We have this notion that if solving crosswords is hard, constructing them must be even harder and those who create the best puzzles have to be both modern renaissance women or men and be off-the-scale intelligent. Unfortunately for the rest of us, this seems to be the case.
Wednesday’s puzzle is by Daniel Kantor. He hasn't accomplished much at all. He was the Marketing Director for Finale, still my favorite software for composing or arranging music. He's a graphics designer. He's an author. He taught Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of St. Thomas Graduate School for Business. He's a successful composer — one piece has a half-dozen different professional recordings. Oh, and he writes crosswords.
Last Saturday’s puzzle is by Karen M. Tracey. Another simple soul. Orange linked to this interview with Ms. Tracey where she confesses that since Crossword Compiler didn't quite do what she wanted, she built her own construction software from scratch. She also compiled her own personal database of all the 11,000 puzzles she's solved.
The biographies for most constructors are just as impressive. Yes, we’re all created equal. Some of us are just more equal than others.
Who's the crossword community’s favorite architect? I’d like to believe it was Christopher WREN since he designed my favorite building in the world but that word gets as many avian as architectural clues. I'm sure you guessed it's EERO with 86 references in my database, almost every one clued simply as "Architect Saarinen." You probably know he designed the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. Slate has a slide-show retrospective so you can more fully appreciate him if you ever see that clue again. Odds are you will.
I was going to update this post with a brief review of the Thursday puzzle but I like it so much it gets its own post...
