Wordplay garnered a lot of media attention for crosswords this year. Some weekly independent newspapers (like the Chicago Reader) run the puzzles that Ben Tausig and Matt Jones make—making crosswords more appealing to the young hipster crowd by offering something that isn't your father's Oldsmobile or your grandmother's crossword puzzle. Books like Crossworld and Gridlock heighten the interest in puzzles. Even the sudoku craze, which seems antithetical to crosswords, is luring more customers into the puzzle sections in bookstores.
So there are a lot of people who have just discovered that crosswords are cool, or have finally been motivated to work a little harder to see if they can't finish a puzzle now. If you could give those newbies one piece of advice about solving crosswords—about getting better at it—what would it be?
September 19, 2006
Advice for newbies?
September 18, 2006
Tuesday, 9/19
Tausig 5:10
CS 4:04
NYS 3:39
NYT 3:08
LAT 3:02
Allan Parrish's NYT plunked his theme entries down amid some juicy fill: words like BREEZES, JUBILEE, KITKAT, GINSU, and NL WEST. The theme gave itself away pretty quickly with BEER BELLY linked to a 3-letter word, and POT was more likely than GUT to lend itself to three more theme phrases. I wonder if the NYT crossword has linked POT to ILLEGAL DRUG before. (My son pretended to smoke a macaroni and cheese noodle tonight—Just say no to powder-based cheesoid substances, kids!) This puzzle also had its share of old-school fill like EDSEL, ETUI, ERE I, and LST, so I was finally compelled to find out just what the heck the [D-Day craft] LST stands for—it's the awkwardly phrased landing ship, tank.
In the Tuesday Sun puzzle by Fred Piscop, "Not the Best Puzzle Ever," the theme is types of WURST. The first theme entry, BRAT FARRAR, was unfamiliar to me; I know of Josephine Tey primarily from crosswords (same as Phil OCHS, who was in the Sunday NYT crossword).
Updated:
I always appreciate getting Ben Tausig's puzzle via e-mail on a Tuesday when it won't be printed in the Chicago Reader until Thursday—Thursday difficulty is always a plus earlier in the week when you crave tougher crosswords. I won't spoil this one ("Check Your Ego for the Season") for you because you should experience it for yourself. I will reveal that it has about 80 theme squares, and you'll want to take a close look (or two) at the clues. Quite a constructorial feat!
Bob Klahn's CrosSynergy puzzle (which you can download here—the Cruciverb.com link gets you yesterday's puzzle) features a quote from CNN's Anderson Cooper.
Today's LA Times crossword (available at the Cruciverb archive page) by Bruce Venzke and Stella Daily just might romance you.
September 17, 2006
Monday the 18th
NYS 3:42
LAT 2:53
CS 2:44
NYT 2:26
Whoo-hoo! I don't know for sure, but I think this could be the fastest I've ever finished an NYT crossword. Dave Tuller did a great job constructing it—four theme entries at a Monday level, 8- and 9-letter fill entries, and a smattering of...words with Scrabbly letters (e.g., JOGS, KIOSK, WIZARD). The theme's sweet, with GENTLE BEN (which I last saw dubbed in German on an Austrian TV channel in the '90s), WARM WELCOME, TENDER MERCY, and KIND WORDS. Those long fill phrases are top-notch, too—LOCH NESS and AS I RECALL, WIND CHIME and RED CROSS. The word FETID, by the way, is etymologically unrelated to fetus or feta cheese.
Bonnie Gentry and Vic Fleming constructed the Sun puzzle, "Lullaby of Broadway," which is heavy on the high-Scrabble-count letters (a whopping total of 13 Z's, X's, K's, or J's)—Peter Gordon seems to welcome such puzzles, and so do I. I hadn't even heard of the middle theme entry, The DROWSY CHAPERONE—apparently I'm behind the curve when it comes to Broadway musicals. So what else is new?
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In his CrosSynergy puzzle, Harvey Estes works in five theme entries plus a dozen 7-, 8-, and 9-letter fill entries.
