ACROSS LITE PUZZLE: [ THEMELESS WEDNESDAY]
PROGRAM: [Across Lite]
PROGRAM: [Java]
PRINTOUT PUZZLE: [ THEMELESS WEDNESDAY]
PROGRAM: [Adobe Acrobat]
I also have today’s puzzle in the Onion. Get it here: [Across Lite] [PDF]. Have fun with it. Slight spoiler in the middle of the post, so heads up.
BEQ gets mail! And it’s chock full of gems. Let’s do this.
Here’s what my granddaughter got me for Christmas (see above picture). I’d never done a diagramless before and am having fun with your book. Is it possible to do them with out using the clues?
-John Ellis, San Diego
Of course you can. I do it every day: it’s called constructing a puzzle. Now, the odds that we’d come up with (a) the same theme, (b) the same theme answers, (c) the same grid shape, (d) the same symmetry, (e) and the same fill are pretty minuscule. I mean sure, we could have accomplished a Vulcan mind meld, or maybe I could have just dictated the answers to you. But stranger things have happened.
Thanks for sharing your BEQ fandom, though. Normally I give out copies of “Diagramless” for examples of such bravado. Instead, I’ll send you something from my condo I don’t want anymore.
Just crawled to a finish on today’s – we have a 20% overlap in musical tastes. #1 is an amazing CD and a friend in Melbourne knows some of the band and said their break-up was pretty messy, so I guess no more Avalanches (wiki says maybe, but I’m not sure I believe it). I used to come out to “Frontier Psychiatrist” when I MC’ed the old comedy club in Asheville (now I use “Warp Spin Rewind” by Melt Banana).
-George Heard, parts unknown
Doubly wow, there. (Well, triply wow if we throw in the confirmation that the Avalanches are no more.) Melt Banana as one’s intro music? Stunning.
So, it got me thinking: what piece of music would I use as a sort “intro” you might hear upon loading the page? After some careful deliberation I’ve narrowed it down to a three: “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (no explanation necessary), “Cut Your Hair” (Pavement, duh. Plus it sounds like the theme to “Pardon the Interruption,” the best TV show not called “The Wire”), or “Jazz Snob Eat Shit” (talk about getting someone’s attention). Please leave other suggestions (I’m open to any of them) in the comments.
Speaking of shit.
Shame on you for using SHIT and FART in 1/6/10 AV Club puzzle.
-S. Fish, parts unknown
Come on, now! Obviously you haven’t been paying attention to my work lately.
I have been driving myself nuts trying to figure out the answers to the “She and Him” Crossword puzzle in the Paste Magazine for hours, and I finally figured out your sneaky trick.
You are a dick.
-Lara, parts unknown
Paste is great in the sense that lately they’ve assigned the puzzles to line-up with the rest of the issue. For example, the “All In the Family” puzzle ran in their TV issue (highlighting Mitchell Hurwitz). The puzzle in question ran alongside a feature of She & Him. Predictably, the gimmick was a rebus incorporating either SHE or HIM. Maybe that one was a little too hard for the magazine. Oh well.
Share the puzzle. New one (yeah, probably another themeless) on Friday.
I suspect John Ellis wants to know if he can do the diagramlesses without the starting square hint. I wrote a NYT diagramless tutorial a couple years ago, back when I still used the starting square/symmetry hints. Lee Glickstein commented that he uses a graph paper grid that’s bigger than the puzzle so he has room to fill in his answers without having to know where the starting square is, letting the diagram take shape more naturally. I kinda do that now, only I just start scrawling answers in the margin or on another sheet of paper until I get about five rows pieced together–that’s usually enough to determine the starting square and transfer what I’ve got to the grid.
Pshaw, no html for hyperlinks? The tutorial is here:
http://crosswordfiend.blogspot.com/2007/12/what-do-you-do-with-diagramless.html
Harder than Monday’s for me, but only because I couldn’t recall ESCAROLE. “ESCARGOT … ESCALADE …?” Not fond of [Thug] For BADASS, as the former is pejorative and the latter not exactly, to my ear. Considered: BADGUY, BADMAN, and BADDIE, but never BADASS (until I did). Also can’t hear “AT ONCE” as a self-standing command. Not easily. YESES for YEAHS kept the SE the most challenging part of the puzzle by far.
I ASPIRE goat cheese? I ASPIRE curvy women? What am I missing there? How is ASPIRE [Have a taste for]?
Don’t understand MESSES IN. MESSES WITH, I’d get. RETS is new to me. Reminds me of TEDS, the hay-related meaning of which I learned the hard way last year.
PS Shout out to John Ellis, who’s been a reader of mine for years (really hope I have the right guy here). Nice to see a pic. Great guy.
rp
I tried and tried to put in UNINTELLIGIBLE for 37D. Alas no luck. But then again, he might just be that way for me. At least the puzzle was a bit easier than slogging through “A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man”.
I really liked the Onion puzzle. Thanks for the suggestion.
No. 170 was fun, also. Couldn’t get ATALANTA or HAVLICEK for a while, because I wanted YESES and STEINS for YEAHS and STEAKS.
