ACROSS LITE PUZZLE: [ TECHNOLOGICAL BREAKTHROUGH]
PROGRAM: [Across Lite]
PROGRAM: [Java]
PRINTOUT PUZZLE: [ TECHNOLOGICAL BREAKTHROUGH]
PROGRAM: [Adobe Acrobat]
Heads up: I will have the variety puzzle in this week’s Sunday New York Times magazine. I shall link to it here (watch this space), or if you’re into that whole Twitter/Facebook thing, I’ll post something there. A’ight?
Is that the theme music for “Behind the Puzzle?” Well, if you’re hearing music, you might need to get your ears checked and/or stop inhaling marker fumes. I still haven’t received any candidates for a “Behind the Puzzle” theme song, yet. And I have to say, I’m’a little disappointed in y’all. After the tours de force that came about with the creative entries to my R.E.M. puzzle, I’d’ve thought a theme song would be forthcoming. So, in the event you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m still accepting submissions for a prize to be named/awarded later. In the meantime, click here and then fade out after a few measures. It’s ghetto, but it’ll have to do.
If you haven’t caught on by now STOP READING if you’d like to have a spoiler free solve.
What’s up, Quigley? You post a picture of Prince, yet you linked to Rush for the theme song. Are you sure you’re not the one who’s been inhaling marker fumes? Last time I checked, no. But it certainly appears that Mr. Prince Rogers Nelson has lost his marbles. My buddy Francis alerted me to this bit of news. And boy, if the ignorance of that statement isn’t enough to bruise one’s ego, Kenny G., of all people, told Prince otherwise. Anyway, a statement so perplexing as such meant that I had to make a puzzle around it. I thought I’d take the phrase very literally. And in this case, there’s four additional entries dangling off the corners in a pinwheel fashion. Those entries being four popular endings for Internet websites. You can’t see them, because they’re literally “completely over” the boundary of the grid. Thank you! Thank you! You’re too kind.
Cluing probably ended up in the Thursday-ish wheelhouse. Couple reasons there. I felt the theme was a bit on the tricky side so it should be a little hard. Also, it was hotter than a cat on a tin roof in the ole BEQ.com headquarters. I mean, put it this way: the walls in the only air conditioned room were sweating. So I think the heat made me a little cantankerous. So cranky BEQ = hard cluing. Favorite clues include 15-Across and 3-Down, the conversational bits at 35- and 44-Down, and the trivia at 37-Down too. I’m pretty happy with this one.
Share the puzzle. New one on Monday.
DIE HAR next to EL NORT is what finally clued me in. Then the rest of the puzzle fell quickly.
Hope Sunday is a diagramless. Did your entire book of diagramless on a trip to Spain, and I really miss them! Had a young lady on the plane on the way home ask me how I could possibly do a puzzle with no black squares – I tried to explain it to her, but her eyes began to glaze over. This was the same plane they had to “tow us to a remote part of the airport” to fix the right engine. The pilot came on an hour later and said” well, we think we have the problem fixed”. Two people immediately demanded to get off the plane, and we had to wait another hour for them to find their luggage and take it off the plane. The flight took off 8 hours late – your book saved me! That, and the fact that the movie they showed was “The Tooth Fairy” ‘nuf said.
One of my favourite gimmick theme ideas of recent times! Even a couple of super-ugly roll-your-own words (ASTRUT and BEVELER I’m looking at you) can’t dampen my enthusiasm! Sure I’m not the only one who went through several rebus possibilities before realising something much more cunning was afoot!
Also loved the triple bluff @ 9D – he had GUYLINER last time so it must be MANSCARA, no it’s got LINER in it so it must be GUY again! Gah!!
Query: Anyone got tips for remembering OERTER. All I ever seem to be able to dredge up is “begins with O, has weird vowel combination”!!
Loved it, though meaning of “OVER” is mildly stretched here. I knew something was f’d up in the NW, when all obvious answers were one letter too long, but even with THE INTERNET in place, I couldn’t figure what the hell was going on because I kept looking *above* words/the grid for answers. Sigh. Once I figured it out, it became an easy/medium puzzle. Clever stuff, sir.
Well, I got pretty much all the answers, and still couldn’t figure out how to complete the puzzle. I put double letters in the appropriate squares, which gave me TERDOUD for 62A, which I could make no sense of. Especially confusing in that when I ‘checked’ 62A, it said I had no incorrect letters. Similarly in the other corners — just couldn’t make head or tail of it.
One objection: at 13D, avaricious and miserly are not remotely synonyms. The first means greedy or grasping, the second means cheap, stingy. You can be one without being the other.
Wow. This was one of my all time favorites. Like Nanpilla, I knew something was up at Diehar, but then wanted RD in a rebus. (R & D creating technical breakthroughs?)
Beautiful cluing on OHENRY.
Clap, clap, clap.
i LOVE puzzles that push the answers beyond the boundary of the grid, but for whatever reason i wasn’t feeling this one. too random maybe + too much of a stretch for “over” to get where you wanted it to go. looks like i’m in the minority though, so that’s cool. i look forward to the sunday (i’m assuming) diagramless!
Gareth: Perhaps it might be easier to remember if you think of his name as Örter and then back-form it? In Germanic languages the umlaut is essentially a vestigial ‘e’
http://bit.ly/agz8PN
Maybe picture him, grunting at the shot-put, as a snörter?
For some reason Al Oerter has stuck in my mind since I as a child saw his photograph in the Guinness Book: something about competing in the most Olympics?
Nice puzzle – I finally got completely clued in down in the SE with NET. Even with all of the theme answers in I still had some trouble, especially in the NW, but really a great puzzle. Just the kind of interesting, contemporary stuff I love!
Pure genius! Thanks once again!
This is why I do xword puzzles DIE HARD/EL NORTE was my opening, at first I thought rebus.
Good stuff. 15A was nasty clever, chalk up one symbolic [headdesk] for my discovery moment there.
Prince is officially completely out of his mind. Although you obviously don’t need a commercial hit to be recognized as a musician, seems his best days are apparently behind him… Now when you have Kenny G calling you out as well, it may be time to hang up the purple guitar and just play open mic nights for fun. Then again, it’s apparently the most press he’s had in some time.
I wanted gams at the very beginning and abandoned NW because it didn’t seem possible. That was a mistake. Clues for omit and vena were very straightforward and probably would have clued me into something funny going on. Finally saw what was going on in the SE with pretzel shape, etc.
It was appropriate that I did this on an iPhone. Nothing fits on the screen anyway!
Great puzzle.
How depressing that *no* one else thought of Chubby Checkers for 15A……
I thought of Chubby Checker (a name rip-off of Fats Domino) off the Y but caught some other crosses before entering it. Liked the theme/gimmick, but it would have been purer with ORG instead of NET for reasons I can’t fully explain. Thanks BEQ.
Belatedly just want to say I loved the puzzle and not just because I caught on quickly. ASTRUT was pretty bad, but Rex didn’t even complain, so either you’re enjoying Most Favored Nation status, or he’s losing his touch.