September 16, 2006
Sunday, 9/17
NYT 11:52
WaPo 10:30
LAT 8:52
BG 7:54
CS 5:23
What Brendan Emmett Quigley does and does not do with his Sunday NYT crossword, "Missing Persons": challenge and delight on the one hand, and disappoint and cut us some slack on the other hand. (If you haven't done it yet and you usually do it online, you might consider solving this one on paper.) The puzzle was a good 20% to 30% harder than most, owing to the BEQ/Shortz cluing, the interesting BEQ fill, and the polished theme. Me, I can't think of a single alternate for any of the theme entries—can you? As for that theme, I bet it's a little easier to find the pertinent [Missing from __-Down] clues on a hard copy, where you can scan all the clues at a glance. For me, the hardest theme entry to parse was BATTLE OF BIN; eventually I found the [Missing from 37-Across] clue, worked that section, found RITA, and saw that she'd been extracted from B[RITA]IN. Actually, TOGA SPRINGS confused me, too, until I found the SARA that precedes it. The others, of course, are MY FAVORITE MART[IAN], BOT[TOM] OF THE BARREL, C[ANNE]D LAUGHTER, LISTENS TO AD[VIC]E, (my personal favorite) THE S[CARL]ET LETTER, and BATTING A[VERA]GE. It was nice to have that gimme with [Memory trace], wasn't it? After ENGRAM stumped so many people on Tuesday, we now see that Will was just giving us all a leg up on the Sunday puzzle. Favorite fill and clues included [Flipper?] for SPATULA (would've been easier without the question mark), PIZARRO, SPENGLER, IT'S A SIGN, IRON-ONS, RAZOR-SHARP, and [Little sucker] for MINIVAC. The obscure (to me, anyway) name of the day is Jack NARZ, a game show host from the days of quiz show scandals. A Sunday puzzle sprinkled with Friday/Saturday toughness is just the thing to follow a Saturday puzzle blessed with a Thursday-style rebus, isn't it?
September 15, 2006
Saturday, 9/16
NYT 7:41
Newsday (untimed, but hard)
LAT 5:27
CS 2:57
Don’t let this deter you from using the word, but if you hear it just right, undeterred sounds like a two-word phrase that is unlikely to pass the Sunday-morning breakfast test.
Based on the early returns, the Saturday NYT by Michael Shteyman is uncommonly challenging. For starters, there's the fact that it's actually a Sathurday puzzle, a hybrid between Saturday and gimmick-laden Thursday. Me, I didn't know 1-Across or 1-Down, but eventually enough crossings in that section pointed me in the direction of a rebus for [MATCH]GAME, crossing [MATCH]BOX cars, and that made it so much easier to make headway on the rest of the puzzle. The Thursday-style rebus (five MATCH squares in all) is joined with Saturday-style cluing, like [Rake] (the verb) for SKIM, [Where singles start out in love?] for TENNIS[MATCH], [Mythical dweller across the Rainbow Bridge] for ODIN, [Half-serious run?] for AEIOU, "Low in education" for SETH, and [Frequent flier?] for KITE. Then, sort of out of left field there's YOU N ME. Great longer entries with the rebus squares in them, Michael. Thanks to Michael and Will for a twisty treat on a Saturday!
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Doug Peterson's Newsday Saturday Stumper is indeed a knotty one. As with the NYT, there was plenty of staring blankly at the clues and wondering what the answers could be, but both eventually unraveled themselves. Bob Mackey's LA Times themeless was a little easier than those two, but not too easy.
September 14, 2006
The curse continues: Friday edition
NYT 6:55
NYS 6:51
LAT 4:54
9/1 CHE 4:27
CS 3:43
WSJ 7:19
Reagle untimed
Sheesh, all week I've been having my derriere handed to me by more NYT applet solvers than usual. It may be in poor form to whine about plummeting a few notches farther from the top, but dammit, I expect better of myself. I think I'm just sleepy earlier in the evening now that the school year has started and I have to get my son out the door by 7:50 a.m. each day. But take heart: At Stamford, the whole competition takes place long before my bedtime.
You know who's been kicking ass lately? Howard Barkin, who was bested in the C finals by Ken Jennings at the most recent ACPT. Howard's time on the Thursday puzzle was fantastic. Howard, you'd better go to Stamford next March, because I think you'll be climbing the ranks. And then Byron Walden's almost always fast—so long as Will Shortz keeps hiring him to construct and judge for the tournament, we won't find out if he can beat us in the tournament setting and he won't find out if he'd self-destruct. (What? It could happen.) Also, if you've got ideas for how to defang Tyler Hinman, we should all start working on that project. The tournament's only six months away, after all, and he's taken to solving the daily NYT on paper, tournament-style. This could be trouble—so we need a plan. (If you're a constructor doing tournament puzzles, may I suggest that your name be Bob Klahn, or that you cross little-known rivers with old-timey entries? Anything from the '50s and earlier should be good.)
