Kevan Choset and David Kwong's April Fool's Day NYT is tricksy. I crave a wide-open Saturday grid (my precious!), but I can always make an exception for a tricksy puzzle that toys with the format. This one almost makes it too easy by including the key word think in the clue for OUTSIDE THE BOX, "How you have to think to solve this puzzle." There's an extra THINK pushed outside the borders of the grid at all four corners; for example, at the bottom left (where the gimmick first dawned on me), DEE[T], RIC[H], ELH[I], AEO[N], and MEE[K] sit atop an extruded THINK. Combine a twist like this with some Saturday-level clues (such as "Nice brushes" for CARESSES) and fill (NO WAIT), and I'm content.
Updated:
Today's LA Times puzzle by Stella Daily and Bruce Venzke is probably my favorite of their many joint ventures. Some Saturday-level clues and fill, as in the NYT puzzle, combined with an April Fool's twist, as above.
Stan Newman's ("Anna Stiga") Newsday Saturday Stumper has great fill with plenty of high-Scrabble-count letters (JFK AIRPORT, MIZZENMAST, THE DAKOTAS, ANTIQUATING, ADJUNCTS, A VOTRE SANTE, SORE LOSERS, O GAUGE). And is that enough for me? Of course not. As delightful as the grid was, the clues weren't quite hard enough to give me a strenuous Saturday workout. The clues were great, with lots of interpretative vagueness (the plain words with plain clues in the NW corner managed to elude me until the end)—I just would have liked it if they put up a little more of a fight. I think seeing Mike Shenk's A finals puzzle last weekend has whet my appetite for a good cruciverbal whupping. This may sound a little whiny or critical, but really, I liked the puzzle a lot—so much that I wanted to spend twice as long working through it.
NYT 7:58
Newsday 5:19
LAT 5:05
CS 2:58
March 31, 2006
Saturday the Foolth of April
Friday
It's April Fool's Day tomorrow, so this week's Weekend Warrior in the Sun is Trip Payne's annual Wacky Weekend Warrior. Always fun to have a twist on the usual format, and surprisingly challenging.
I liked the quiet theme in Gilbert Ludwig's NYT, but I was out of it just enough to swap MID and CAP in 1 and 17 Across, which slowed me down. There was some quaint fill in this puzzle, like SWAINS, GAMINE, CRUMPET, CAMPHOR, and...HELLCAT.
Good Wall Street Journal puzzle from Manny Nosowsky, "Contain Yourself." I enjoyed the medical vibe with EUSTACHIAN TUBE, SPECIMEN JAR (YECCH), and SACRA, not to mention OWIE. And ERUCT for "burp." (I'm still waiting for Dr. Manny to work borborygmus into one of his puzzles. It's such a fun word to say!) One thing that threw me in this puzzle, though, was the nonstandard (but existent) use of the spelling PAHLEVI instead of PAHLAVI; at least the crossing of BASEMENT made it clear that the E was needed. At Stamford, someone described Manny's clues as "pitch-perfect," and I can't say this puzzle refutes that. (It's also a relief to see a puzzle that Mike Shenk worked on that doesn't stymie solvers! Man, his A finals puzzle was an absolute bear.)
Who wouldn’t like a Reagle puzzle called “A Regal Puzzle”? Yet another fun excursion into Merl's realm of puns.
NYS 9:52
NYT 6:34
LAT 4:06
CS 3:37
WSJ 9:12
Reagle 7:21
March 30, 2006
Thursday
Well, I fell asleep an hour before the Thursday NYT launched on the applet. Yes, that means I was out cold by 8:00 Central. What can I say? I needed to catch up on sleep. And I've come down with something involving a cough, laryngitis, and an inability to focus. I got through the NYT puzzle by Rich Silvestri just fine, but I struggled to stay awake through Anthony Salvia's puzzle, and now I can't think of anything to say about either puzzle. That's no knock on the puzzles—blame the miscellaneous virus or bacterium that's in charge. My couch is calling to me more strongly than the LA Times and CrosSynergy puzzles right now, so you know I must be sick. Too worn out for 6 or 7 more minutes of puzzles? Maybe someone should call an ambulance. (Just kidding—the couch is all I need.)
NYS 5:27
NYT 3:45
LAT 3:34
CS 3:20
March 28, 2006
Easing back into regular blogging
Time for a soupçon of catch-up (you want fries with that?).
