ACROSS LITE PUZZLE: [ STRANDED]
PROGRAM: [Across Lite]
PROGRAM: [Java]
PRINTOUT PUZZLE: [ STRANDED]
PROGRAM: [Adobe Acrobat]
Before we get to the Lollapuzzoola recap, I must begin with a shameless plug. If you liked the puzzles this month, and have some spare change, please consider dropping a little cash in the Tip Jar this week. Have no fear, this site will always be free. I will never ask you to pay a subscription to get your dose of BEQ crosswords. Just think of this like an NPR pledge drive. I got small costs to cover, and your help will keep this blog going strong and independent. A small tip of $5, $10 or $20 would be much appreciated. As an additional way to say thank you, one randomly selected donor between now and next Monday will receive a copy of “Diagramless Crosswords.” Thanks, and now, onto the recap.
“Steely” Dan Feyer took it all at this year’s Lollapuzzola, and to some, it wasn’t much of a surprise. (He’s the sexy guy on the left up above.) You may recall Dan was the man who announced, yes, damn it, he was to be taken seriously as a speed solver earlier this year in his breakout performance at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. This coming after the ungodly training session of 25+ puzzles a day. Whew! Well he’s here, dammit, and he’s not going anywhere any time soon. Dan pretty much owned it at Lollapuzzoola. (Coming in second, a mere seven seconds behind Dan, was Francis Heaney, who if you recall was just thisfriggingclose from winning the ACPT outright himself earlier this year. Howard Barkin, no stranger to the world of speedsolving as he was Lollapuzzoola’s returning champ, placed third.)
It sounds like I’m stating the obvious in saying that the whole thing was a footrace, but these three guys were, for the most part, tied all the way through the whole tournament. I don’t know if it’s muscle memory or Zen or hard drugs, but nothing got by these guys. Lollapuzzoola directors Ryan Hecht and Brian Cimmet called me in to make the playing-field leveling puzzle, which I’ve posted up above. Slight spoiler: the gimmick of the puzzle required you to do two standard crossword gimmicks, with the hopes that solvers would talk themselves out of one or the other and not into both. Even with some hard as hell cluing, at the end of the day, it just didn’t matter; Dan, Francis and Howard weren’t going to be slowed down. Very humbling, but then again, I know these guys. Dan and Howard frequently post the top times on the Leaderboard to your left.
By the way, just going to throw this out there: I think that one of either Dan, Francis or Howard and let’s throw in Trip Payne and (especially) Tyler Hinman could lay waste to the current Guinness Book record for speed solving the New York Times Monday puzzle. So since we’re all six degrees separated, if any of you faithful readers knows how to get in touch with the right Guinness people, hit me up. We gotta set this record straight.
Anyway, Ryan and Brian put on a fantastic tournament. The whole even was filled with the humor and showmanship we’ve come to expect with their entertaining blog. Just a small sampling: one puzzle’s theme entries were clued as dramatic reenactments of famous movies by the hosts. Another lovely feature was “Google tickets.” By cashing in one ticket and incurring a scoring penalty, contestants were given any answer of their choice. One contestant, Amanda Yesnowitz, used seven tickets just on my puzzle alone. She told me later, if she had to use one, might as well use ’em all. (She did finish mine in time, a feat not all can say they did.)
Anyway, it was a blast. Hope to see you all there at Lollapuzzoola 3: This Time It’s Personal. And as for today: share the puzzle. Come back on Wednesday.
Brendan — thanks for the awesome write-up! Your puzzle was a big hit at Lollapuzzoola, and I’m eager to see some of the comments from your regular readers here.
Thanks for your wonderful contributions to our event. We look foward to seeing you (and all you readers) at Lollapuzzoola 3!
Thanks for sharing your Lollapuzzoola offering with those of us who couldn’t make it. That’s one awesome achievement of cruciverbalism! Loved the “double gimmick”! I was definitely trying to add or subtract the letters to/from all the theme answers (as you hoped we would!). Keep up the great work!
Great puzzle. I got interrupted by a phone call, so I don’t know my time, but it was way hard. I didn’t have the modern pop culture chops to figure out the NW (2 errors), so I definitely would have crashed and burned on this puzzle at the tournament.
What’s the current Guinness listing, is it still Stan’s 2:20? I’m sure that’s been beaten multiple times. Maybe Will could stage a Guiness beating session with the upcoming Monday puzzle at the next ACPT. I bet someone could break 2. To be fair, the puzzle should be laid out as in the newspaper since the smaller grid size slows you down a bit as compared to the across lite printout.
I test-solved this puppy with the original killer clues and it took me over 10 minutes. With a handful of clues eased up perhaps, and remembering how the theme worked and some of the answers that had been unfamiliar the first time out, it still took me a Thurs/Fri NYT amount of time. Yes, the “hard” designation is spot on!
According to Stan’s author bio, it’s 2:14, and yes, at least eight of us could beat that! I’m totally in favor of this proposal…
Great puzzle… following the blog here helped a lot with 1A, and getting the central helper entry first helped with tackling the theme.
I finished this puzzle after some time (with no googling! I did enlist the help of Across Lite’s check letter option a few times though) and I still have no idea what the theme is.
Original killer clues?
I would have *loved* to try that one, lucky you!
I got to help score some of the submitted puzzles on this one as well, and can say that there were some excellent, creative, albeit incorrect entries in that top-left corner. I wonder what else would have happened if the clues were toughened up even more.
Haha– My strategy didn’t exactly pay off as my score on your puzzle was dropped but it did get me a mention on your blog which is not too shabby. Those red dots made me feel like Hester Prynne.
