This is the crossword puzzle thread

same. cracked it with the "school daze" clue

Just walked out in my garden for a few, too few minutes of sunshine. Heard some kids and then came within a dozen feet of a guy sitting out there supervising them who turned out to be Ben Tausig. He told me he and his wife had already had the virus and recovered.

He doesn’t even live here, but a block away. He assured me he was practicing good social distancing with this other family.

cool

^I didn’t know where to post this so I posted it here, sorry

no it is cool!

He is one person I seem to see around the neighborhood a lot. I usually say hello to him even though he doesn’t ever quite remember who I am. So to me it was kind of funny that he was sitting there in my garden, especially since I didn’t recognize him for a bit and then had that “hey, Wait a minute!” moment.

sounds like you have a number of cool neighbors !

Were you reading one of the other threads?

I did the "crossword from your couch" tournament on Saturday, super fun puzzles. Was 244 out of 1815 total entrants, and no mistakes, which I was pretty happy with...the playoff puzzle with the hard cluing totally kicked my ass, however

puzzles here: https://www.crosswordtournamentfromyourcouch.org/puzzles/

Actually, just found out that two of my former across the street neighbors will be on the cover of the May issue of Downbeat.

dang i didn't know about that tournament! hope they do another one

I think it was bcz ACPT was cancelled. I've never done any kind of tournament before

xps

hi, yes, sorry james. you mentioned a neighbor on the hoagy carmichael thread, where i’ve been meaning to post but haven’t. wasn’t trying to be nosy.

Ben T. tweeted about COVID-19 yesterday:

We've now officially tested positive.

I am not mentioning this to be alarmist. I'm physically fine, and have no more symptoms. I'm totally, totally ok, and focused solely on not exposing others.

But damn, the mismanagement. The levels and layers of mismanagement.

— American Values Club (@AVCXWord) March 24, 2020

Anyway, I popped in here to say that I've decided to get into crosswords again while in quarantine. I re-subscribed to the AVC crossword (after letting my subscription lapse 3 years ago) and have been going through back puzzles. It's proving to be an excellent distraction from the news.

Are you constructing as well?

So this is a thing

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/03/fight-to-make-crosswords-more-inclusive/608212/

I agree, and love seeing fresher, more inclusive puzzles.

(But I am not gonna stop doing NYT puzzles because I am fucking good at doing them, and frankly I need all the tiny victories I can get right now)

i'm bored with nyt puzzles but the ease of doing them on an ipad is perfect for me. i wish i could get the new yorker puzzles the same way

I really like Natan Last's puzzles! Probably my biggest regret in lapsing on doing the NYer every week.

Erik Agard is my favorite from the NYer crew, he's a genius (at crossword solving/constructing), and he cares a lot about inclusivity.

My current NYT stats

Monday average 5:24
Tuesday average 6:15
Wednesday average 7:13
Thursday average 9:54
Friday average 9:24
Saturday average 10:45
Sunday average 16:56

As a dork I am interested in how this graphs, because it steps up so neatly in one-minute increments but then I'm slightly faster on Fridays than Thursdays. (Because hard themeless is my jam; some of the Thursday gimmicks just elude me for too long. Rebuses and whatnot).

Wish I could bring Sunday down more just for visual elegance - but it's all about the size, not the difficulty.

How often do you get a DNF, out of curiosity?

Are you constructing as well?

― Robbie Shakespeare’s Sister Lovers (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, March 26, 2020 11:40 AM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

Haven't quite gotten back into that yet. I think I need to solve more to get more into the construction mindset, where themes start popping into my head.

However, I *have* started editing a monthly puzzle (by V1c Fl3m1ng) for the magazine I work for.

Josefa - I have never not finished. On archived puzzles from years ago, I will use "check" and sometimes need to run through all the letters. Every once in a while I do get well and truly stumped, alas. So I confess I have sometimes googled to get out "1973 Superbowl MVP" or "1952 Best Supporting Actress nominee" or whatever. Three or four times a year?

But for the current puzzles in the week's streak, it's all legit; I would rather just work my way out of it by focusing on the internal logic of the puzzle or solving the other direction.

Wow, that's impressive. I can finish maybe 14 out of 15 of the contemporary NYT Fri and Sat puzzles, but I bought a collection of Sunday puzzles from the Eugene Maleska era (1988-1992 specifically) and they are way way harder than today's puzzles... I can finish about 1 in 5 of them.

Only here to complain that Thursday, April 9 was atrocious. Ended up revealing the puzzle and some clues seem nonsensical to me.

i finished without figuring out the theme but got it after. it helps to know that a period/dot is an "E" in morse code and a dash is a "T"

omfg

i support more inclusive crossword puzzles except for the inclusion of telegraph operators

".- phone home"

I figured it out eventually but for most of my solving time I thought the theme was going to be something like dotting i's and crossing t's.

Like, at first I couldn't see why 17A "-able" should be PUTONHOLD, but all the downs worked.

So I shrugged and kept working.

25A "Big nos." made no sense so I decided to come back to it later.

36A "Op-ed" solidified as MADEACHOICE.

So at this point I had a little eureka moment, but it was the wrong one!

