This is the crossword puzzle thread

oh, jaymc has a puzzle in that penguin book? now i have to get it.

Two puzzles, in fact! I just got my copy of the book the other day, and it was interesting to see (as someone who'd never before published a puzzle) how B.T. edited the clues. I think maybe a third were changed in some way: either easier, harder, or livelier. In retrospect, I think I probably had a few too many synonym clues -- which weren't necessarily easy (I tried to make it tough by using words with multiple definitions), but may not have been particularly fresh or interesting.

cool!

Heard ADIA just now for the first time ever maybe in the supermarket. Now I just have to go and listen to "ELLA in Berlin."

Yesterday's Times had a celebrity co-constructor, a one-time Jeopardy contestant.

Looking forward to receiving my copy of that Penguin book later this week.

Weirdly I had just seen Dana Delany's Battlestar Galactica episode last week.

I'm trying to remember: was she the third contestant when Andy Richter beat Wolf Blitzer?

tyler hinman puzzles are always so fucking sporty

Has this been linked to before?
http://www.slate.com/id/2145623/

IIRC, that's from Gaffney's book -- which is definitely worth a read.

For what it's worth, I use a software program to create a grid, and websites to help me come up with fill -- but I don't maintain a word list, ranked or unranked, like many constructors do.

Which program do you use, or is that a trade secret? :)

I use a freeware program called Crossword Master (for Mac). I emphasize: this is just for designing the grid. No bells and whistles at all.

I do have a copy of Crossword Compiler, which is the industry standard, but only on my work computer, because it's PC-only. I basically use it when I need to convert the grid to a PDF or other file format (PUZ, CCW) preferred by publications. If I had it at home, where I do my constructing, I'd probably take advantage of some of the advanced features.

Thanks. I was wondering about that because I have a Mac at home and it had seemed to me that the standard program being PC-only would force most constructors to be PC-based. I was actually meaning to ask some people at Lollapuzzoola but I forgot. What about the new format BEQ and Crossynergy use, the jpuz?

I haven't heard of that.

There's also a Mac-compatible program called CrossFire that a lot of constructors like. I have the free demo version, and it seems pretty good.

Oh yeah, I had heard of that one.

Amy R is always pushing .jpz (no 'u' sorry for earlier misspelling) http://www.crosswordfiend.com/blog/2011/04/18/tuning-spork-jpz/. You need to use a different program to solve with called Crossword Solver aka Puzzle Solve). Most of the speed solvers don't like it because it doesn't have certain convenience features AcrossLite but it seems there is some legal and financial reason constructors have been switching over.

Huh, I will check it out.

Here's a post by Tyler about this http://www.tylerhinman.com/blog/posts/316
which links to this post by Amy http://www.crosswordfiend.com/blog/2011/04/05/see-im-telling-you-make-peace-with-puzzle-solver/

Man, Friday and Saturday puzzles both killed me this week.

Today's puzzle had a nice gimmick that wasn't too hard to get. People did end up talking a lot of crap about it.

I've always wondered, when constructors are creating a puzzle, they mostly work horizontally and try to munge the vertical words afterwards, right?

Theme answers are always placed first, and those tend to be mostly (but not always) horizontal. Otherwise, I work one section of the puzzle at a time, placing both Across and Down words before moving on to the next part of the grid. It's hard for me to imagine there being any value in working in only one direction, without knowing if the crosses are viable.

There is some explanation of this in Patrick Berry's Dummies book, I believe

Full title: Crossword Puzzle Challenges for Dummies. I see it recommended all the time as the book to read about puzzle construction. Seriously.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/09/how-will-shortz-makes-a-new-york-times-crossword-puzzle/244733/

Fascinating.

Really? I wanted more.

Wait, I just clicked through to see the mark up more clearly. Pretty interesting.

What do you think of this? http://ericberlin.com/?p=4101

I've never done the USA Today puzzle, only know it by its poor reputation. That post is fairly damning!

Never did it either. There is a funny quote about it from Jon Stewart in Wordplay

lol at that divided grid (linked from that eric berlin post)

Yeah, that was even worse than using the answer in the clue.

Today BEQ mentions the Patrick Berry book and posts a link to a video of Mike Selinker giving a talk about crossword construction.

One of these days I'm finally going to study up on my NA and European rivers.

Which river missed you up?

Oh, nothing in particular, just something that I've always been meaning to shore up. (ARNO? ELDO? EHRE?)

ELDO? Do you mean EBRO?
EHRE? That's the German word for "honor," don't know the river
As for ARNO, I think the most important thing about it is not to confuse it with Thomas ARNE, composer of "Rule, Britannia!"

Today's Jonesin' puzzle, "Juggler's Blues," is awesome: http://groups.google.com/group/jonesin-crosswords

yeah nice! thanks for the recommendation!

nice. i always do jonesin' in my local free weekly, but the puzzles are consistently 2 weeks behind the online version (or whatever gets posted at crosswordfiend).

This week's Jonesin' wasn't bad either.

Joon Pahk is everywhere!

OK, Patrick Berry's contest this week in the NYT? Pretty amazing.

Didn't even try the metapuzzle until a few minutes ago. Pretty cool.

Wow, lots of people entered that contest. http://wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/drawing-contest/

For the record, we received 4,763 entries in the contest, of which 4,576 were correct.

Here I will admit that, before I figured out the "fill in the circle" bit and just had a bunch of scrambled letters, I thought the "leader" was "Justice Scalia."

Ha, before I did that my first guess was "Judas Iscariot" but I couldn't figure out how that was going to play and couldn't think of anything else.

jaymc, I have an idea for you: for November 11, 2011 you should write an "eleven" themed crossword. oh wait

Sorry.

I did the Patrick B. puzzle package that come out end of last year but never got most of the metas. Have until Valentine's Day I guess. Have since taken a break from doing regular-style crosswords and have focused on cryptics instead but I probably need to switch back soon.

Just did this month's Patrick Blindauer puzzle which had a good twist.
http://www.patrickblindauer.com/play.html

So I wrote a tiny search engine for The New York Times crossword - spanning 15 years worth of clues and answers as a little weekend project. There are 432,205 clues from Oct 23rd 1996 to the end of 2011.

http://donohoe.tumblr.com/post/18789743183/nytimes-crossword-search