Across the Board

Barry C. Silk seems to enjoy big squares divided evenly into grids. I got off to a fast start on this Sunday, July 20 puzzle (answers) by guessing that "Viking, for one" was a PUBLISHING IMPRINT. That made the circles spell out BISHMR. Hmmm, this theme will be trickier than I thought. Then when I finally made sense of that answer, I couldn't figure out why there were seven theme rows since I could only come up with six chess pieces. Oh well.

There is a lot of old European history today. The EDICT of Nantes was issued in 1598 by Henry IV of France, giving various rights to the French Protestants called the Huguenots. The gentleman with the intense eyes in the photo is Mr. Guy Fawkes whose annual night is an excuse in Britain to set off fireworks commemorating his failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Venice Preserv'd is an English Restoration play written by Thomas OTWAY in 1682. No doubt there were SMEWS in the ponds back then too.

More recently, Dave BERG created "The Lighter Side" for Mad Magazine. A "pickup attachment" is not, in fact, a rifle rack but rather a PLOW. "Bossman or bosswoman" is a wonderful clue. Why the explicit both-sex qualifiers? No reason. They're just screwing with our brains again, and we continue to let them do it.

In the "not what one expects" department, the "purveyor of chips" wasn't some variation of one who antes but rather the corporate entity INTEL. The "climactic scene in Hamlet" wasn't ACT V but rather the big DUEL with Laertes.

The odd word of the day is SKIRR. It means, approximately, to scurry, so we're not losing anything essential by letting the obscure archaic word disappear from common discourse. From the Useless Stats department, this is Mr. Silk's eighth puzzle of the year and second pangram in a row.

In the Freshness Analysis, a word that, surprisingly, has never appeared before is SQUIRT. What percentage of all the answer words in my database would you guess have made only a single appearance?

Update: I failed to note that this puzzle represents a milestone for Mr. Silk. This is his first Sunday puzzle and since he has every other day of the week already covered, he has become only the 25th constructor in the Will Shortz era to have Hit for the Cycle. Quite a remarkable achievement. Congratulations!

Comments

[Myles Callum]

Hey, congrats to Barry Silk! And I'm no longer the Cycle Club newbie. :-)

Myles

[KarmaSartre]

I was fortunate to get the CHINESEMUSTARD answer early, as that gave up the circle-theme which helped quite a bit "across the board". I struggled with OPERE and JAPES, and it took a while to give up ACTV. Leader of Lesbos was clever, as it had both the self-referential bit and the language-appropriate bit going on. Pretty much a perfect Sunday puzzle.

[PhillySolver]

Indeed a nice puzzle with a payoff giving us a panagram and a cyclagram all in one. Some tough spots for me at SMEWS at ISOLA, OBOLS at SPOOR SKIRR at SPOOR and JAPES at OPERE. Like Jim, I could not think where the last circled answer was taking me and wondered if a pawn transformed to another piece had a pseudonym. I think I'll go look at YouTube and see if I remember correctly that Duane Eddy recorded Raunchy. My recollection of Guy Fawkes Night is of huge bonfires and major pub crawling. There was said to be a connection between the fire and the resulting water.

[Wendy Laubach]

I knew "Remember, remember, the fifth of November, 'twas gunpowder, treason, and plot," as well as "A penny for the old Guy, Sir," but I guess I was thinking "day" instead of "night," so I still stumbled for a while there.

I figured "ISOLA" must be going for "island," but had no idea how to say that in Cyprian or whatever. And then I had "BRAVO" instead of "BRAVA" and "OPERA" instead of "OPERE," which slowed me down. I looked at "TOATOTO__" for the longest time. Not to mention "RA__DEAC," since I thought the city was Acton instead of Alton. In fact, I had persistent holes all over the place for a really long time. Very difficult puzzle for me! Some pretty obscure crosses: smews? Obols? Also, I don't think I've ever heard of an "AWN," and I've sure never heard of a "SKIRR," or a school called "COE." I nearly persuaded myself that there was a city in Spain called "RIMAOJIO," unlikely as that seems.

For once, the theme actually helped me.

Congratulations to Mr. Silk.

[Linda G]

Count me among those who struggled to come up with another chess piece...thought maybe they wanted CHECK.

Loved LIMAOHIO...although I was sure I had something wrong when I saw AOHI in the middle of it.

[profphil]

Thought Lambda was clever, especially as there is a Lesbian/Gay Legal Defense organiztion called Lamda. The puzzle had a lot of difficult spots that required guessing, most already mentioned but lucked out and guessed correctly.

[Doug P.]

Great puzzle, and it's a pangram! An impressive 30.8% (8 of 26) of Barry Silk's puzzles are pangrammatic. I'm sure JimH can tell us whether anyone has a higher percentage, but I doubt it.

[ArtLvr]

Super Sunday achievement, both for Barry Silk and for me ;-) Yes, the Title "Across the Board" helped me tremendously -- I guessed it meant chess and sailed on from there right through, even knew Deimos and Soonyi! Loved the long phrases too.... Cheers!

[john farmer]

It seems a week doesn't go by that we don't see Barry Silk's name on a puzzle somewhere. He's had four in the NY Times in the past six weeks, and I just did his LA Times from Saturday. I don't know where he (and some other prolific puzzle makers) find the time to crank 'em out like that...and make 'em so enjoyable too.

For the record: in the pangram department, Barry's 8 of 26 is an impressive percentage, but Janet Bender's 8 of 23 is a shade higher. (Manny tops the list with 10 total, i.e., for the NYT/Shortz puzzles.) I'm sure that's right 'cause I read it at the XWord Info site. Amazing what you find on the internets these days.

Lots of theme packed into that 21x grid today. Kudos to Barry.