ACROSS LITE PUZZLE: [ CENTRAL PROCESSOR]
PROGRAM: [Across Lite]
PROGRAM: [Java]
PRINTOUT PUZZLE: [ CENTRAL PROCESSOR]
PROGRAM: [Adobe Acrobat]
The Visual Thesaurus ran my contest puzzle today. You can do it over on their website here.
In other news, celebrity shitheadedness happens. Reader George Heard brought this article to my attention. For those who can’t be bothered to click on the link, I’ll summarize: a clue in a British crossword asked for the current beau of a minor celebrity, that celebrity sued the crossword editor for libel, and the newspaper is running the solution with that entry blanked out. I can only hope that this doesn’t become a trend.
Way back when, back before this site launched, I made a puzzle for a client (name withheld to protect the not-so-innocent, thank you very much. We need secrets!). And that client’s lawyers kindly asked me to remove all references to currently living celebrities as well as works of art that wasn’t in the public domain. Thanks to them, they managed to litigate all the fun out of the puzzle. Not so good times.
Message to all y’all bone-headed celebrities and/or bloodthirsty lawyers: there are people whose goal in life is to be a clue in the New York Times crossword, or any other crossword puzzle for that matter. Ask Peter King. (No, wait, don’t. I didn’t realize mentioning his name in a puzzle would open up all the a whole slew of negativity. Don’t want to unleash that furor again. Bad example.) Take it as a compliment. Oscar Wilde summed it up best: “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”
Anyway, for one last time: If you liked the puzzles this month, and/or you were thinking about tipping your constructor, please give it the Red Cross instead. You have always been generous to me in these mini-drives, please be as generous to those in Haiti.
Share the puzzle. New one on Monday.
I am in total awe of this puzzle. I have a PhD in Computer Science (but know nothing of Buddhism) and I was dumbfounded by how wrong my answer to 7 down was until I got it. Talk about “aha”. The title of the puzzle is amazingly apt also. Another gotcha was a search of the cast of the Exorcist that revealed that Ron Faber was the only cast member whose first name had three letters and last name had five letters. Hah! And a “plural” ending in “P”! And “Marshall” is not a last name. And the timeliness of this puzzle. The fact that this puzzle exists seems like a fantasy to me.
If it weren’t for that ridiculous central Across answer, I would have rated this closer to Easy. Medium for sure. But I had to work for every single cross in the middle, even after the IPAD reveal, so the time was pretty Hardish. Low end, but still there.
Also thought SHANE was GRANT for some reason 🙁
And ONEIDA for OGLALA
rp
OGLALA hanged me up. otherwise, a solid medium. sometimes you just get them. expertly done.
Haven’t done the puz yet so trying to type this w/out reading the comments. But hey: does anyone know what’s up with cruciverb.com? Site’s been down for over a day with some kind of database connection error showing. I don’t have an email for the person who runs the site but somebody around here must know, right?
hackers have messed with the site, but apparently it’s still fine except for the front page. if you’re looking for the LAT puzzle in across lite, for example, you can get it here.
@Brendan, knowing that you’re a musician, I tried for the longest time at 6D to figure out a three-letter word for “technical ability”…And it’s nice to see someone else with a pale ale at the very heart of their Friday.
Very clever device, BTW, and a very, very hard puzzle. Couldn’t have gotten through it without checking my answers repeatedly. “That which does not kill us…”
Last square filled was 52D O_EN, which seems so obvious in retrospect that, to avoid feeling dense, I’m declaring the clue to be Extremely Clever Indirection By The Constructor.
@salo, I imagined that the answer cross-clued by 64A would somehow emerge from the alphabet soup that got spilled across the middle of the puzzle. But once I had 7D [scattered letters]_DRESSES, and the center square boxed in with N_M across, I confidently guessed A and hit Check All. When the apparently unhappy Mr. Pencil x’ed out my A, I saw right away what was going on. If not for checking that unlucky guess, I might yet be sitting here, staring at 35A and speaking in tongues to myself.
@Anyone who subscribes to Peter Gordon’s puzzles, I got the letter but not the meaning at square 44. Help?
I’m super excited because I thought this one was pretty easy. Om Mani Padme Hum is a gimme for me (learned during Sophomore year of college, in Sanskrit class – finally that class proves useful!). It is a stunning puzzle, timely, and love that the long down is a computer term. Really well done. Thanks!
Well, 20 minutes for this one versus 12 for todays NYT, so I guess that counts as harder than “medium” for me. Couple of gimmes: 1A, 28A, and of course 64A. Some tough proper names slowed me down. Should have had 5A a lot sooner but couldn’t get 46A for the hint, because I could figure out what to add to VCRS to fill the crosses. TV seemed awfully redundant and a bit of a strain, but hey, guess what. Fell pretty fast after that. Isn’t a cager a BBALLER though?
Anyway, fun stuff as always. I for one especially appreciated 7D, a half gimme, because it took unconscionably long for me to remember what the opposite of “static” is in that context. Embarrassing, considering what I do for a living.
Thanks for the update Joon. Was that meant to be a link in your post though? Didn’t get it if so. Maybe that “URLs automatically linked” script isn’t working. Glad to hear the rest of the site is up but I don’t have any deeper links bookmarked so I’m stuck. And yes, I need that LAT in .puz format!!! Anyone else know where I can lay my hands, er, mouse on it?
“I tried for the longest time at 6D to figure out a three-letter word for ‘technical ability'”
I’ll second that. Wonder how many others got snagged there too. Nice bit of misdirection.
A gimme for me too, once I had the central square from 64A. Though in my case the source was nothing so estimable as an actual Sanskrit class. Stranger in a Strange Land.
It’s a good thing you didn’t guess “I”. Mr Pencil would have loved it!
http://www.cruciverb.com/puzzles.php?op=showarch&pub=lat
dammit, it ate my link.
fireball 44a, THU = cal(endar) col(umn)
Thank you very much!
Salo hits comedy gold at 4:47, bravo.
Interior monolog upon completion: “What the f%^& is a ‘DYNAMICIP ADDRESS’ ??”
I might need some Buddhist meditation to recover!
And a quibble: Betamax boxes needed a TV too. So TV/VCR, while a great entry, is probably not quite accurate.
Joy!–thanks Joon!
At risk of belaboring a point I’ve made before, UCAL is not a legitimate abbreviation/curtailment for the University of California.
ASSUMING THAT 24D REFERS TO TENNIS, I THINK THERE IS AN ERROR. 40-30 SCORE IS NOT CALLED ADIN. BOTH PLAYERS MUST WIN THREE POINTS EACH PUTTING THE GAME TO 40-ALL (DEUCE) BEFORE ‘ADVANTAGE’ SCORING KICKS IN. IF THE SERVER WINS THE NEXT POINT, THE SCORE BECOMES ADIN.