CROSSWORD SOLVER PUZZLE: [ SORRY, JOKE’S OVER]
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PRINTOUT PUZZLE: [ SORRY, JOKE’S OVER]
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ACROSS LITE PUZZLE: [ SORRY, JOKE’S OVER]
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Head’s up: this puzzle works best in Crossword Solver, Java or PDF. Across Lite solvers, beware.
Also, this letter originally appeared in McSweeney’s #37. Get your copy here.
Hey McSweeney’s,
While making my latest crossword, I had to stop for a good couple of minutes to contemplate two answers I’d managed to fit in the southwest corner: VIMEO (clued as “YouTube competitor”) and AMANPOUR (“News anchor Christiane”).
Both fit, that’s always a plus.
Both were new, never-before-used entries, and us puzzlemakers love being the first to debut new words in crosswords.
But the fact that VIMEO crossed AMANPOUR at the M really bothered me. Was that unfair? Just how well-known are those entries? Would most people have heard of both words?
I think about things like this all day. Crossword constructors are supposed to go out of their way to avoid obscure crossings. When we have to rely upon an ungainly entry, like the Belgian river MEUSE, to hold our grids together, we’d better be damned sure that the words going the other way are all common entries. If we crossed say the first E in MEUSE with something like SOTER (you recall the years of his papacy, 166-175 AD, no doubt), we’d be stuck with a blind crossing. Blind because that crossing square is essentially unsolvable without either and encyclopedic knowledge of arcana or mad Googling skills.
Among certain circles, these blind crossings are called Naticks. I should know, because one of my puzzles led to the coining of that term. In my Sunday New York Times crossword of July 6, 2008, two obscure entries crossed at 1-Across, of all places. “Treasure Island illustrator, 1911″ clued N C WYETH, while “Town at the eighth mile of the Boston Marathon” clued (you guessed it) NATICK.
The N was completely blind.
I remember thinking at the time that it was a tough but essentially fair crossing. Then again, I live in Boston and have at least thought about running the Boston Marathon. So NATICK to me would have been a no-brainer. Not so to pretty much everyone else. Since WYETH’s name began with two initials, that first letter could have been BATICK, HATICK, or MATICK. You get the idea.
This move was deemed extremely dickish, and the Natick Principle was formed: “If you include a proper noun that you cannot reasonably expect more than one-quarter of the solving public to have heard of, you must cross that noun with a reasonably common word or phrase.”
So what do you think? Is VIMEO crossing AMANPOUR a Natick? Let me know.
I would say yes it’s a Natick. I think VIMEO would be obscure to most solvers and that, although many people would recognize AMANPOUR if they saw it, being confident of the second letter is a greater challenge.
I enjoy the puzzles, as well as your own commentary.
BTW you may experience a decline in your word recognition skills once the baby comes.
Best,
Aaron
Glad to see Erwin Schrodinger get a mention in the XWP. The gimmick was great. I noticed a few starter without the exponent in the corner. I was baffled by it for a while until RIDDLE showed up. It’s a good variation on an old gimmick. One could say the main theme of HP Lovecraft is “Curiosity killed Schrodinger’s Cat”.
OK, what’s 38D mean? I don’t get it, though I got it from the checks.
I thought Christiane Amanpour was pretty well known even before she became a regular on “60 Minutes”, so I think that’s fine. She’s famous enough they did her on SNL as early as May 1996, and as recently as this season (though admittedly not often). (I love snltranscripts.jt.org.)
“Where there’s war, there’s Amanpour.” I think the NY Times coined that, and it’s the title of her Tumblr page.
Oh, like a telephone number extension? Meh.
AMANPOUR is far from obscure. Incidentally, she knew where bin Laden was hiding. She mentioned it on Bill Maher’s Real Time back in 2008.
I solved this OK but it seems to lose points because “sorry, joke’s over” isn’t used much and doesn’t make much sense as a phrase. This blog entry is already the #1 google hit. “Sorry, the joke’s on you” is more common.
But maybe I’m missing something.
Awesome. A puzzling theme for a while, 59A brought some nice variety to cluing that answer and 46D made me laugh!
It may be a Natick in the NYT, but not in a leading-edge distributed-online-only crossword like the BEQ series. I wouldn’t cross them in a puzzle that wasn’t going to be graded Hard, though. So Say I.
Enjoyed your letter in McSweeneys last night!
I figure that either you live on the Internet, in which case Vimeo is easy, or you’re a old fogey with one of those antiquated tele-vision devices, in which case I guess you might have heard of this Amanpour person.
On the other hand, who hasn’t heard of Natick?
Vimeo heard of and used, Amanpour is Urdu to me. ARI/ERWIN was my Natick on this puzzle.
AMANPOUR has been on national TV news for nearly 30 years. She was a “60 Minutes” correspondent beginning in the mid-90s. She’s now host of one of the three major Sunday morning gabfests. She is about as big a name as you can get among people now working in TV news. I have no mercy for anyone who thinks hers is an obscure name.
Then again, I live 3000 miles from Natick and thought it was perfectly fair.
Amanpour is pretty well-known at this point. Vimeo is rather a mystery and I’m not a Luddite. Technology is skittish and depends what you work with from day to day, I suppose.
That Natick clue was just evil, I still remember that sucker. And this from someone who might not recall what he had for breakfast.
I’ve used AcrossLite for a while and it seems to have a few adavantages over the Puzzle Solver (or pdf version) for those of us who prefer to print our puzzles and solve with a pen:
1) Can choose to put the grid at the
bottom, so my arm/hand doesn’t cover the clues when I write.
2) Can choose to use grey-scale instead of solid black for the filled in squares.
3) Shows the title on the printout.
thanks for all the puzzles!
VIMEO=WTF and AMANPOUR=gimmie, so, no NATICK for me. The NATICK king for me is your fellow Bostonian Henry Hook. In last Sun.’s BG titled CLUE FACTORY there were 2 1/2 NATICKS, 22a/17d, 63a/57d, and 95a/89d. The last is 1/2 because the 95a clue, while not obscure, can be read 2 ways. Oh, and thanks for another clever/fun puzzle.
I noticed a few starter without the exponent in the corner. I was baffled by it for a while until RIDDLE showed up.