completely guessing on: 2 (LA PUENTE and LA NOTTE)
pro wrestling entries: 1 (and it was my first gimme—oh, the shame!)
non-PETA-approved entries: 1 (VEAL STEW, on the heels of yesterday's controversial MILKFED veal)
entries and clues I liked: countless (but especially "hooked up and left" for TOWED, "what an A is not" for NLER, "seasonal recurrence" for MONSOON, MISS KANSAS and POPE LEO XI, and "upset" for MAL DE MER)
Updated Sat. morning:
Lynn Lempel's LA Times puzzle is a lot more tractable than the NYT. Good stuff like MR CLEAN and NEW MOON, plus a great-looking grid.
Looking ahead to the Sunday puzzles, Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon's LA Weekly puzzle has a knotty NOSTRADAMUS anagram theme. I didn't feel like I had my anagramming MOJO working this morning—it felt like hard work.
In the Washington Post, Deb Amlen provides a thoroughly enjoyable puzzle with a letter-switch theme. So many of the clues were fresh and fun, there are too many to list here. Near the top, there's "Tweed twitter" for NAST, and at the bottom we have "It's well-produced" for OIL; in between, the puzzle's just jam-packed with goodies. Thanks, Deb (and Fred Piscop)—excellent work!
15x15's
NYT 8:23
Stumper 5:44
LAT 4:46
CS 3:16
21x21's
LAW 11:02
WaPo 8:09
September 30, 2005
Saturday
This week's Tausig puzzle
I'd been wondering where Ben Tausig's Village Voice puzzle was—turns out it was hiding in my spam folder for a couple days. Anyway, I found it and the giggles were worth the wait: "Mansierre, alternately" for BRO (harking back to a classic "Seinfeld," of course), and "Course of action"? for SEX ED. Now, the S in SEX ED crosses NTS (short for nights), and NTS could have been improved somewhat by becoming NTH crossing HEXED instead—but who wants to sacrifice "Course of action?" Not I.
4:38
September 29, 2005
TGIF
Nancy Kavanaugh's NYT has got a lot of tricky stuff. "Head-turner" for PSST, "small gull" for MEW (huh?), C'EST BIEN (my French eluded me for a bit), "lack of starch" for INFORMALITY, and that damn WHEREAS that eluded me for a minute and a half (Repeat after Ellen: Read the across and down clues! There is nobody named EDNT Best). I liked RUBRICS, MATILDA, JUNKET, and (just because it sounds funny) PISMO BEACH. I wasn't crazy about STREAM OF AIR, but I do appreciate pangrams.
Michael Shteyman and Kyle Mahowald's NYS puzzle went quickly, with the title, "Quadruple Doubles," pointing straight at the double-letter rebus. The constructors give a nod to academia with CRAMMER and TEST SCORE, get into drugs with STREET NAME, XTC, and PLAN B, and toss in a flower (PHLOX) to get a third X into the grid. Seeing XENA raises the question: Will the day come when "Xena: Warrior Princess" is too obscure to pass muster for mainstream crosswords, or is it as eternal as those ancient TV Westerns that were before my time? I vote for an eternal Xena.
Updated:
In Martin Ashwood-Smith's CrosSynergy puzzle, the theme is supplemented by an unusual number of uses of a single high-Scrabble-value letter in most of the NW corners of the puzzle's sections. Check it out for yourself. (And if there's an official term describing that sort of crossing location, please enlighten me.)
Moving on to weekend-sized puzzles, I enjoyed Harvey Estes' WSJ outing, "Interest Earned." My favorite theme entries (involving phrases swallowing INT) were MAN INTO WAR ("Hawk?") and TINTED KENNEDY ("Rose Rose?"). The best clue is "Slaughter with a bat" for ENOS; according to the Cruciverb database, Harvey's used that clue a couple other times, Hex used it once, and Mel Rosen used "Slaughter with a club."
15x15's
NYT 6:29
NYS 5:04
LAT 4:41
CS 2:44
21x21's
WSJ 10:40
Reagle 7:35
Kid book recommendations?
My five-year-old son, Ben, did his first word search puzzle at kindergarten yesterday. And you know what word searches are, don't you? That's right: the gateway drug to crosswords.
He'll be getting Helene Hovanec's My First Puzzles: Easy First Puzzles for Christmas. In the meantime, can you recommend any great puzzle books for young kids? Keep in mind that Ben can't exactly read yet, but I've let him slide for long enough. It's time he joined the world of word games.
(And if it's a book you created or edited, please don't be shy about recommending it if it's appropriate for kindergartners.)
September 28, 2005
Thursday
The marquee puzzle of the day is Brendan Emmett Quigley's juicy Themeless Thursday in the Sun. JETSKIS and QUIZNOS! VH-ONE and LANDSAT! JANE DOE and EXOTICA! SHIATSU and AVENUE Q! TRIX and LIMN! "Da and ja" cluing YESES. I will forgive the knot where INNESS crossed IER and KNAPP because the rest of the puzzle is just so tasty. I'm curious to know what Brendan built the puzzle around—nothing stands out to me as an obvious seed because so many entries stand out as possibilities. Your guesses?
