SNAFU is, of course, an acronym. A wonderful definition from the OED notes that it is military slang "conveying the common soldier's laconic acceptance of the disorder of war and the ineptitude of his superiors." There's a lot of poetry like that in the OED.
The Tuesday, June 17 puzzle by Steven Ginzberg (answers) is not a muddle at all, although I got, uh, "fouled" up by the perennial teenager, assuming she was filled with ennui. It turns out ANGST was her bigger problem. The theme answers all mesh nicely together. This seems like a good puzzle to give to friends just learning the sport of crosswords. It's easy enough and there are no iffy clues. I liked "It keeps going and going..." for EON. It's the 77th most popular answer word in my database and you can bet it will keep going and going and going...
We've had a lot of puzzles from computer geeks lately and Mr. Ginzberg carries on the tradition. He's a software architect for Green Hills Software in California and PhillySolver found his Linked In profile. It's interesting to see the correlations between constructors and math, and constructors and music.
I'm collecting Reader Mail Questions and I'll batch them all together in another post but one I've been asked recently is if I read the other crossword blogs. Sure I do. It's fun to see where we agree and where we differ, and I often get new insights. Since I can sometimes be a bit of a geek myself, I created a software tool to help me stay on top of what's happening in the blogosphere and I recently added it as a public page on my stats site. Click here for an overview from several different blogs. I display the latest entries plus any others posted in the past 24 hours. It sometimes takes a few moments to load.
