This is the crossword puzzle thread

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.

Okay but what about something like "Capital of Mexico" yielding PESO?

Ymmv but I think these double entendres and potentially strained interpretations and sidewise puns are exactly what puzzles are supposed to be doing.

If all you want is a strict one question > only possible answer paradigm, go play Trivial Pursuit.

ymp i don’t want that, it’s cool :)

capital of mexico is fine imo

Always bloody RIAL, though.

(I cheat all the US sports ones, come at me)

yeah that’s a nice one :) the william and mary example is a step beyond. it feels a little cheap to me. like it’s slapping you down for even trying to puzzle out the relevance of those particular names. it feels slightly outside the rules. a bit of a dad-joke frankly but like i said before, even though i kind of hate it i admire the chutzpah. it’s rare that i’m surprised by a tactic in the nytimes puzzles.

xpost

xp Actually what's worse is that these days I don't have to, I've started to learn them.

I don't know if everyone gets the same random puzzles from the archive recommended in the app or the website, but one of the ones this week was from a week in 2015 when they just asked contributors "What would you like to do that's never been done before?", including one featuring an unclued entry with no checkers. The week starts here: https://www.nytimes.com/crosswords/game/daily/2015/10/12

what’s a checker?

On nyt you can ask it to auto-check your answers. Wrong letters have a red slash through them.

Personally I do not do this. Sometimes, on an archived puzzle, if I haven't solved correctly, I will do "check puzzle" and it will tell me which squares are wrong. It doesn't tell you what the right answer is, just tells you where you're wrong.

Oh no - this is I think lingo I picked up from the other Times - a checker is a letter in answer that you've got from a crossways answer. I meant that there's no answers intersecting with that clue - it's at the bottom of https://www.nytimes.com/crosswords/game/daily/2015/10/14

(I should check, but I assume that we've discussed upthread that the NYT style where every letter is in two clues is weird and claustrophobic from a UK perspective?)

Every letter is in two clues? Just the ones that intersect surely?

Sure, but they all intersect! I should probably have said square instead of letter. You can see the UK style here - nearly half the squares are in only one clue.

https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/quick/15633

This might be a general US crossword thing, the NYT is pretty much my only exposure.

Ahh yes you're right. I'd never realised that until just now!

See, to me, UK-style crosswords seem weird. Requiring all the letters to work in two different words is harder from a construction perspective, and is a different intellectual challenge for the solver. It's like the difference in Scrabble between playing for word length vs. playing for tile density (that is, multiple overlapping words at a time).

When I see a US crossword that doesn't cross completely, I assume it is for beginners and/or children.

totally

xposts I'm reminded of a classic bit of dialogue from the Hallmark channel's Crossword Mysteries

Xword Ed.: "Nightingale did the Sunday puzzle?"

Detective: "Well, not all, he just filled in the Across clues, in cursive"

Xword Ed.: "Just the Across clues!?"

Me: "SO ALL THE DOWNS TOO THEN BY DEFINITION!"

This show, man. Truly high-end #CrosswordMysteries

— Rex Parker 🐈🐾☕️🐾🐈 (@rexparker) September 9, 2019

This week’s series of Thursday/Friday/Saturday has been difficult for me—I haven’t finished any of them and I’m at a standstill in each. I flip between them to look at clues with fresh eyes but it doesn’t seem to be helping. Tough week!

I found Saturday really easy, and posted my personal best time. Friday, though, was definitely hard, and I didn't finish before the streak deadline.

I thought Thursday's gimmick was cute, and nicely telegraphed at 31D.

I agree that Friday was tough. I didn't get a foothold until the southwest quadrant (I think 34D was my first confident answer).

Today? It seemed to be of appropriate overall difficulty, but the structure lends itself to "you know it or you don't" type answers, rather than things you can work out with perseverance. Like, the long answer in the middle.

If you have even modest familiarity with Miles Davis album titles, you can confidently fill in a huge section of puzzle without even needing the downs for confirmation. If you don't, then you will have a tough time getting traction.

somehow i failed to even look at the miles clue until i was well into the puzzle : /