The Monday NYT by Janice Putney was cute. GARY COOPER'S TOWN, DICK CLARK'S VILLE, and J PAUL GETTY'S BURG were a nice trio. • Tuesday's NYT by Jim Hyres featured assorted slang terms for the central entry, MONEY; alas, I solved it when I was drowsy, so I'm not remembering much about it. • The latest NYT by the late Frances Hansen fell fast for a Wednesday puzzle. It felt a tad old-fashioned, with fill like LEHAR, DAHL, and RLS—but would I be saying that if I hadn't seen the byline first? I dunno. I did like NAWLINS and "something that's pitched" as a clue for TRASH.
Boy, there are a lot of puzzles that I'm thinking about doing tomorrow. Tonight's for sleeping, for a change.
Updated:
Ben Tausig's Ink Well/Chicago Reader puzzle, "Duped," is a good one, as usual. Outside the theme, there's SEX SELLS, MOSHING, TREKKIE, OH OK, and SANTORUM. Crikey! SANTORUM. If you don't already know the meaning of that aside from Sen. Rick, I'm not sure you want to. (Personally, I think it's hilarious that columnist Dan Savage appropriated Santorum's name in that manner.)
Really good Monday Sun puzzle by Joy Andrews, "Zoo Compounds." DIXIECRATS, HUBBUBS, and CRYPTOGRAM in the fill? Good gravy. • Jack McInturff's Tuesday Sun, "A Matter of Degrees," is peppered liberally with Z's and X's, which I like, and throws in WOOZY and SNOOZED, which make a perfect pair of words. (And by "perfect," I mean I like them. That's the criterion. Plus I'm a little woozy and in need of a snooze, so...) • Patrick Blindauer (whose connect-the-dots puzzle from last Friday's Sun was the talk of Stamford) continues his UPward trajectory in crosswords with "Getting a Lift." The theme eluded me for far too long! What I liked best in this puzzle were the clues: "Cultured breakfast item" for YOGURT, "Burn's partner" for SLASH (I mentally moved the apostrophe and entered ALLEN), and "Ford part, familiarly" for INDY. We didn't need another constructor named Patrick (on top of Merrell, Berry, and Jordan), but this guy's a worthy addition to the roster.
Curtis Yee's one of my favorite LA Times regulars. He only started submitting puzzles last year, but he does some nice work. WAITING FOR GODOT in a theme, and SCALAWAG and RYDER CUP tossed in as fill? I like.
Patrick Jordan's CrosSynergy puzzle contains a quote, which normally I'd rail against, but it's a Roger Ebert quote. Of course, once I had the first half of the quote, I filled in the rest of it without glancing at the crossing clues. TOWNSFOLK is a great entry—I'd like to see it in a themeless with an impossible clue and tough crossings.
Moving on to last weekend's puzzles, Randolph Ross's Wall Street Journal outing, "At Play with the Rich and Famous," has a perfect theme for the moneyed readership of that paper. Excellent wielding of puns, e.g., IACOCCA COLA and RELIGIOUS ICAHNS.
I did not ralph while solving Henry Hook's "Ralphabet Soup" puzzle from the LA Weekly. One of my favorite things about this puzzle is that it rewarded me for knowing who played Bill to Keanu Reeves' Ted in "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" (first and last names separately in cross-referenced clues). I'll never decry pop culture clues—except for the ones I don't know.
Easy Washington Post puzzle from Elizabeth Gorski, "Minding Their Businesses." "An early Mouseketeer" was a gimme for DARLENE, but I'm guessing that very few people younger than me would know that one. I think Darlene Love and the "Roseanne" character named Darlene have more "legs" than the Mouseketeer clue at this point pop culture clue—but when they fade from the collective memory, poor Darlene will be locked out of crosswords...
Wed NYT 3:18
Tues NYT 3:46
Mon NYT 2:53
Wed NYS 5:31
Tues NYS 4:01
Mon NYS 3:30ish?
Tausig 4:27
Wed LAT 3:28
Wed CS 3:16
Fri WSJ 8:27
Sun Reagle 7:31
Sun WaPo 7:07
Sun LA Weekly 7:44
Wrapping up the Stamford wrap-up
I’m looking over the sketchy draft I wrote Sunday night, the material I planned to polish and make my next post out of. But it seems to seesaw between incomprehensible and disorganized, pointless and boring, indiscreet and self-absorbed. Other people’s already-posted write-ups render a lot of it superfluous. So instead I’ll cull much less, and I won’t fret about organization and transitions. Bulleted list, to the rescue!
