THEMELESS MONDAY: [ ACROSS LITE][ PDF]
PROGRAMS: [Across Lite] [Adobe Reader]
PROGRAM: [Java]
A nice puzzle book from last year that sort of fell through the cracks was recently brought back to my attention, and I gotta say I’ve rather enjoyed it. It’s Shawn Kennedy’s “Bull’s Eye Puzzles.” Longtime Games magazine subscribers probably remember the form that I’m pretty sure Will Shortz invented, but don’t quote me on that one. The rules are simple: each puzzle has 15 questions that all involve wordplay of some sort. These can be anagrams, deletions, containers, homophones, you name it. You cross those answers out as you solve them and the leftover words combine to form a quotation. That’s it. Now the reason I really liked the book is that the puzzles are capital-E Easy and capital-E Entertaining. The easy puzzle that doesn’t insult your intelligence, my friends, is a very difficult task to pull off. So yeah, you can crank through two or three of them in a couple of minutes still have enough time to look at your watch and say “do I have time for one more?” Chances are, the answer is “yes.”
As for today’s puzzle … you can probably guess the seed entries. And despite the (gasp!) 21 three-letter entries, I’ve been told this one’s a beast. Hopefully I walked it back a bit. Enjoy.
Share the puzzle. New one on Thursday.
I’d rate this one as an easy “hard” BEQ. Until I got to the SE. Of course, this old fart didn’t know the long down award winner – from last night (nice!).
I did the puzzle ok, but why is ARCH tongue-in-cheek and SLUR a troll’s word? Anyone?
I’m with IBE – huh?
Nice, elegant grid, filled it from the center and out to NW and around. Fell in place quite nicely!
I did know the award winner from seeing it in the news today … thank goodness, because otherwise I might not have gotten through this one.
“Arch” can be used as an adjective meaning “mischievous, saucy.” And an Internet troll might try to stir up trouble in a discussion forum by using a slur to describe someone else.
I actually found this easier than most hards.
Slur is a troll’s word b/c BEG’s using it in the sense of an internet troll, or modern troll meaning someone who is intentionally provocative and says hateful things just to rile folks up.
Arch makes sense. The only issue for me was the upper right, but once I got OD’ed, it sorted out. I wouldn’t say it was excessively easy, but easy on the scale of hard (i.e., about 15-20 mins).