ACROSS LITE PUZZLE: [ THEMELESS MONDAY]
PROGRAM: [Across Lite]
PROGRAM: [Java]
PRINTOUT PUZZLE: [ THEMELESS MONDAY]
PROGRAM: [Adobe Acrobat]
Whew, what a weekend. My New York Times puzzle from yesterday generated some astounding amount of blog comment vitriol, got mentioned on national television last night as well as in a popular sports column this morning. (And as an unintended side bonus, I also managed to piss off Keith Olbermann. Although, he seems pissed off all the time, so maybe it’s not all that difficult to pull off.) Not bad for a day’s work. Not quite sure what I’m going to do for an encore.
Well I can start with going over the results from last Friday’s contest. Clever solvers who finished the last blog puzzle found the following riddle: WHAT CATCHER’S / LAST NAME IS MADE / OF THE LAST NAMES / OF AN MLB MANAGER / AND AN ACTRESS? The manager in question was L.A. Dodgers skipper Joe Torre and the actress is bombshell Jessica Alba. And when their Wondertwins Powers activate, they take the form of Colordo Rockies catcher Yorvit TORREALBA. 101 out of the 103 entrants got the answer correct, and the results are in: Avram Gottschlich, Angela Harris and Tom McCormick are recipients of my latest book “Diagramless Crosswords.” Congrats to all. (If you didn’t win, feel free to get your own copy in my store to the right).
Finally, just wanted to say that if you enjoyed the puzzles from this month, and you have a little bit of extra money, any contribution would be helpful for keeping BEQ.com running smoothly, independently, and fiercely thumbing its nose at conventional puzzling. As a way of saying thank you, I will send a free t-shirt of their choosing to one lucky donor who contributes this week.
Share the puzzle. New one on Wednesday.
UPDATE: Kissing Suzy Kolber chimed in, too funny.
In your picture with Peter King you kinda resemble Thomas Dolby. Must be the headphones: http://bit.ly/tfU1H
I’ve been told over the years I resemeble “that guy from E.R.,” Beaker from the Muppets, and Don Cheadle, but nobody yet has said I look like Thomas Dolby. Approved. (“Science!”)
That 1-A/3-D crossing was pretty evil, but I managed to guess it. Rest of the puzzle was great.
BTW, as an avid Peter King reader, I thought the Sunday NYT was cool. Great writeup in his MMQB column today.
“Crossword Crowd” member
ZAP MAMA is foreign to me, and I’ve never seen the word ALIENEE, but that might just be because I’ve never been unlucky enough to have to deal with closing out someone’s estate. Good puzzle.
ZAP MAMA, holy cow! WTF!
Else, solid BEQ work. Loved (in a horrible way) TMZ ON TV. Also, thought there might be a GAY CZAR. That is the gov. post I would most like to see become a reality.
rp
Al’s not only a crossword crowd member, he’s the president.
Thanks IC
I think the Gay Czar job is being saved or created as we speak.
ZAP MAMA! haven’t thought about them in ages. i didn’t realize they were belgian. they are a band, though, and not a person/singer, so you might think about tweaking that clue if this puzzle gets reprinted somewhere.
Seeing my name as a winner of the contest is almost as good as seeing one’s name in the NYT puzzle ;-). The vitriolic comments chez Rex were almost funny: all those people getting exercised because they don’t like Peter’s writing, but not worrying when IDI Amin is in the puzzle.
I thought about TMZ almost as soon as I saw the 1A clue, but didn’t realize that the official title was TMZ ON TV, even after I had the TV part. ESPANOL took me forever to get, even staring at E__ANOL, and my pretty good grasp of French didn’t help MES AMIS to appear. Until that corner I thought that the rest of it was not so hard. Being the sort of football aficionado who reads Peter King’s MMQB religiously (read it just before doing this puzzle), 8D = QBRATING was a gimme for me without any crossings, which helped immensely.
Nice puzz. Hadn’t heard of that incoherent rant referred to at 8-Across.