• Last year, I never set foot in the hotel bar (the colorful Northern Lights), and I was ensconced in my room well before midnight. Boring! I tried to get a good night’s sleep, but was too wired to do so. This year, I figured, why frustrate myself by trying to sleep? So instead, I set a goal of hanging out in the bar, avoiding room service, socializing, and sleep deprivation. Success! I did better this year than last year, so apparently it’s a winning plan. The hard part is unwinding afterwards and figuring out how to sleep again.
• I’m so glad I went to Sundance in January. Not only did I get to know feared rivals Ellen, Al, Trip, Tyler, and Stella, but I got to see Wordplay and study the way those people approach the tournament. I hadn’t understood the strategic aspect until I saw the movie, and I think it helped my performance this year.
• I’d planned to buy some puzzle books over the weekend, but was stymied at first when the hotel’s ATM was out of order and I had only $10 in my wallet. The only book I ended up buying was Peter’s brand-spanking-new Hall of Fame Crosswords, which collects all the puzzles Peter’s had published in the NYT over the years. It’s almost all themed puzzles, but I generally trust Peter’s themes to amuse or impress the limbic structures of my brain.
• From what I heard, pretty much everyone found “Jeopardy!” king Ken Jennings to be a great guy—funny, interesting, genuine, whip-smart. I had been expecting a touch of insufferable smugness, but there was none of that. And he looked taller and cuter than he did on TV. He made some great remarks before he embarked on bestowing trophies—he talked about how “Jeopardy!” and crosswords remind people that having knowledge is a good thing. It reminded me a little of The Incredibles, with its message that the glorification of mediocrity is to be deplored, and that the pursuit of excellence is far better. And in his Friday-evening Quiz Bowl game, I learned that (a) Ken Jennings knows a lot, and (b) he talks really fast. Also? I love that I can invoke his name to put the ACPT in perspective for outsiders. “Yes, I won the rookie prize my first year competing. The next year, that prize went to Ken Jennings, who’s always copying me! He did very well for a first-timer, winning the Division C finals. Of course, I won the B finals my first year…” Here’s a picture of Ken Jennings with Judy Pozar:
• While the C final was underway, I was working on the same puzzle but with Mike Shenk’s supraWaldenesque Division A clues. After about 5 minutes, Ken Jennings finished to win the division…and I looked up amid all the applause and (darn it!) saw the elusive 1 Across answer. With the A-level clue, that one was tough—that corner of the puzzle eluded Tyler, Kiran, and Ellen for a long time. Despite having that free spoiler, it still took me 11 or 12 minutes to finish; my figurative hat is off to Tyler for finishing in roughly that amount of time without an assist; I don’t know whether I would have finished it within 15 minutes. In my estimation, the A finals puzzle was tougher than puzzle 5, and clearly tougher than Byron’s finals puzzle last year. Plenty of people felt bloodied and bruised by Byron’s puzzle 5 this weekend, but if everyone had had to solve the A finals puzzle, I think those humbled glares would have been redirected at Mike. Here’s a photo (from left, Mike Shenk and Byron Walden); let me know if you need the hi-res version so you can make a dartboard.
Mike Shenk, Byron Walden
• On the flight home, I found a copy of the March 13 New Yorker. There was a cartoon that resonated—one penguin says to another penguin that’s wearing sunglasses, “Oh, get over yourself. We were all in the movie.” It’s so Wordplay! (This same issue of the New Yorker also had a glaring misspelling, and I know you all share my horror at that. “…After drinking it I wondered for several moments if I would wretch.” Wretch? And in another article, the S was pointlessly capitalized in “Down’s Syndrome.” Oh, New Yorker. What happened to your standards?)
• I enjoyed meeting a lot of people whose names are well-known in the crossword arena. Editor and constructor types like Manny Nosowsky, Matt Gaffney, Patrick Berry, Sherry Blackard, Karen Tracey, Rich Norris, and Shawn Kennedy. Assorted solving whizzes past and present, including David Rosen, Dave Tuller, Francis Heaney, and Ray Hamel. And then there were the many people I’d met last year and was pleased to see again—far too many to list. Not to mention the folks whose names I knew from their comments at this blog; I’m glad I can now put faces to the names. And it was nice to see Wordplay creators Patrick Creadon and Christine O’Malley again, and their warm and friendly family members who came to work at the tournament.