I thought, "okay if '-able' comes out as a synonym for PUTONHOLD, then the theme must be that you're supposed to be pronounced as 'table.' The theme gimmick is that the clues should be pronounced as words.

So (my thinking went), if a dash equals T and there are also dots (.) in some clues, then there must be something like "cross the t's and dot the i's." Dots and dashes had not occurred to me yet.

This realization led me to reexamine "Big nos." If you pronounce it as "big nose," then SCHNOZZOLA makes sense. Eureka #2! Period equals E, not I as I had suspected.

It ran counter to my "cross the t's and dot the i's" theory, but at least at that point I knew that some sort of rebus hijinx were afoot, so I should just focus on what I know for sure and suss out the theme answers later.

49A ROADMARKER did not come to me until after I had solved 58A MORSECODE.

"Mil. post" > milepost (subbing an E for the period) > road marker.

Honestly I had no clue what the Morse values for E and T are, but after getting MORSECODE it was a logical inference. So I was able to go back and complete the theme entries that weren't quite jelling.

That was my thought process anyway, and is not far off from how a lot of themed puzzles go for me. I don't want to figure it out too early (which would be disappointing) or too late (which would be frustrating. Every puzzle has an internal logic and my puzzling method is to discover that logic, much more than it is about knowing all the rivers of Saskatchewan or another name for a fucking sea eagle.

iirc saturday's was good/different

looking back i see it was a half-aygard joint, so maybe not surprising

I have to admit that I find Agard's puzzles frustrating, mainly because I've stopped paying (or never paid) attention to large swathes of pop culture, and this last Saturday was a DNF for me.

On Saturday 1A, 10D, and 47A were surprises to me (the first is pop culture, the second a tricky science thing, and the third a piece of I guess commercial culture?).

Fortunately, for me, they mostly didn't cross with equally obscure things. Or things that are obscure in the same way.

My weaknesses are sports and movies. That's why the puzzles I can't finish unassisted are ones where my weaknesses cross. Like "1973 Superbowl MVP" and "1952 Best Supporting Actress nominee" upthread - if those two clues were to cross I would be lost, and have to just run through every letter that was phonologically possible to get it right.

i didn't know 1A or 10D either, and 22A was entirely new to me

kinda wonder if they considered making an obscure chapo reference with 40A

Re. N.Y. times crossword of 6/10/20 no. 0506: Prepared by Ali Gascoigne

Many answers appear to arbitrarily have missing “r”s. Seems kind of silly. I saw no clues suggesting this. I’m rather new to crosswords. Seems like this was not at all accidental, but It certainly dramatically upped the difficulty. Didn’t like it.

Thanks for any input.

Do you mean the one by Amanda Rafkin and Ross Trudeau? I don't see that clue in the one I did today.

that's the crossword from may 6, not today. the trick is that in eight squares the answer is UR (which you can input on the app using the rebus button)

and it is kinda bullshit because it's a wednesday puzzle, which typically do not have rebuses. usually that would be a thursday

For example today's, which you need to check out the 'info' for if you're working on the app (the iOS one at least). It's also slightly poorly clued for 20 across - given the gimmick, '59- and 62-Across' would be better, I think.

I agree with mookieproof that rebuses are unusual on Wednesdays. Perhaps if there's a gimmick but the overall difficulty is Wednesday-esque they'll let it slide.

For that May 6 one, yes, those squares need UR in them. I should add that the "revealer" is at 52 across: "Words on a mall map... or a punny hint for eight squares in this puzzle."

I dunno, I thought it was cute: You are here -> UR here. By that point I'd figured out the gimmick (by methodically solving the down answers) but didn't know why until I got to 52A.

That's sometimes what happens to me with gimmicks and themes: I know I'm right, but I don't know why. Sometimes I don't even care why.

the sheer fuck you-ness of “william and mary, e.g.” being “NAMES” is infuriating and also amazing

I think of that as simply good cluing, because it capitalizes on ambiguity.

Ditto any clue where the meaning changes if a word is capitalized or not, but it comes at the front of the clue so it has to be capped. Or when the tense is unclear from the clue, and you have to figure that out.

If it were just "insert synonym here" or "insert the answer to this trivia question here," it wouldn't be a puzzle.

I think I draw the line where a word in the clue both needs to be pronounced differently and is an awkward construction - 'flowers' for 'rivers' being a particular example.

I mean, I'm only human, so the sun will shine on any answer which I actually get from the clue rather than the checkers.

Hmm. Personally I'd rather scratch my head over "flowers" for "rivers" and be pleasantly surprised when I figure it out, as opposed to the you-know-it-or-you-don't stuff like "1964 Best Actress nominee" or "1987 NL Series MVP" or "Belgian provincial capital."

For me, the ambiguity of e.g. Polish (nationality) vs. polish (wood-finishing product) is what makes puzzling worthwhile and fun - the initial mystification, the gradually working out of crosses, the slow buildup of educated guesses, and the final "ah-ha!" moment of seeing why a river could be called a flow-er.

or maybe the answer is WORD

FWIW, “Flower” for “river” shows up all the time in Cryptics. See also “number” for “feeling more numb”,

i don't mind clues being a bit tricky but no one in real life has ever used 'flower' for 'river'

In cryptics misdirection is more the point, so I’d say it’s fair game.