As a side note, I’m sure you saw that the Indians named Manny ACTA their manager yesterday, thereby retaining his legitimacy in crossword land. Being an ex-manager of the worst team in baseball doesn’t really cut it, so here’s to Cleveland saving us from having to go with the ancient legal def of ACTA.
Two squares wrong in 1A, but I’m taking full credit because (i) I don’t speak French and (ii) Belgium does not exist.
I’m amazed that there are people who remember what Thomas Dolby looked like.
Man, that was a bear! I was amused by Brendan’s “Bad Crossings” puzzle the other day. I didn’t know it would become a regular feature, LOL.
Loved it, BEQ. Make me work for it. Only a late rally saved me.
The NYT puzzle brings to mind Vonnegut’s “Siren of Titan” in which the Tralfamadorians manipulate all human history so that primitive humans evolve and create a civilization in order to produce the replacement part for a space ship that crash landed on Titan a moon of Saturn.
What if you did something similar, i.e., contacted Peter King and told him to make the crossword comment on 9/21/09? Maybe not, but I bet that someday reality will be manipulated by a constructor in order to create a great puzzle. And at the moment you seem the most likely one to do it. 🙂
Spent about 1/3 of my time on the NW corner.
In a hard puzzle, I’ll usually go look at a cross-referenced clue rather than wait for crossings. So I went from 34A over to 33D, which sent me to 62A, which refers to 33D, and I actually said “oh fuck you” and moved on. 🙂
+100 for BLUTH.
Duly noted.
Thank you kindly, and congrats.
Hmm… I’ll see if I remember that one.
Basically, those two squares are the difference between an A+ and an A+ with honors.
Call me the fitness instructor.
My head hurts after reading that… but I like it!
If I had a dollar for everyone who said to me “oh fuck you” and moved on …
The MEANEST part was making me try out about a dozen possible spellings of Kaddafi, Gaddafi, Kadaffi…Boy, are you lucky I went to PayPal BEFORE I did the puzzle. I permit myself to do Google for your website puzzles, because we Aging Boomers don’t know from TMZ. (DMZ, I know that one.) And I got the Headhunters–pretty sure we have one or two 78’s with that band performing.
Had to look up BLUTH, THOM, BRESLIN, and (embarrassingly) PSALMS…even though I had __LM_. BONJOUR did not help me in the NW.
Oh, and I notice you’ve changed your middle name to Emmitt, eh?
Thomas Dolby had more hair back in his heyday. Saw him in concert in 2006 with BT and he was sporting the shorn look as seen in the picture I linked to.
Sorry – that was supposed to be in response to Wade’s comment.
I liked this one. Had to break down and google Zap Mama because I kept thinking it was ‘tmztv’ from the ads I’ve seen on tv but there were too many letters. Oh well. Still fun.
The TMZ / ZAPMAMA cross – guessed it, but damn, BEQ. Crossing “…trashy gossip show” and “Belgian singer…” is some circle of crossword hell just outside solving USA Today puzzles with one’s eyes pinned open a la “A Clockwork Orange”.
I kid, of course, but that upper-left corner was still a chunk of (quirky, interesting) nasty. Which is still better than dry, boring nasty. Lots of other good stuff all over the place.
Just changed it, actually.
I just solved one of your diagramlesses that used ZAPMAMA (as well as some facts about Wilco I didn’t previously know) in your new book that just showed up today (squee!), so I was quite happily surprised to find I could apply that very same new-found knowledge before my brain dumped its short-term memory cache. Great timing! 🙂
The NW was my undoing and I thought I was going to get it. I had IMITATE for EMULATE which didn’t help. Had to Google for ZAP MAMA and TMZ ON TV even with the MAMA in place and thinking TMZ would be 1A. Oh well I’m giving this one the HEAVE HO after all the AGONY.
My last answer was the B in QBRATING, which was a big ‘huh?’ for me. I wanted karateing or qskating or something more Olympic sounding. Ohter than that, I appreciate the fresh clues BEQ comes up with.
Isn’t DSL an alternative to cable? You either get DSL or you get cable. I don’t think one “comes with” the other.
Years late … but I must say those headphones around your neck are very fetching.