If you start playing with statistics long enough you eventually get punchy on the numbers and start asking meaningless questions. Keen observers of this blog will note that it happened here some time ago but since it's fun, I keep going.
A couple of different readers have asked me which constructors have hit for the cycle, i.e. had puzzles published in each day of the week. I don't know what you'd conclude from that data, but it's certainly no stupider than its baseball equivalent, and it's perhaps harder. I quickly tossed together a query page here to slake my 'satiable curiosity. It turns out 18 brilliant authors have accomplished this dubious feat, identified with the red yes on my chart.
The top three constructors have all cycled. Manny Nosowsky is the King of Friday with an even 100 puzzles on that day, more than half his total. Number two, Elizabeth C. Gorski, rules Sundays with 40 large under her obi. The most amazing, though, is the third on the list. My ACPT buddy Rich Norris just barely makes the cycle with only one Monday and two Tuesdays but of his 139 puzzles, 105 of them are Saturdays! Yikes. (My lawyers advise me that I need some fine print here about my data only going back to 1996.)
Who has hit for the cycle with the minimum number of at bats? Raymond Hamel shows .500 efficiency by hitting all seven days with only 14 published puzzles, and that's after he blows four of his 14 on a single day of the week — Saturday.
Let's see, what else? Oh, after whines from a couple of historians I updated my papal post to include two more Loser Leos, numbers XII and XIII. And check out the comments in the post before that where where Alex tries to chastise me for forgetting a 21st century puzzle that included punctuation and I try to weasel out of it by claiming it's not quite the same thing.
Besides all that, it turns out the Times published another puzzle today. The Wednesday crossword by Gary Whitehead (answers) is his second NYT but his first without a middle initial which he apparently no longer wants you to know. The JimH Blog breaks that story wide open. It's a J.
The theme was fun. I was thrilled to see Mille Bornes which my sister Heather and I played for hours on camping trips. Roulez! There really ought to be a word that means "more or less vertical" and APEAK is as good as any. NIXON is an answer word that has historically been gingerly clued. "1974 pardon recipient" seems designed to rile us up one way or another. I always appreciate that.
