ACROSS LITE PUZZLE: [ THEMELESS MONDAY]
PROGRAM: [Across Lite]
PROGRAM: [Java]
PRINTOUT PUZZLE: [ THEMELESS MONDAY]
PROGRAM: [Adobe Acrobat]
Spent the entire weekend cluing puzzles. I don’t recommend that to anybody as I think my brain has turned into mush. Yikes.
But can I get an “amen” for Google? We’ve already covered that I worship at the altar of Google, but seriously, that website’s made cluing a helluvalot easier. (Two other no-brainers are Wikipedia and OneLook.) It’s astonishing! I can’t even imagine how puzzles were clued before it. Oh, wait, I can. I used to make puzzles before Google. And let me tell you: it sucked, and therefore my cluing sucked. I was only as good as my rudimentary library, which meant my puzzles were rudimentary.
That reminds me, I meant to mention this in my post about the M.I.T. Hunt from last week. There was a pretty impressive amount of puzzles in that batch that simply couldn’t be solved from straightforward googling. Two examples are here and here. Wow. From a puzzlemaking standpoint, that’s a pretty astonishing feat. I guess I could start applying that ungoogleable approach to my puzzlemaking. Expect clues like {What number am I thinking of right now?}, {Has anybody seen my keys?} and {What’s the problem with kids nowadays?} in the future.
BTW, feel free to search if you need to. Remember: puzzles are meant to be solved.
Finally, if you liked the puzzles this month, and/or you were thinking about hitting up the tip jar this month, I am requesting that you please give that donation to help those in Haiti instead. Thank you.
Share the puzzle. New one on Wednesday.
It’s a little … namey over there in the east, i.e. JENA over KRISTI or AMIEL. Don’t know Any of them and only got that part right because of crosses, finishing with JIM.
“X” in DUMMY TEXT / LENEXA could’ve been an “N” an “S” … no way for me to know, as LENEXA is woefully obscure and the Latin clue for DUMMY TEXT did nothing for me.
RETICULE / EFFIE was also an iffy cross for me. Never heard of an EFFIE.
rp
Rex covered exactly all of my comments.
A Venn diagram of our troubles would be one circle.
If you’re around KC, I’d say no problem for LENEXA, otherwise, yeesh. Names were freaking brutal this time out. Heard of Jon Amiel, otherwise, yeesh again. That right side smacked me around nicely.
Cool stuff otherwise :). Nice shout out to Joon there, although that’s also some insider baseball.
Got pretty stuck on NAMETAGS/NOTED for 3D/22A, which cost me several minutes. Whole top half was brutal, I thought, especially the NE. Nice workout though.
That NNE was a b!tch…maybe because I’ve never been within 500 miles of Kansas City and scratched my head over ‘lorem ipsum’ for awhile.
But I learned something, so it was worthwhile…
Yeah. What they said. The NE just brutalized me. Stared at ICY and YESNO forever until the THEATRE materialized. I call foul on the clue for ITALS not being pluralized. Or maybe I’m just being snorty on a Monday.
Really fun puzzle today. Glad to see LENEXA in the grid, as I grew up there. Thought 26D was being trickier than it was, and initially filled in MT. DOOM 🙂
@Brendan, I’m good with “hard” for this one so long as the rating includes one or more f-word variations as intensifiers. Still wish you’d add that additional term to your easy-mesium-medium-mard-hard-_______ series. Your “brain…melted…” graphic says it all.
Thirty solo minutes in, I hit Check All. Geez. Five correct acrosses, five correct downs, and 46 wrong letters = “learning experience” (one of the better euphemisms I’ve come across). Things I learned today: Larry BIRD wasn’t #7. It’s not googleearth.com. The U.A.E. isn’t Djibouti’s neighbor (and I thought Sheik Djibouti died with disco). Was glad 3D wasn’t NAMETAGS and that 29D wasn’t BREAST—too straightforward.
More later, assuming I survive.
this felt like a medium masquerading as a hard. iffy crosses were covered elsewhere, but WEBINARS is an ugly-ass word and not worthy of your puzzles except as an object of mockery.
@everyone: get a copy of brendan’s diagramless book if you haven’t already. really enjoying mine!
Stopped cold at 79:49, still staring at ALE_. Been using Check All and google for half an hour. How is 21A not “alef” or even “a let[ter]”? Oh, damn, just figured it out. Guy who plays ball for the Oakland As. Damn.
Other problems, some not even of my own device. When I finally worked it out, I realized that I was dead out of the gate due to the cluing for 1A, which is in the present progressive. I may come *to* a WATERSHED moment in life, at which time I might experience a paradigm shift in my thinking, but I will *not* be “making” anything. WATERSHED is noun, not a verb.
I also have misgivings about the cluing for THEATRE. In fairness to the solver, shouldn’t it have read “Canadian play[ ]ground”? That still would have been clever and misleading with the words spaced, no?
And everything everyone else had problems with. This. Was. Not. Fun.
WATERSHED is also an adjective, and the whole thing makes sense as an adjective phrase. although i think it should have been “marking,” not “making.”
@Jooh, thanks. Yes, “Marking a paradigm shift” would have been waaaay better. And, ironically, I used WATERSHED as an adjective in my post…
Doesn’t the clue for 21A contain part of the answer (A)? To me it is analogous to the following
clue: Use of a needle
answer: needlepoint.
It would be better if the Oakland As were in the National League.
That JENA/KRISTI/JIM/AMIEL was all unknown and then trying to parse DAILY KOS just made me put up the white flag. Same in the NE with ALER/LENEXA/CHIEN, at that point I didn’t really care. The rest of the puzzle was enjoyable.
“A” in the clue stands for (Oakland) “Athletic”, and in the answer it stands for “American”…so its legit in my book
Still weird to me that out of all of those names, 35D was the gimme…mutual ugh to the threestack and the Canadian/French crossover. ALER is on the flansir list.
“flansir list”? Please to elucidate. Inquiring minds want to know.
Flansir list (from Merl Reagle): http://tinyurl.com/yc77zos
Ellie Light. Hah! Though, I think her publication count is up over 70 papers and counting.
Re that 4 name sandwich, Guessed KRISTI, but then JENA/AMIEL plus a JIM who was unfamiliar made that area impossible for me to finish; also couldn’t get LENEXA/DUMMYTEXT.