Even if I'm not setting any speed records on the Friday puzzles, I'm always pleased to have a couple themeless crosswords to sink my teeth into—here, Frank Longo's Weekend Warrior in the Sun and Harvey Estes' NYT. Frank has APPLE JACKS cereal (go ahead—click that link), SMART BOMBS, RAGGEDY ANN, and INSEMINATE (clued merely as [Sow]) anchoring the four corner sections of 10-letter stacks. Tell me this: What popped into your mind first when you read [It's often popped before mingling]? (The answer's MINT.) [Ranch dressing item] is not E. coli-infested spinach, but rather, a STETSON hat. [Compact toy] is the POMERANIAN dog, not a plaything. Terrific fill and clues here.
Harvey's NYT includes three triple-stacked 15s, and nary A TEENAGER IN LOVE in sight. Anyone else try plugging IT'S ALL GREEK TO ME in the bottom row, in lieu of IT'S TOO DEEP FOR ME? Or TONS instead of CELS for [Short units, perhaps]? Or MSG instead of DIN for [Headache intensifier]? Or GRINS for BEAMS? Those wrong turns didn't help me out. I like how THE POWERS THAT BE sit astride the rest of the puzzle. And the two rooster-related clues, one pertaining to the CHINESE CALENDAR, set the solver up to misconstrue [Where to see many rams?]—the DEMOLITION DERBY, of course, has nothing to do with the animal and everything to do with crashing. Hey, at least I didn't come up with a wrong answer for that one. I'm quite proud of myself.
Updated:
Merl Reagle becomes a cruciverbal bad boy, breaking rules just because. In this weekend's Philadelphia Inquirer puzzle, he lets himself use unchecked squares (which I had no trouble filling in, so it's not as if Merl's made the puzzle harder) and two-letter entries in a themeless 21x21 format, with a grid that's completely symmetrical (see? he's not breaking all the rules). There are four 21s in each direction, all interlocking, none of them stretching the bounds of good entries. I see a mini-theme in INTERNATIONAL DATE LINE and THIRD INFANTRY DIVISION both dividing the grid vertically.
The Chronicle of Higher Education took a summer vacation in August, but the puzzles are back now. Paul Land's "Doctor Who" puzzle has a theme of identifying the targets of satire in various Seuss books—interesting! I did get stuck in one spot, where a trigonometry term and Shakespeare quote crossed a chemical and an easy word with an overly specific clue ([Mexican miss] for LATINA).
I liked Mike Torch's Wall Street Journal puzzle, "Pop-up Blocker," but—since it's now morning and I'm wide awake—found it a little too easy.
September 13, 2006
Thursday, 9/14
NYS 6:20
NYT 4:23
LAT 4:10
CS 2:44
I can't tell what's going on with my higher faculties this evening. I received the November issue of Games World of Puzzles, leafed through looking for a Quint-Essential puzzle and found none, and turned to the contest puzzle. Pshaw! Easiest contest puzzle in ages. Had the final trivia answer (Starbuck! No, not really) figured out with about half of the grid still empty. So I figured I was firing on all cylinders. Put GWoP to the side and shifted my attention to the Thursday Sun puzzle by Mark Feldman—and it killed me. I was comparatively faster on Karen Tracey's NYT crossword, but I strive to crack the 4-minute mark on Thursdays and missed. (Oy.)
First off, Karen's lovely puzzle: It includes the word FIEND, but gracious me, it's clued [Villain]. I try to be nice, honest. The skeleton in Karen's puzzle consists of an interlocked quartet of 14s and 15s that could all be clued [How the solver feels on completing this crossword]. With fill like MILLI Vanilli, HOBBIT, LEIA, and BOB DENVER, the pop culture fizzed, and GODIVA chocolate is always nice to contemplate. Now, this puzzle also has its vexing crossings that may stymie plenty of solvers—the WESER River crossing WAF, or the tenant farm CROFT crossing the Firth of TAY—but you gotta be ready for such things on a Thursday.
What I wasn't ready for on a Thursday was the theme in the Feldman Sun puzzle, "Course Numbers." I paid no mind to the title and convinced myself that the theme pertained to birds—EAGLE, ALBATROSS, and BIRDIE supported that. Then COLONEL BOGEY came along, and that name means nothing to me, and it ain't a bird. Eventually I got to NOT UP TO PAR and figured out it was a golf theme...but what the heck is ALBATROSS doing in there? My husband likes golf, but he's never heard the word in relation to golf. Anyone?
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Randall Hartman's CrosSynergy puzzle is smooth and easy.