When do you think you’ll publish another cryptic like the one last year? That one gave me several hours (or days) of enjoyment.
Both puzzles were great. One issue-
Atalanta was turned into a LIONESS.
Wow, major bummer. Just wrote what I hoped was a nice, detailed, fun-to-read post. Then tried to post it and poof–lost in cyberspace. Houston, we’ve still got a problem.
Well, on to the Onion.
Medium?! Hmmm. Solving this one felt like throwing handfulls of Scrabble tiles at the board, hoping for words. Despite availing myself of Check repeatedly, I was dead in the water at 50 minutes, with 11 squares blank in SE. Googled “perfume Libre d’Orange” (had started 52A with EAU D'”) and got ETAT (State of Orange? What, they’re speaking French in Ulster now?). Still dead in the water. Googled “myth runner turned into lion” and got ATALANTA. Argh. Remembered her, forgot the lion thing. That sufficed. Done, but done ugly.
Some terrific clues, in retrospect. 40A “Leaf section” was terrific indirection. “Section” seems a bit odd, but “side” or “face” would be too straight. 57D “Attempts, e.g.” was a good clue that (in retrospect, again) doesn’t seem like it should have been so hard for me. 42A “They’re experts in cases”. Wow. Brutal, but brilliant, especially as linked to 64A TENSES. And 47D CURER was also killer cool. Started with HEALER, then SMOKER (so close and yet so far).
Saved several other times by Check. Had 56A E_CAR___ and entered ESCARGOT. Hey, radicchio, smeechio. I don’t cook, and I try not to eat anything with that many letters in it. 25A started with NO MA’AM, which wasn’t bad, except for being wrong. 48D started with SNACKS. STEAKS? Guess I was thinking pub grub. Brendan must hang out at higher-class taverns than I do. 53A caught me on that vexing OCHRE/OCHER thing. And 38D started with NOR, as in a compass heading (see Rex’s NYT blog–quite a dust up re GST). Still wonder if the referent here is Greenwich, latitude, or GPS technology. Anyone figure that one out?
Though I tend to think that puzzles should mostly be critiqued by other constructors, I do have qualms about several of the clues here. Same problem as Rex re 9D. Had _S__RE and SWAGGED the right answer, as it turns out, but shouldn’t the answer and this type of clue be more or less interchangeable in common phrases? It isn’t. How does the verb EBB mean 39D “Pull out”? Fall back, decline, recede, yes, but pull out? Ebbus interruptus. 3D “Remained” for LASTED just seens too tenuous. And what Rex said re 46D “What are you waiting for?” Again, shouldn’t the answer and this type of clue be more or less interchangeable in common phrases?
On to the Onion and, I’ll bet more fun and less pain.
OK, hope this is three and out. As soon as I clicked on Post for my “dang, the dog ate my post” post, the text of my original post reappeared in this box. Weird. Time warp? Flux vortex? Bad karma?
I’d call this Medium-Hard. My fellow solvers and I made no substantial progress on it; later when I tried to finish it up on my own, I was able to do it with only one Google.
Not able to finishat lunch with the group = harder than Medium
Actually able to finish with only one Google = easier than Hard
Favorite clue: 38-Down. I was totally thinking of temperatures here.
Good, fun, perfectly Onion puzz, made pretty hard, for me, by the number of know-it-or-don’t crosses. Luckily knew enough, but barely. And slowly. Nice work.
Word of the day wasn’t actually in the puzz. Saw the clue for 56A and slammed in LAPIDARY. Dang.
My only real snag was the time I wasted giggling stupidly when I got to 34A “Squid protuberance”. Given the general tenor of the puzz, I was thinking “Aha, Zoological jargon, Brendan looked up the word for a squid’s penis!” But no.
@S. Fish, c’mon, man. Have you never read the freaking Onion?
Also having weird posting karma today. My original post disappeared.
“Shame on you for using SHIT and FART in 1/6/10 AV Club puzzle.”
Poor Mr. and/or Ms. Fish. It’s a good thing he/she wasn’t doing the A.V. Club puzzles when we were going through our sensitive body parts phase.
Thanks for not using the word “underpants” in the Onion puzzle.
I’m hoping S. Fish is controversial NYT blogger Stanley Fish.
In case anyone is curious about the puzzles Deb is referring to, they can be found here:
http://is.gd/5PX92
http://is.gd/5PXcI
They’re both great. The first one may be my favorite crossword of all time. (Don’t speculate as to what that says about me)
OK, now I’m fascinated, in a morbid sort of way. One Stanley Fish was, whilst I was a grad geek, Chair of English at Duke (though tenured in Law) and a good lit crit writer (see e.g. “Is There a Text in This Class?” [New Year’s resolution to learn how to do html code for italics]).
@Amy – is this the controversial NYT blogger to whom you refer?
Thanks for posting those oldies, Alex. Love the Kaidoku site, btw!
Needless to say, The Onion/A.V. Club crossword gang hasn’t matured much since then. Once we got the whole genitalia thing out of our systems, and our Fearless Leader Ben Tausig might question whether we’ve actually done that, it was a slippery slope down to the digestive and excretory systems.