Over in the NYT, we've got a Yogi Berra quip from Sam Bellotto Jr. (It's a somewhat amusing quip, but is it so great that it's worth sacrificing standard crossword symmetry for left-right symmetry?) I liked seeing GRANDPA with a "Munsters" clue (even more retro than BEQ's SIT ON IT from "Happy Days"), IT MAY BE, and Puzo's THE DON; struggled a little to come up with ALL AFLAME. How did a simple quip puzzle take me a smidgen longer than a BEQ themeless? I'm gonna have to go with my affinity for themeless puzzles, the construction of which eludes me completely.
Updated:
David Ainslie Macleod's LAT puzzle features a synonym theme, which I liked, and some clues that grabbed me: "Fife player" for KNOTTS, "Second opening?" for NANO, "Rubble creator" for TNT, and "Jobs for towers" for REPOS.
NYT 5:37
NYS 5:36
LAT 4:01
CS 3:23
September 27, 2005
Wednesday
Patrick Jordan's NYS, "High-Caliber Profession," has a great-looking grid and some nice fill that hasn't been used this year (according to the Cruciverb database), such as SYNONYM and SIROCCO. I loved the clue for EDIT: "Mad workers do this"—a nice switch from the usual Time and Money clues. I wonder if that was Patrick or Peter Gordon's clue...
Randall Hartman's NYT moves "at ease" from the fill to the clues, where it serves as the opposite of TENHUT; meanwhile, Jack McInturff goes sensational, inspirational, and celebrational in the LAT. Updated: And in Hartman's CrosSynergy puzzle, his theme is the opposite of his NYT one—in the CS, he extracts AGE, while in the NYT, he adds a couple C's.
NYS 3:52
NYT 3:49
CS 3:42
LAT 3:04
Not helpful for constructors, but fun anyway
Adam Jacot de Boinod scoured foreign dictionaries for words that lack a precise equivalent in the English language—such as the German Gemütlichkeit—and gathered the best ones into a book, The Meaning of Tingo: And Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World. Here in the US, Amazon says the book will not be available until next March.
For a sneak preview, the review from The Independent offers a selection of these words. Some are essential (fucha is a Portuguese verb meaning "to use company time and resources for one's own purposes"), some are odd (buz-baz is ancient Persian for "a showman who makes a goat and monkey dance together"—hey, my dream job!), some are evocative (mamihlapinatapei is from the Fuengian language in Chile, meaning "a shared look of longing between parties who are both interested yet neither is willing to make the first move"), and some are just plain mystifying (tingo, from Easter Island's Pascuense language, means "borrowing things from a friend's house, one by one, until he has nothing left").
September 26, 2005
Tuesday
Kevan Choset pays homage to the theory of relativity in Tuesday's NYT, with E, =, M, C, and squared all clued and answered inventively, and tied together by EINSTEIN FORMULA crossing them all vertically (78 theme squares—that's a heckuva lot, isn't it?). In addition to the ably executed theme, we've got entries like ST OLAF (crosstown rival of my alma mater), OH BOTHER (very Winnie the Pooh), and LIVE BAIT.
Okay, Jangler, I give up trying to figure out what sort of themes you like. Probably don't much care for the NYS puzzle by that Jeffrey Harris fellow, eh? I liked the altered pronunciation/meaning theme, personally, and a number of clues/entries, such as "London and Berlin, e.g." clue for SURNAMES, INNER EAR, LARAINE Newman (ah, nostalgia), and "Mastermind pieces" for PEGS.
Updated: I don't know. I think 7 a.m. is a little on the early side for Mel Rosen's CrosSynergy puzzle, "Mixology 101." It's too easy to misread the drink recipe embedded within and think that you have to mix in some ARMY ANTS and then SCREAM AT the glass.
NYS 5:14
NYT 4:24
CS 3:22
LAT 2:52
I'm getting itchy
Where are those Sun puzzles? The day's half over, and I haven't been able to gorge on a week's worth of puzzles all at once.
I know, I know. We're lucky to have access to them at all, and Peter Gordon spoils us by letting us pounce on Themeless Thursdays and Weekend Warriors when easy Monday and Tuesday puzzles leave us craving a challenge. In a world designed for my convenience, though, those puzzles would be ready by 8 or 9 a.m. I'm just sayin'.
September 25, 2005
Monday
As often happens with a Monday puzzle, I missed out on a lot of clues and entries because after I filled in a section with one direction of clues, I moved on. Looking back over the puzzle, I see some perky stuff I'd missed, like, oh, the Rock, Paper, Scissors theme, and "It may have screwdrivers on it" for BAR TAB. I also appreciated the OUR/TOWN and CAPE/COD pairs, "grapevine contents" for GOSSIP, and "'Potpourri' for a thousand, ALEX."
Updated:
Rich Norris's CrosSynergy puzzle has the kind of theme that keeps you guessing until you reach the explanatory 6-letter entry (which is mentioned in the title, but I often don't read the title before I start solving) that ties them together. The theme entries include two 8s, two 9s, and a 13, and the clues don't hint at the theme. Jangler, why don't you do this one (accessible via Puzzle Pointers) and tell us what you think? I've read your objections to overused themes, and perhaps you'll agree with me that Rich's theme has an elegance to it.
CS 3:42
NYS 3:35
NYT 2:55
LAT 2:51
