ACROSS LITE PUZZLE: [ THEMELESS FRIDAY]
PROGRAM: [Across Lite]
PROGRAM: [Java]
PRINTOUT PUZZLE: [ THEMELESS FRIDAY]
PROGRAM: [Adobe Acrobat]
Hard themeless today, and a couple quick hits. Shall we?
- One sure-fire way to get my attention is to send a photo of yourself pimping the ole’ BEQ name and/or crosswords. (Readers of the blog will recall Jimmy Dale and Kelly Reidy.) Say “hello” to Whitney Luther from Portland, Oregon. That’s her up above solving my Times crossword puzzle from last Sunday when she should have been taking in the sites in the Big Apple. Whitney writes: “So, I’ve been planning a trip to NYC for a couple of months to visit my best friend who was recently transferred there (against her wishes) by Nike. Everyone kept asking me what my plan was once I was there. My response was the ONLY thing I wanted to do was pick up the Sunday NYT puzzle and sit down and drink a cup of joe and have a bagel with lox. Well, my boyfriend’s dad who decided to join us wouldn’t allow such lollygaggery and hauled us ON FOOT all around the city all day Sunday. I kept having to pull out the xword at random sightseeing stops to work on it.”
That’s the spirit! The NYC skyline will always be there but that crossword might not be. (Uh, Whitney: you do know you can get the Times crossword in Portland, right? In print even. Just sayin’.) For her promotional bravado, she will receive a copy of “Diagramless” (get yours in the store on the right). And, as always, please send your pictures in of you wearing a BEQ t-shirt or solving one of my puzzles and I’ll run them here.
- Hat tip to reader Alex Chiang for this inspired Tweet. I see a bunch of spam accounts promoting Joseph Crosswords (who?) and Sheffer Crosswords (who?) that say pretty much the exact thing Alex said. So, if you’re so inclined, why not start tweeting your results to the BEQ puzzles as well.
- I somehow missed the story about the Sudoku championship cheater, or else I might have spoken about it earlier. All that work for what, $3000? Unbelievable. Story is here. Thomas Snyder’s live journal is pretty amazing too, many posts, the first of which starts here.
- New Visual Thesaurus puzzle is up today, go get it.
- The Peter King story refuses to die. Listen to him wax poetic about the puzzle on WEEI here (Start at 20:20).
- Finally, thanks to all who were able to contribute this week. If you haven’t already, please consider a tip of any size as it helps the BEQ.com run smoothly, independently and fiercely thumbing its nose at conventions (have you done today’s puzzle yet?). And one lucky donor will receive a t-shirt of their choosing. So just think: if you win, and you take a snappy picture of yourself in said t-shirt, I can run it here.
If you can’t contribute, you can help out immensely if you tell just five people about this site. Thanks.
Share the puzzle. New one on Monday.
Hard as f@#$ in the NW, but the rest of the puzzle fell pretty easy. ME AND BOBBY MCGEE is a straight-up gimme, as was LORETTA. I don’t really know the term FACE PALM. FACE PLANT, sure. Soooo happy to get POHL instantly (the upside of collecting old paperbacks, incl. a lot of scifi). Don’t read “Spiderman,” but GWEN STACY somehow lives in my head anyway.
Approved … though there was no need to BITCH SLAP LIL KIM.
rp
Loved it. Swear words and “THE WIRE”. Plus, I think Lil’ Kim most definitely deserves a bitch slap for sucking. Give me Jean Grae and Bahamadia anyday.
Dude, you kicked my ass today. I hope my time doesn’t adumbrate my future performances.
Thanks.
“Thumbing it’s nose” at punctuation conventions too! 😉 Sweet puzzle today. There’s a nearly identical clue to one of Gaffney’s in the Daily Beast, and for a 7-letter answer no less…
Thomas Joseph has those books called “100 Baffling Crosswords” and suchlike — 11×11 themelesses that are not awful at all. Just not worth one’s time when there’s BEQ available!
Having a brogue = SHOD: muy inspired.
YEANS is a new word to this country boy. I also didn’t know ADUMBRATE meant foreshadow. I tried GIVE A HINT for a first pass.
What REX said on the gimmes and Spiderman and FACE PALM. I never heard of EGO SURFER. SYSTEM of a Down was also a gimme, though I have no idea why.
I had wrong first guesses all around: DOGBERT for CATBERT, PAYOFF for PAYOLA, DINES for YEANS, SPA for STY, ORALB for BRUSH (stupid in hindsight; Oral B is a competitor of Reach), EGOMANIAC for EGOSURFER, MAGEE for MCGEE. Blanked out on LORETTA (which should have been a gimme), couldn’t fish out GWEN STACY nor ARTIE Ziff, never heard of SYSTEM of a Down nor FACEPALM. This made things a bit slow, but I got there without Googling, at least. Despite the frustration, seemed quite fair.
Had PAYOFF,DINES, SPA, ORALB too. Also , UPSET for UPEND.
Surprised at the clue for IMBAD. Dunno OHSOIT, already forgotten the ADUM… thing. But -not too many red squares this time.
correction: 11×13. FWIW.
Great puzzle today. My best showing on one of the hard ones. only had 2 squares I needed to scroll through after much thought on the puzzle as a whole. Have a good Halloween if that’s your thing, otherwise just have a kickass Saturday.
Nice one today! There’s an advantage to keeping up with the puzzles and postings here at BEQ Central. Even though I’ve never seen an episode and know very little about the show, I filled in THE WIRE with only the “R” in place. I figured it couldn’t be anything else.
AWESOME to put ABEL (the mathematician) in the crossword. I may be the only one who appreciates it, but gosh darn it, that’s enough! Interesting character, that guy – did all that math and died in a duel before his 27th birthday. The insolubility of the quintic is now one of those things you learn in college abstract algebra classes.
FWIW, Galois was the one who died in a duel, tho Abel and Galois both did groundbreaking work on the insolubility of the quintic (and in Galois’ case, the theory of solving polynomials in general).
F**k. Tuberculosis, not a duel. At least I got the under 27 thing right. Galois was the one who feverishly wrote all the math he knew on a piece of paper the night before the duel, right? Perhaps I should look things up before posting.
Great puzzle and lots tougher than the NYT Fri. The stuff I hadn’t heard of (YEANS, ADUMBRATE) was gettable through the cross so this one was fair from my point of view. However, if you hadn’t introduced me to ASA GRAY a while back, I might have been in trouble.
will beat me to it. yeah, you got the galois story right. (eventually :P)
i loved this puzzle, by the way. so much awesomeness. didn’t know FACEPALM at all, and ORATORIES/RELIGIOSE was a curious combination, but EGOSURFER, ARTIE ziff, ABEL, ADUMBRATE, OH SHIT, CATBERT… man, this thing was so fresh it needs to be bitch-slapped. just sayin’.
and who are you callin’ an OLDSTER?
I love EGOSURFER. I have been known to ego-surf, truth be told. (18,500 Google hits for my name in quotes, vs. 28,200 for the fabulous Mr. Quigley.)
Brendan, I can’t believe you didn’t do a mini-theme combining FACEPALM with HEADDESK.
That is a beautiful grid, Brendan.
Man, I would have thought twice before including GWENSTACY, never mind ARTIE, but it seems to have worked out well. I briefly thought you were going for RELIGULOUS at bottom right…