ACROSS LITE PUZZLE: [ ROTATION]
PROGRAM: [Across Lite]
PROGRAM: [Java]
PRINTOUT PUZZLE: [ ROTATION]
PROGRAM: [Adobe Acrobat]
I also have today’s puzzle in “The Onion” which you can get here: [Across Lite] or [PDF]
I heard from a handful of people lately that a few of my puzzles have completely stumped them. (Course, I’ve heard from a vocal minority that they aren’t hard enough, but that’s a different post altogether.) Hey, getting stumped happens sometimes. I think it’s all part of the puzzling process. Eventually we’ll stumble upon the one puzzle that makes mincemeat out of us and makes us wish we’d taken up a much nicer hobby like making ships in a bottle or translating Garfield cartoons into Esperanto.
But believe me when I say us puzzlemakers want you to solve them, eventually. No matter how hard they seem. Being stumped it part of the process. Heck, it’s part of everyday life. You know? Just to level the playing field, and to let you know I’m a human being, here’s an abbreviated list of everyday things that stump me:
Massachusetts tax codes, indoor plumbing, the appeal of “Sex and the City,” cars with stick shifts, the church of Steve Jobs, the metric system, anything involving botany, most U.S. history, Rubik’s cubes, how airplanes work, Backgammon, the supposed difference between penne and cannelloni, animal husbandry, rocket telemetry, people who say they don’t like coffee, the Electra complex, “friendly fire,” Möbius strips, grokking, Finlandization, doublespeak, polygraphs, the difference between “its” and “it’s,” sensory deprivation chambers, pantomiming, the concept of “infinity,” etc.
I could go on, but you get the picture. Basically, you don’t want me on your pub quiz team.
Share the puzzle. New one on Friday.
Love the theme, Brezdaz! Kick-ass “aha” moment when it hit.
CARNAP.
rp
I agree with Amy, although I had to get all the theme answers first. I really enjoyed your Onion puzzle as well. Bravo.
good puzzle, although i think rex is right (unless this is a new lunchtime parking-lot strategy i haven’t heard about).
also, lol @ your WMD clue in the onion puz, which was fun even though i don’t follow basketball.
Really wanted ‘works for a few quarters’ to be REF. Got the theme at the last two (for me, the BOOZE crosses). Very little cheating, so not really a LOOZER here.
I like your ‘don’t understand’ list, would like to add common law, yoga, i[anything] and talk radio.
Lots of erasing, but well worth the effort. Ironic that Pat Boone is more famous for milking than boozing..
-Daz
Stumped by indoor plumbing? Fixing it, or just the general concept?
Re: indoor plumbing, my buddy who used to be a plumber recently said that he was buying a new toilet and wanted to get one with “good flushing power”. “I said I thought that was all done by gravity”. He said “yeah, it’s gravity but it’s also…” and he put his hands up as if to discribe the intricacies of powerflushing, then looked at me as if to say “it’s not worth the time to explain it” and I let him off the hook by shrugging and saying “okay, whatever”.
Elvis Costello, mayonaise-based salads, lobster, Kindle.
Happy pencil=happy solver. I find with these puzzles that there’s always a last piece of fill that doesn’t want to cede. Today DUH instead of DOH and MINAH instead of MYNAH left UXI…….crap. Took me awhile to unwrap myself from the axle. What’s an UXI?
I prefer the fill here to BEQ’s syndicated puzzles and think its different.??
Yoga instructors are pop culture enough to make it into crossword puzzles now. What is the world coming to…
Possibly spoilers ahead, though it looks like people have already discussed some clues above:
I fell into like a million traps, like SIESTA (actually CATNAP), and got stuck on words I flat out didn’t know (EBOAT? CINERAMA?) but that only made me feel like a million bucks when I finally finished this one. A wonderfully executed theme was just icing on the cake. (Plus, I loved your clue for 31A.)
Like @Randal Burns, I’ve complained before about often getting stuck on the last few letters in these. Today I had IN HERE for 16a, but I fairly quickly saw that “That’s ANORE” didn’t make sense at 9d, and all was well. I also often want to quibble that they seem harder than your rating promises; today’s seemed pretty hard to me, but in the end my time wasn’t so bad (for me), even with ANORE at first, so maybe your assessment was not so bad after all.
A couple of hiccups where I made a mistake but overall it flowed pretty nicely. Getting the theme early helped. About halfway done with the Onion which appears a bit harder.
It’s a shame I’m no longer in a rap outfit because BREZDAZ would be an awesome name.
Which, while we’re here: would not SCZAS be an awesome stage name? (Pronounced: “Scissaz”) No?
Logical positivism philosopher Rudolf CARNAP?
Thanks Bruce.
Ben wrote that clue. Just because he’s paranoid …
True story: My sister sold all of her belongings to go live on an ashram to become a yoga instructor. Liz and I are going out there to visit her this weekend. BEQ + downward facing dog = High comedy.
Glad you stuck with it. Expect more irony in future puzzles.
Fixing it. Our kitchen sink is all types of I-dunno-fucked.
Substitute all the plumbing stuff in that comment with puzzle stuff and that’s pretty much life.
Elvis: I hear ya. Mayonnaise is good only sparingly, but yeah, on a salad? Just bizarre. I’m allergic to shellfish. The Kindle, though … not for me, but I see the sexiness of it.
By “BEQ’s syndicated puzzles” do you mean the Times stuff?
Well, why not? While we’re here: my sister is in this video from CBS news… she’s the one in the green shirt in the back of the room!
http://is.gd/43Cr7
Thanks. I was pretty happy with that clue too.
We’re still ironing out the kinks with the difficulty. Bear with us.
I’ve heard the Onion one was nasty. Two Albert Ayler clues doesn’t help.
Fun puzzle. Medium seems right to me. I can never remember how to spell ECZEMA, had to ask my bride. Speaking of hard ones, I couldn’t finish Mon. without cheating. Had to look up QUARKXPRESS.
Fantastic. I love CBS Sunday Morning. It seems like NPR on TV for some reason. And that video reminds me of something that stumps me. God.
well, the reason i lol’d is that i once complained on this very blog about the cluing of WMD in connection with terrorists, since WMDs are state munitions. that clue hedged the f* out of things just enough to be acceptable to me. 🙂
the concept of “infinity,” etc.
Okay, it’s real simple. There are as many even numbers as odd numbers, right? And that’s the same as the number of total integers, and fractions. But that’s waaaaay fewer than the number of real numbers. And if the continuum hypothesis is true …
Hm. Maybe it is complicated. I’ll just point you to the Wikipedia page of the Hilbert Hotel (http://is.gd/45uUZ ) and call it a day.