CROSSWORD SOLVER PUZZLE:
[ THEMELESS MONDAY]
PROGRAM: [Crossword Solver]
PROGRAM: [Java]
PRINTOUT PUZZLE: [ THEMELESS MONDAY]
PROGRAM: [Adobe Acrobat]
ACROSS LITE PUZZLE: [ THEMELESS MONDAY]
PROGRAM: [Across Lite]
For the “Why didn’t I think of that before?” department: Now all the Themeless Monday puzzles will have their series numbers included in the post title. I’m a genius! No really, hold your applause. Bow down before me, instead.
Oh yeah, this one has been declared brutally tough by those in the know. Brutal, but fair. Dan Feyer, don’t show off and say this took you 4:20. I want it to take you at least 4 and a half minutes. M’kay?
I’ve got a couple links for you. The latest (topical) Visual Thesaurus contest puzzle is up now. Go to it, and good luck. The other two come from my man “Miracle” Matt Gaffney. When he isn’t writing amazing meta puzzles for his site (his latest one is especially nice) or sending me grainy Dutch documentaries about economics on YouTube (I’ll spare you those), he writes amusing articles about crosswords for various publications. His latest on Slate is a doozy. You can read that one here.
Share the puzzle. New one on Thursday. A much easier puzzle, I swear.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t think it was brutal. I finished, with no cheating, in about the same time it takes to do any of your hard puzzles.
I usually struggle with your “hard” puzzles..finished this one in less than 10 minutes…maybe you overestimated the difficulty
somewhere between a medium and a hard for me, closer to the former. thanks for the new vocabulary word at 15A!
Yes, I don’t know who your testers are, but they must have had an off day. 9-something for me and I usually take 12-15 average. More for challenging ones.
Almost made it – bad guess STAT instead of SCAT kept me over 4 and a half. Not super-hard, but definitely some sneakier clues than usual…
I’m with the others – not too tough. I’ve definitely struggled a hell of a lot more with some of your other themelesses. 57-Across was a gimme so the bottom fell pretty quickly, but I had never heard of 15 or 17 across so that was tough (although I knew exactly what the clue for 17-Across was getting at)
Put up some fight, but I’m still standing, and the puz ain’t.
Fave clues: “Horse collarer”, crossing “Do maintenance”. Dang, Quigster.
Agreed, not so bad – my lunch group finished in about the same time we always do. One of the group (not me, unfortunately) was totally in the zone, though. Got C-SECTION off the first C and the T, and just knew MAGIC EYE before he looked at the grid.
I’m on a roll with three successful hard Monday solves in a row. This one didn’t have any real odd fill or overly esoteric references which is what usually flummoxes me on a BEQ. Tricky cluing is par for the course.
quite a few memorable clue/answers in this battle roil. The Stratego (isn’t this trademarked?) was very welcome. The “Way of Coming Out” clue wasn’t registering with me and then finally the “Eureka” moment materialized, thankfully. That single letter with the hyphen (but not inc. in the grid) is one of those types of clues that bedevils most solvers of the famed difficult XWPs of the NYT, LAT, etc. Thot “Horse Collarer” was LASSO. + The lower SQPDL answer seemed contemporary to me until I realized that the first name of the singer wasn’t 7 letters long; it was a nickanme consisting of 2 words. 35D This is the same as the Stereograms, yes? I remember this things bedeviling some of the GAMES Mazazine readers in the late 1980s. Took me a while to find out how to get the image to emerge. Just use a glass pane and stare at your reflection. Then, Voila! + First SQPDL answer didn’t register with me until I got ______ STADIUM. Never heard of this place. + 6th nonant was the most difficult one in this grid as some of the other solvers can attest to. Took me over excruciating 10 min. to get out but was still worth it.
POTTERYBARN was a gimme this time (I had an RY when I got to it though), only because I remembered it from an early BEQ “PBR me” theme!
This took me 6 minutes. Last week I stared at for half an hour and I couldn’t finish it. Your brutal-o-meter needs recalibrating