September 12, 2006
Not my night
9/10 BG 9:04
NYS 5:49
NYT 4:31
LAT 3:35
CS 3:23
I may have sprained my brain lately by plowing through 101 Cryptic Crosswords: From the New Yorker, edited by Fraser Simpson. Because I can't help myself, I've raced against the clock for most of these cryptics. Will Johnston's customer review says, "Because of their barred diagrams and extensive checked letters, you'll find that with practice one of them can be solved in under half an hour." Hmm, these must be phenomenally easy cryptics, because I can finish a lot more than one in that time. I think I have (temporarily) gummed up my mind, because the Wednesday NYT and Sun puzzles felt Thursday-hard.
The NYT by Lee Glickstein and Nancy Salomon lured me into many wrong alleys: I went with chocolate MOUSSES instead of MUDPIES, CARP instead of YAWP, and AT ONCE instead of PRONTO. Anyone else? No? Just me? Okay, then. Lots of good fill surrounding the five theme entries, which were all for naught—being, like Seinfeld, about nothing, in particular, NOTHING IN COMMON. This "much ado" puzzle is good, but I don't know why it gave me such trouble.
And then Fred Piscop's Sun crossword, "Think Small," also stymied me. I did not turn to Google, but I did ask my husband for the hockey player (Denis POTVIN). I spaced on the concept of a packing plant, and can't say I'm too familiar with PLANTLET, so the top theme entry fought me. Looking back at the puzzle, it doesn't look all that hard. Hmm. What did you think?
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Last Sunday's online delayed edition of the Boston Globe puzzle was delayed a couple days, so I've just done it today. It's Henry Hook's "Airplay," playing around with the names of TV series. Most of the theme entries involve changes in vowel sounds, but there are a few with added or changed consonants, as well. Five of the seven horizontal themers are crossed by the vertical one, which is impressive interlocking.
After a good night's sleep, Nancy Salomon's CrosSynergy puzzle and Jack McInturff's LA Times both felt like...Wednesday puzzles.
The Believer
For $8, you can buy the Games Issue of The Believer from McSweeneys.net. The issue includes a translation of Georges Perec's foreword to his French books on crosswords; you can read the beginning of "Thoughts on the Art and Technique of Crossing Words" here.
The magazine's TOC also includes "Crossword After Perec" by Ben Tausig.
September 11, 2006
Tuesday the 12th
Tues. NYS 4:50
Tausig 4:30
Mon. NYS 3:23
LAT 3:20
NYT 3:09
CS 2:57
Without tossing my solving times into a spreadsheet (and, presumably, without knowing the details of your own solving times), how would you guess the Friday NYT, New York Sun Weekend Warrior (the themeless puzzles publishing on alternate Fridays), and Saturday NYT crosswords stack up against each other in terms of difficulty? Which of the three do you consider the hardest?
The theme in James R. Leeds' NYT crossword revealed itself quickly, didn't it? Moving right along to spoilers—right there in 1-Across, the circled letters spelled the Greek letter NU, giving a huge hint to what was in the circled letters in seven other entries and what the central 15-letter entry might say: IT'S ALL GREEK TO ME. While I don't object to NAZI clued as ["The Soup ___" (classic "Seinfeld" episode)], it would have been easy to swap it out for NAVE (crossing HOVELS and EPEE) to extirpate the word. There are some creaky old entries (RETE, OENO, ETAPE) and a name I'd never heard (former NASCAR driver Ernie IRVAN), but more important was great fill like S[PHI]NX crossing URTEXT, RABBIT EARS, GUAVA, and BA[RHO]P. Seeing SHIH Tzu reminds me of a hand-lettered sign posted in my neighborhood, seeking a lost dog—but the dog was described as a "shit-zu."
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Those of us who don't live in New York (or eschew right-leaning newspapers) went without the Sun puzzle yesterday, but it just means we get two today. In Gary Steinmehl's Monday puzzle, "Say It With Vowels," I wasn't sure what [Stag movie] was getting at, and was surprised to see BAMBI. (Makes perfect sense, of course.) Then there's [Obstacle on the way to second base?] for BRA.
Randall Hartman's Tuesday Sun, "Show Me the Show Me State," adds an MO to the theme entries. It would have gone a little easier for me if I'd ever heard of the Modoc tribe, and if Doc Savage were more prominent in my mind than Dan Savage.
Martin Ashwood-Smith's CrosSynergy theme is movies ending with the names of countries. Can you think of any besides the three he included? Out of Africa came to my mind, but Africa's not a single nation.
I really like the theme entries in the LA Times puzzle by Gia Christian ("it's Rich again").
In his Ink Well crossword, "Blending In," Ben Tausig spices up a themed puzzle with two themeless-style stacks of 9-letter entries, including the "wait...is that right?" BOYZ II MEN.