• Tyler is the youngest ACPT champion and also the second-youngest. I’ve got to train my kindergartner to break Tyler’s record—is that too much pressure to put on a kid? He took my Midwest trophy to school today for show-and-tell. Speaking of kindergarten, sometimes Ben’s homework includes a word search. I couldn’t help critiquing yesterday’s, which featured eight hidden words ending with -op. Who on earth would include HOP along with SHOP and CHOP? Poor kid thought he found HOP, but it was really CHOP. Who’s writing these dang workbooks, anyway?
• I came home with 70 pictures on my camera, and yet I’ve posted only two. You know why? My pictures suck. Poor composition, terrible timing with the red-eye flash, Satanic glowing red embers for eyes without the red-eye flash. I took one of those tests in college designed to tell you what sort of career you’re best suited to, and apparently I have a lot in common with photographers—except that they're actually good at photography. There are plenty of great pictures available via the 2006 tournament page.
• Still with me? You’ve made it to the end, and you’re wondering how it’s possible that this version is less pointless, self-absorbed, and disorganized than what I’d drafted? Trust me, the other stuff was far worse. Anyway, as mentioned in the comments on the previous post, yes, there was a scoring error that means I really placed 5th overall. (As of this writing, the posted rankings haven’t been updated.) Two posts ago, I was mystified by my score for puzzle 6. The referee who picked up my paper and jotted a “25” for the number of minutes remaining wrote it fast—you know how a sloppy/fast 5 can look like a zero? So they’d entered my minutes remaining as 20 instead of 25, shorting me by 125 points. I’m delighted to move upward in the rankings, of course, but I’m sorry that the change is a disappointing one for Katherine Bryant (who kicked major ass on puzzle 5—nobody else finished correctly until 2 minutes after Katherine, and she was a whopping 5 minutes faster than I was) and Al Sanders (the only thing that kept Al out of the finals this year was puzzle 5 slowing him down—on the other six puzzles combined, he was actually tied with or a minute faster than the three finalists).
Safe place for ACPT spoilers
I know those of you who are doing the Play by Mail option probably haven't seen the ACPT puzzles yet, so blog posts will remain free of spoilers for those puzzles for the time being. (If you're looking to avoid seeing any spoilers, don't read Eric Berlin's excellent write-up.) However, the HaloScan comments window is easy to avoid—if you don't want to read any spoilers, don't click on the comments link. I'll start it off.
March 27, 2006
ACPT wrap-up, part 1
Most of the people reading this blog probably have never attended the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. If that’s true of you, I encourage you to take advantage of the “Play by Mail” option—send in this form with $20, and they’ll mail you a set of tournament puzzles. You time yourself while solving and mail the completed puzzles back with your solving times noted. Then Will Shortz’s people score your performance by Stamford rules and return your graded papers with a sheet that tells you how you would have ranked in each category you’re eligible for. I Played by Mail two years ago, and would have been 33rd; that was all the encouragement I needed to fly to Stamford last year. Because it was a fantastic batch of puzzles this year, I think everyone should try their hand at them—they’re worth the $20. So I’ll try to avoid writing about specific entries or clues for the time being—but I don’t know how long I can hold off. It could be mere hours…
Here’s an overlong recap of the tournament itself:
Friday, I flew to New York and served as Nancy Shack’s trusty navigator on the drive from LaGuardia to the Marriott. (I was trusty until we reached downtown Stamford, anyway.) I checked into the hotel, tossed my luggage in my room, and essentially abandoned the hotel room for the next 11 hours. Mingling in the lobby, attending the NYT crossword forum’s annual Cru dinner, playing the preliminary part of the Quiz Bowl trivia game written and emceed by “Jeopardy!”immortal Ken Jennings (about a dozen Stamford contestants have also appeared on the show over the years—bright group of people, eh?), and then abandoning the sudoku contest in lieu of checking out the scene in the hotel bar. (Apparently there’s some interest in college basketball these days?) We quit paying for drinks and went over to the ACPT reception, and then returned to the bar and the lobby for more conviviality.