Amanda
The theme didn’t confound me too much, though I did spend a few seconds wondering why INTEL COMBUSTION didn’t contain RNA, but then I realized what the central entry was trying to tell me. Once I was done, it took some staring at 18A to see where the RNA was transferred out (and into 24A).
On the other hand, the NW killed me. For a long time I had MOLIERE for 2D, which fit with ELO for 17A (when in doubt for 3-letter band E__, go with ELO). In the end the interaction of 1A, 17A, and 2D was too much for me, and I googled 1A to finish (note to self: when stuck on a BEQ rapper, think Beastie Boys).
It always annoys me when the names of obscure (to an oldster like me) bands prevent me from finishing nicely, which is why I rated this just 3 stars. Other than the NW, though, I found the rest to be surprisingly do-able (VIABLE?).
Whoa! You win!
I read your recap first and then promptly forgot you were going to do a double-whammy. Took me a while to weave the RNA in and out – nicely done. Thoroughly enjoyed it but had to admit defeat in the NW corner, too.
Tip o’ the jar!
I didn’t read your “slight spoiler” alert before diving in. Starting at 1-Across, I got through the top half with just a few answers filled in. Then the bottom half filled-in pretty quickly. (“Quickly” being a relative term, of course.)
When I completed INTELCOMBUSTION I knew that the letters RNA were dropped from the more common term, looked at the puzzle’s title again and said “aha”!
But then BARNABYDOLL made the theme obvious. But, er, you do know that Barbie Doll is spelled with “ie” not “y”, right? This is a letters-addition/letters-subtraction theme and this is the only entry with a substitution. Tut-tut. **wags finger**
As I worked my way up again and filled in TRANSFERRNA I looked at my time, 6:03. It’s a rare day that I complete a BEQ puzzle in under 15 minutes and this could be one. And it’s a “hard” puzzle no less!
The top half kicked my butt. I used a Trivial Pursuit ticket (that would be the Across Lite reveal feature, rather than google) for 17-A, EMF. Never heard of ’em, but that got me 3-D once I realised that 20-A was ILSA, not RICK (which was the second answer I filled in after 1-D, of course).
Used my second TPT on 11-D. I’ve heard of the movie ARARAT but never heard of Atom Egoyan. (The last movie I went to see in a theater was “United 93” and the time before that was “Men In Black” some 10 years earlier. Yeah, I don’t go to the movies much.)
So, I used two tickets and finished in 28:46. What was the time limit on this puzzle at the tournament? If it was 15 minutes then I probably would have still had about 30% blank/incorrect squares when the buzzer rang. Kerplunk.
Oops. I just realized the original was “Baby doll”, not “Barbie doll”.
Nevermind.
I might have had ARACAT @ the tourney. 🙁
My favorite part of the whole tournament was the first refreshing breeze when everyone turned over your puzzle, and then the second refreshing breeze when, after about 5 minutes, almost every hand in the room went up at the SAME TIME with a Google ticket clutched in it. Watching everyone go scrambling to help the solvers was my second favorite part 🙂
Great puzzle!
for a while i had the entire bottom half of the puzzle done and almost nothing on the top half.
Catching up as missed solving your blog last week, though not sure exactly why; slacking I guess. My excuse for missing Lollapuzzoola – being thousands of a kilometers and one large ocean away – is that good enough for you?
I just sent in a puzzle with a similar theme (spoiler for 3 months time if I’m lucky) so the theme itself was easy to grasp, also doing 2 years of genetics meant TRANSFERRNA was a complete gimme. The rest of the puzzle still proved a tough slog lots of vague/misleading/obscure (11D!!!!!) clueing, plus plenty of stuff I just plain hadn’t heard of. The top-left was utterly Satanic. Not being able to remember the very easy VESPA didn’t help the bottom-left much either. It was a lot of fun though!
same.
Outstanding theme, Brendan.
Can anyone describe the scoring system used at Lolpuzzoola? I’m doing the puzzles and would like to see how I would have ranked on the list.
For the record, I took that picture. It’s not my best effort, and I don’t mind you yanking it from facebook, but please credit me. Thanks. Elaine Lippman
Well, Spork (may I call you Spork?), the scoring was a rank-based system, with the first to solve earning 2000 points, second earning 1995, and so on. +100 bonus for a perfect puzzle, -10 for blank/wrong letters(words? I forgot), and -25 for each Google Ticket(TM?) used to obtain answers – this wouldn’t apply to a home solver, unless you honestly count how many answers you searched for.
Judges wrote the finishing times on the sheets to determine ranking, so you would need the actual solve times of the competitors posted with the scores to make a meaningful comparison.
-10 for wrong letters, yes.
If you email me your times at [rbxblog at gmail dot com], I’d be happy to run them against the field and let you know how you would have placed.
Just let me know your time (if it was under 35 minutes), how many times you went to Google for an entry (even if it was just to confirm a guess), and how many letters were incorrect when you “handed in” your puzzle.
Yes to molecular biology in the puzzles!
I’m with ‘tmccormick4’…that NW was painful!
I filled it in with my ‘best guesses’ (guessing “MOE” helped) and they were all correct!!!
Thanks for another good ‘un…
I just want to thank you so much for SQUIRRELCARNAGE. I cannot think of any crossword answer I’ve been more delighted to uncover! Where I live we are absolutely overrun with squirrels, and they are destructive, aggressive, disease-ridden pests — rats with bushy tails. You made my day!
I also want to thank you for your prolific puzzle production (hee hee) and your graciousness in sharing them for free. As I am currently between jobs and trying to economize, it’s a great help not to have to buy the newspaper every day. As soon as I am reemployed, however, I will be pleased to make a contribution. You’re a champ!