ACROSS LITE PUZZLE: [ “I’LL HAVE THE #2”]
PROGRAM: [Across Lite]
PROGRAM: [Java]
PRINTOUT PUZZLE: [ “I’LL HAVE THE #2”]
PROGRAM: [Adobe Acrobat]
If you ever have a conversation with me about my job, let me tell you now it’s going to be fairly rote. The same concepts/ideas/exchanges keep coming up. I’ve said the same stories for over a decade now. It’s cool. I’m used to it. One question I get asked a lot is how do I come up with my themes? And my usual responses are: “I dunno,” “lot’s of drugs” or “I just rip off Patrick Berry.” Laughs generally ensue. The conversation moves onto something more interesting.
Sometimes, however, the conversation doesn’t stop there. There are some who offer me unsolicited theme ideas. Typically, these brave and creative souls are people who’ve never solved a puzzle before in their lives. The results can get interesting. Their suggestions fall into one of two categories:
- “I found a great word the other day you might consider using in a puzzle. CAUDAL. It means ‘having a tail.'”
- “I was reading ‘People’ the other week about the Gosselins and was thinking maybe you could make a puzzle about them.”
The answer to those are: I’m only using CAUDAL in a pinch, and a “Jon and Kate Plus 8” puzzle probably wouldn’t be much fun to make or solve.
(Quick side bar: I made a point of encouraging the readers of this blog to give me suggestions for themes/entries, and I stand by it! Do not stop giving them to me! I love what’s come in over the transom! Okay back to rant.)
The reason I’m bringing this up is that today’s puzzle comes from an unlikely but seemingly untapped resource: my wife Liz. She came up with the germ of it last weekend, and it’s now developed into what we have here. This isn’t the first time I’ve got theme ideas from her. But what’s interesting is that she has ZERO interest in solving and/or making crosswords herself. But she’s got the one thing a lot of unsolicited ideas lack. She has a sense for what makes a puzzle fun. There may be another puzzlemaker in the family just yet!
Having said that, I cannot reciprocate. There is no appropriate time that I can offer suggestions for Liz’s work. If I did, I would sound like the people in the above examples. (For the record: she’s a research psychologist, specifically, childhood development, which might explain the juvenile humor in the puzzle). If she wants to continue to be taken seriously, and she damn well does, we’d best leave the science thinking to her.
Okay, share the puzzle. New one on Monday.
Psst… MINI-ME is a sidekick in the Austin Powers series, but he’s actually Dr. Evil’s sidekick.
It begins. You and Liz will be finishing each other’s grids by the five-year mark.
I’m sure the fans of JON AND KATE PLUS EIGHT would love a puzzle based upon the kids’ names, but you’d have to have a way of making sure that a fair number of the show’s fans got to see it.
For your current audience, you might be able to use the show’s name as a tentpole for a rebus (JONANDKATE+EIGHT is 16 letters, but JONANDKATEPLUS8 is 15, JON&KATEPLUS8 is 13, JON&KATE+8 is 10, and JONANDKATE+8 is 12).
Finally, there’s the possibility of a trivia theme based on crowded TV families (Brady Bunch, et al), prolific mothers and/or fathers (Charlemagne), and doomed onscreen relationships, factual and fictional (seriously, it amazes me they lasted this long– though I’m sure that last idea would be controversial and might bring a flame or two).
I love solving and working crosswords, but I’ve tried unsuccessfully a few times to make one myself. I find yours quite challenging, BEQ.
I’ve thought of a clue that I think is clever, and perhaps would work in a puzzle, but not as a theme.
You Can’t Fight It?–THEMOONLIGHT
You Can’t Fight It?–CITYHALL
I may be stretching it, though. Nice post today.
I am glad I am a super fan of “Arrested Development”. Generally, I have to assume that 53A was impossible for most. Great puzzle though. 41A threw me off the theme for a second or two. But the Eating Shit turned me around quickly.
SADD is the sch. program. Or so I thought. The NE brutalized me. Otherwise, just fine. Makes a nice counterpart to today’s LAT.
rp
My head hurts after reading this post. I guess the moral is: Never say never.
(Thanks for that egregious error. None of my test solvers caught that! D’oh!)
Thanks, logan.
I hate to say it, I’ve never seen the show. I know my sister swore by it. In a remarkable bit of symmetry: try as I might, I can’t get her to watch “The Wire;” try as she might, she can’t get me to watch “Arrested Development.”