Saturday morning, I woke up far too early despite having stayed up far too late. A crossword tournament sounds like such a placid, low-key thing, but I must’ve been absolutely wired. I tried to perk up by solving Byron Walden’s Saturday NYT puzzle, which seemed unusually difficult. (Cue dramatic music to foreshadow events to come.) I finished it, handed it to the constructor himself, and learned I had one letter wrong—though you have no proof of that, since I didn’t use the NYT’s timed applet and it wasn’t a tournament puzzle. (Phew!)
Next, on with the tournament!
Puzzle 1, by one of my personal faves, Harvey Estes: It took me just over 3 minutes, but there were eight solvers who finished in under 3 minutes (leaving me 25 points behind the lead).
Puzzle 2, by Cathy Millhauser: Stella Daily tore through this puzzle in (I think) under 7 minutes, with about seven of us turning in correct papers in the minute after Stella.
Puzzle 3, by Patrick Merrell: Surprisingly dastardly for a supposed-to-be-easyish puzzle 3. I finished within 8 minutes, 2 minutes behind Trip Payne and 1 minute behind several other speed demons. This puzzle vexed a lot of folks.
Puzzle 4, by the legendary Manny Nosowsky: Finished in under 4 minutes, in a pack of people 1 minute behind Tyler Hinman, Trip, and Francis Heaney.
Puzzle 5, by the widely feared and ferociously talented Byron Walden (“I’m your number 1 fan”—cue music from Misery): You’ve heard of “Brokeback Mountain”? This was Brokeheart Crossword. Roughly 95% of the competitors were unable to finish it correctly within the 30 minutes allotted. Byron and Will Shortz laid many traps in this puzzle, and each of those traps left the tangled wreckage of many thwarted solvers in its wake. It took me nearly 16 minutes, if I’m doing the arithmetic correctly, with no errors. Katherine Bryant blazed through it 5 minutes faster than me, and another five people finished correctly 1, 2, or 3 minutes before me. This was the rare puzzle that trips up multiple top contenders with errors, shuffling the standings dramatically. One reason Byron’s my favorite constructor is that while his puzzles are uncommonly challenging, I almost always finish them perfectly—and I managed to do that on this one.
Puzzle 6, by Maura Jacobson: Whew, time to relax with a breezy puzzle. At the moment, I’m trying to figure out if my posted score is actually correct—I may have jotted down the wrong time limit for Maura’s puzzle (was it increased from 30 minutes to 35?). According to my notes, I finished the puzzle with exactly 25:00 left on the clock; either it took me a fast 5 minutes and I was shorted some points (inconsequentially—tack on another 100 points to my score, and all that happens is Al Sanders and I swap places), or the time limit was longer and I meandered through it in 10 minutes, trailing the leaders by 5 minutes. But I’m not sure that 50+ people finished ahead of me, as the scores would indicate; was I really such an outlier on puzzle 6?. So…I’m confused. The fog will lift eventually.
Puzzle 7, by Merl Reagle, another one of my perennial favorites: I so enjoyed meeting Merl at Sundance, I bought a copy of Volume 1 of his collected crosswords. Actually, I ordered it as a gift for a friend, but Merl autographed it, so I had to keep it for myself and order another copy for the friend. So in addition to the one Merl puzzle a week in my routine, I’ve solved an extra 13 (lucky 13!) of his puzzles in the past two months. Excellent practice for puzzle 7, which Al and Kiran Kedlaya finished 2 minutes ahead of me and another peloton finished 1 minute before me. I moved fairly deliberately on this puzzle, making sure I wasn’t writing sloppy or incorrect letters, checking the crossing clues, and protecting against an error that would make me plummet out of the top 10. I also took the time to chuckle at the funny theme entries—I wonder if Trip and I bothered our tablemates by laughing so often.
I want to write more, and have drafted a bunch of paragraphs, but I’m losing my focus here (sleep deprivation), so I’ll post this portion and finish the rest later.
March 26, 2006
Hold that thought
Okay, I'm gonna write a nice long post about Stamford, and throw in a bunch of photos. But it's 10:00, I've had less than 6 hours of sleep in two days, and I haven't sorted through the pictures yet. So hang tight. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow. But let me say this for now: Whoo! Seventh place! Whoo-hoo! I was genuinely surprised that I made the top 10. Those of you who made careless mistakes or moved slowly on puzzle #7, I thank you. Merl and Byron, thanks for constructing puzzles on which assorted rivals made errors. Will, thanks for easing up some of Byron's most impossible clues so that a couple dozen of us could actually finish the puzzle correctly.
