What is that? It's a bench, 4 feet in diameter. Costs $1,632, but hey, shipping is free!
It looks like a crossword grid that breaks the rules about symmetry, unchecked letters, and minimum word length. Such rules were the subject of surprisingly heated debate at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. I heard that Peter Gordon (arguing against) and Merl Reagle (arguing for) debated the standard requirement for symmetry in themeless crosswords until 3 a.m. Saturday in the Marriott lobby. The next evening, I joined the sequel, featuring Matt Gaffney, Byron Walden, and Deb Amlen.
My take on this is that from the solver's standpoint, interesting fill and smart clues are worlds more important than having a symmetrical grid for a themeless puzzle. This is borne out by Frank Longo's Mensa Crosswords for the Super Smart: 72 Cranium-Crushing Challenges, in which half of the puzzles look sort of symmetrical but have some black squares moved around. The fill is terrific, but insistence on strict symmetry would have sent some of these gems into the trash heap. Byron says he's chucked any number of fantastic corners of themeless puzzles just because it was next to impossible to get a symmetrical grid to flow from those corners.
What purpose is served by insisting that symmetry is more important than the quality of the fill? I know a lot of people appreciate the aesthetic appeal of rigorous symmetry, but symmetry is not entertaining in and of itself. Rumor has it that Peter will be making space for some asymmetry in the Sun crossword (and don't argue that those will be crappy puzzles—Peter sets the bar high for fill and clues, and he's not going to be publishing something horribly amateurish and unpolished), and I look forward to solving those puzzles. I'll bet many solvers will never even notice, and if they do notice, I can't believe they'd be anywhere near as troubled by it as some of the crossword cognoscenti.
At Stamford, Matt Gaffney asked me: If you dispense with symmetry, what's stopping anyone from breaking the rules against 2-letter entries and unchecked letters? It took me a week to come up with an apt response to that, but here it is. You know how Rick Santorum bewailed the idea of same-sex marriage, saying there'd be nothing to stop people from demanding the right to marry multiple people at once, or to marry their dog? That's baloney. Just as I think the idea of a slippery slope in marriage rights is ludicrous, I don't see why selected editors and constructors making some puzzles without symmetry means that hacks will be able to demand the right to publish crosswords with unchecked letters or 2-letter words. It's just not going to happen.
Thoughts?
April 02, 2007
Bending the rules
February 18, 2007
Monday, 2/19
CS 3:40
LAT 2:41
NYT 2:37
NYS tba
(post updated at 9:45 a.m. Monday)
Happy Presidents/President's/Presidents' Day! If you have the day off, I hope you find something fun to do—whether it involves a day of action, hitting up the sale at Guitar Center, or sleeping late.
Monday's NYT crossword is by Andrea C. Michaels. The theme is Run, Lola, Run, or three-word phrases in which the first and last words are the same. Can you think of other candidates for this theme besides the three that were used (BOND, JAMES BOND; HOME SWEET HOME; TIME AFTER TIME)? Timely to have a Britney Spears clue (I'M A as part of a song title) so soon after she was in the headlines. Okay, so she's seldom been out of the entertainment headlines for the past year. But now it's because she shaved her head! (Being bald makes her nose look bigger, doesn't it?) Perfect Monday puzzle here, with tons of easy and crap-free 3-letter entries. Okay, maybe beginning solvers don't instantly associate Swedish air travel with SAS, but they've gotta learn it soon enough if they want to get better at solving crosswords.
Updated:
Randall Hartman's LA Times puzzle marks Presidents Day with actors who played fictional presidents in the movies. Fun Monday puzzle.
Rich Norris's CrosSynergy puzzle startled me by including the word GOOK, clued as [Icky stuff]. I don't care if it's in the dictionary with that meaning (as a variant of guck). Its more prominent meaning (definition 1, in fact) is as a racial slur used against Asians and Asian-Americans. Here's a historical look at the word. And no, it hasn't lost its punch. It's alive and well, as this link from just last week shows.
The way I see it, if SCUMBAG and SCHMUCK have no place in the NYT crossword because of their used-condom and Yiddish-penis roots, a hateful word like GOOK—offensive not because it pertains to sex, but because it is used against a group of people—certainly should be off-limits. If you're a constructor and GOOK bails you out of a tough corner, I ask you to keep working on the fill. If you're an editor, if you can't find a way to rework the fill to eliminate that word, don't publish the puzzle. You'd reject anything with the N-word, wouldn't you?
February 06, 2007
Wednesday, 2/7
NYS 4:34
CS 3:46
LAT 3:23
NYT 3:00 (The applet stole a second from me! I swear!)
(post updated at 8:50 a.m. Wednesday)
It's always nice when one's habits or proclivities are borne out as good things. Case in point: I like to solve the all the newspaper crosswords I do online, either in the Times' applet or in Across Lite. There are plenty of books of crosswords to allow the on-paper "training" that many people like to do in the weeks leading up to the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. My fondness for online solving worked out nicely with David Kwong's Wednesday NYT puzzle—the theme entries are the rows in TYPEWRITER / KEYBOARDS, and it sure was easy to key in QWERTYUIOP, ASDFGHJKL, and ZXCVBNM. I wonder if pencil-and-paper solvers found this crossword to be tough going (online, it seemed mighty easy to me). Moving along to the fill and clues: Excuse me, [It's hard to do with "orange"] is RHYME? Codswallop! My son and I banter rhyming words all the time. Have you ever noticed that LEBANON and the Chrysler LeBaron differ by only one letter? (If you're a crossword constructor, I bet you have.) I wondered if 33-Down, NAGGY ([Shrewish]) was a real word. Google was inconclusive (as it often is), but my jumbo Random House Webster's Unabridged lists it. Naggy means "naggish," and dates back more than 300 years. Naggish means "intending to nag; somewhat nagging." Nagging gets a longer definition, but both naggish and nagging are newer words than our friend NAGGY.
Timothy Powell's Sun crossword is called "I Before EE," and the theme entries swap an I for an EE. Thus, a cow chip becomes [Cattle call?], or COW CHEEP. Props to Mr. Powell for including six theme entries and having the vertical ones appear in abutting pairs. Read them aloud and hear yourself sound like Fez from That '70s Show or a similarly accented character. A summer theatrical production with Meryl Streep is STREEP SHOW. See? Fun to say. I haven't heard [Murphy] used to mean "potato," but here it is, cluing SPUD. (Want some HAPPY JUICE with your murphies?)
Updated:
Lynn Lempel's LA Times crossword has a BED AND BREAKFAST theme in which the first two theme entries begin with words that, combined, are a kind of bed, and the last two begin with words that make up a kind of breakfast. The theme's a bit roundabout, but I like it. There's some fill with DASH, such as RATCHET UP, SHOOFLY pie, GO-TO guy. Not crazy about SLUMLORDS (or the use of [Ghetto blasters, e.g.] as a clue for STEREOS in the Klahn puzzle below), though.
Anyone know much about the birds and the bees? In Bob Klahn's CrosSynergy quip puzzle, "Mass Transit," OVULATE is clued as [Make eggs]. In humans, of course, ovulation is the release of an egg that has been present in the ovary for a woman's entire lifespan; the eggs were "made" long before ovulation. Is the clue technically accurate in birds or bees?