Having said that, there’s a whole puzzle dedicated to that show in an upcoming issue of “Paste.” Stay tuned.
Tyler had a tough time with the NE as well. Go figure.
I thought MADD are mothers.
Got it that “Austin Powers” is the movie, not the character.
Nice puzzle.
SADD is Students Against Drunk Driving. MADD is Mothers Against Drunk Driving. I got a full dose of both during school.
And it may just be because I’m exhausted and punchy after the week, but I loved this puzzle. Poopy.
Very nice.
Ironically, I tackled today’s puzzle immediately after completing the Friday LAT puzzle. “I’ll have the #2” would have been an apt title for that puzzle as well. But if they had gone with the BEQ twist on the theme, well, let’s just say the #2 would have hit the fan….
This just killed me. Partly because I’m just having a fuzzy morning: even Enrico CARUSO and John KERRY as a 2004 loser both eluded me for a while. But then there are more obscurities here than usual: record label DGC? MAE Whitman of Arrested Development? (and I’m a big fan of the show) Stephen REA of 1997 Fever Pitch when there’s a more recent, better-known Fever Pitch, and REA’s role was just a cameo so he’s not even on the main IMDB page? I also fell into the MADD/SADD hole, which I found only when SAE Whitman didn’t look so good.
I picked the right puzzle to print out for the lav today lol! This puzzle reeked!!!
O.M.G. L.M.A.O.
I really hated the DGC answer, we’ll see how long it sticks in my brain (although answers I hate are sometimes more memorable than boring answers). I’ve heard of wet nurses before, but never DRY NURSE; a look at the phrase on google gets on 26K hits, most of which seem to be dictionary pages. And I thought SAE looked less wrong that putting MADD in the schools. Re the puzzle theme, ew.
Solidly formed puzzle, with absolutely no loose areas whatsoever. Intestinally speaking.
Seriously, Liz is a closet wordie. We just have to figure out how to get her out of the closet. Well done, both of you!
I ended up with a nice, blank 3×3 square in the top-right corner that wasn’t going to get finished without a heavy heap of Google tonight. Now that I’ve finally solved it, damn, BEQ.
Not dumping on your puzzle or anything, just a hellishly tough corner there. Theme had me groaning nicely throughout. Will never look at the snack aisle quite the same way again.
I’ll join in the chorus. The NE was ridiculously hard for me too.
“I found a great word the other day you might consider using in a puzzle. CAUDAL. It means ‘having a tail.'”
This rings so true that I’m guessing it’s an actual conversation you had. If you made it up then you ought to be Tarantino’s script doctor, it’s that good.
I got hung up in NE for the same reasons Karen did. I held on to WETNURSE and GOESNEAR until I had to peek, as I was going nowhere. Still, a funny/clever puzzle even though I didn’t finish with out cheating.
This puzzle was the shit. The NE killed me, too.
Gotta say that it was beyond the boundaries of good taste for me… but I’m a prude; heck, you knew you were gonna offend someone! Extremely well executed though esp. 17A and 34A… and I love the dupes in the NE though I struggled like everyone else, had WET and GOES and thought 11A was Geffin, wikipedia tells me DGC is a subsidiary, ahh, and now the DG makes sense too.
If I recall, it was also Liz’s suggestion that turned the HATCHET MAN theme from just okay to seriously funny.
You’ve got a good thing going, there…
I thought the NE corner was not so much “tough” as “trivia-filled”. Why not go with some words that regular, smart people (as opposed to infotainment-nerds) might know? Keeping everything else unchanged:
WGT
EON
TET
or
WIT
ETA
TIT
or
DSO
AIL
YTD
What a piece of crap, this puzzle! 🙂
Although, TIDIED UP helped clean it up a little.
Ashish
Probably.
Stop it!
I keep trying, but she’s got no interest. Never say never, though.
Totally fabricated example, but then again, I hear variations of that theme Every Single Damnfool Day.
I’m reminded of an excerpt of an interview with Frank Zappa (that wasn’t going well, apparently) that ended with something like “… and the closest I’ve come to eating shit, anywhere, was at a Holiday Inn buffet in Lafayette, 1973”.
Hi there. First time commenter on BEQ.
Like some others, I drew a blank in the northeast 3×3 (the NE its called I see).
Otherwise, it was fun flushing out the unusual theme entries.
–Mark / quicks?lver@puzzlers.org