In the meantime, those of you who weren't attending the tournament in Stamford who have written, beseeching me to send you scans of assorted Starbucks puzzles, you're gonna have to sit tight. I'll get to you in a day or two. I haven't done puzzle #6 yet and my husband hasn't scanned it in yet, so...patience.
ACPT, day 2
Once again, I've spent next to no time in my room since I left it for breakfast this morning, returning in the wee-ish hours. (Post-puzzling, I went to the Cru party, dinner, the Wordplay screening, the hotel bar, and a beer bash featuring puzzle editors and constructors doing some theme brainstorming that was totally off-the-hook wild.) Unfortunately, rather than having puzzles at 11:00, puzzle 7 is at 9:00, which is sounding mighty early right about now. The preliminary standings will be posted in six hours, and things like sleeping, showering, and eating breakfast need to get squeezed into that time window. Ack!
I don't know of any errors I made in the first six puzzles, but then, how awake was I when I solved them? There's no telling what sort of slop may have ended up on my grids. I mostly finished one or two minutes behind the vanguard on each puzzle, except for puzzle 5 (a wicked themed creation from Byron Walden), where I punched out about five minutes after the fastest solver (Katherine Bryant). However, I didn't make the known errors that may have knocked a couple of A finals contenders out of the running. (That doesn't preclude random errors in other parts of the puzzle...)
I can't wait to find out how I did and who's still in the battle to reach the finals. And so to bed.
March 25, 2006
ACPT, day 1
It's almost 2 a.m. Stamford time, and I finally had a chance to unpack and turn on my shiny new laptop. I have done one crossword puzzle today (or technically, yesterday)—Vic Fleming and Bonnie Gentry's Ornery crossword in the new issue of Games. (It's a good one, and Bonnie and Vic are such genial people.) That's it. I hear rumors about the Saturday NYT, but I haven't seen it yet; I'll wait for the hard copy in the morning.
The Cru dinner at the hotel restaurant was, shall we say, leisurely. I think they're not used to having quite so many people actually expect to order food at one time, so we waited. And waited. And enjoyed the beer, wine, and free-flowing conversation. In any event, the slow service beat the hell out of the absence of service last year (I missed the Cru dinner then, thanks to a tardy flight).
After dinner, there was Quiz Bowl with Ken Jennings (who looks better in person than on TV). Two teams of four each got 38 of 40 preliminary questions right—anyone know off the top of their head how many points there are on the Statue of Liberty's crown? What breakfast cereal mascot's "real" name is Horatio Magellan? My team got 34 right, so we got to watch the top teams acquit themselves in the fashion in which they acquitted themselves. (Better than I could've done.) Ken Jennings talks fast. Quiz Bowl was followed by the Sudoku Smackdown, introduced by Wayne Gould, who kicked the craze off a couple years back. The contest page had three puzzles; I was most of the way through the first one when I made some sort of error and said, "Screw it. There's a bar in this hotel," and went off to find socializing in lieu of sudokuing.
The bar scene morphed into the lively reception, which was followed by assorted chats in the lobby...and back in the bar. Wow, some people sure drink a lot here! (Hey, nobody's driving...) Plenty of good gossip, catching up, getting to know new faces.
The competition kicks off at 11:00 Eastern, with puzzles 1, 2, and 3 before lunch, a long lunch break, and puzzles 4, 5, and 6 at 2:30. The constructors this year include Harvey Estes, Byron Walden, Merl Reagle, Patrick Merrell, Manny Nosowsky, Maura Jacobson, Mike Shenk, and Cathy Millhauser. Hooray! I like them all, and I don't think any of them scare me. I haven't done many crosswords in the past week, but hopefully that means I'm well-rested rather than rusty. But who knows? I truly can't predict where I'll finish in the rankings.
In the evening, we'll watch Wordplay and have popcorn and other movie snacks (plus booze), courtesy of IFC Films. The film's director and producer are here with numerous family members, and they're about to garner several hundred more enthusiastic fans.
Into the wee hours, apparently, the judges (poor saps!) will be scoring papers to generate the preliminary standings for Sunday morning. Stay tuned...
(That wake-up call that's coming in 4 1/2 hours is gonna be painful. Diet Coke in ample caffeinated quantities will be my friend.)
Morning update: I got to sleep around 3:00 and awoke at 5:15, so...yeah, there are a few Diet Cokes with my name on them this morning.
