Elizabeth A. Long had a couple of Monday puzzles published last July and today’s Thursday, July 17 crossword (answers) is her first late-week entry. It has the kind of gimmick that makes you question all your answers until you figure it out.
Whenever all the theme answers are in Down clues, you know something is, so to speak, up. It’s harder to read Down so all things being equal, the interesting answers are always Across. The last Downy example I recall was back on July 9 when Tim Wescott needed the flexibility to put his math answers in the right boxes. Today’s downers are required by the theme which invites us to “quit misbehaving” or SHAPE UP.
This has consequences for the fill too. If you create a puzzle where a percussionist plays the ELGNAIRT, you have to give the solver enough help to push through, especially if it’s only Thursday. This puzzle manages an excellent balance.
BELLE Starr of the Old West was, by all reports, a very tough outlaw. Her murder is still unsolved, if you’d like to tackle a different kind of puzzle. I’ve got Sondheim’s song “The Worst PIES in London” running through my head now. More likely to cause slipping is ICIER although it’s not the ice you slip on but the water that forms when the ice is under pressure. If it's cold enough, icier gives you more traction. James AGEE is a common crossword name. He wrote The African Queen screenplay. Experimental filmmaker STAN Brakhage is obscure but the crosses were easy enough so I got to learn something. I’d spend more time watching experimental films if I weren’t such an ERAUQS. Clifford Odets gets remembered for something other than his first play Waiting for Lefty. Queen ANNE, the last of the Stuarts, succeeded William and Mary in 1702 and, five years later, became the first monarch of the united Kingdom of Great Britain. My favorite clue and the only one to make me laugh out loud is another short one — "Mobile home." Click the answers link if you haven't solved it yet.
The theme answer that nearly confounded me was RATS. Since that’s a legitimate word, I spent way too much time wondering what rats had to do with headliners before finally remembering the theme. Rats, indeed.
I've had some questions about the XWord Info Freshness Factor.™ The formula is explained on the site (click the Freshness link from any puzzle) but the basic idea is that if every answer is unique, the puzzle scores 100. Rare words drop the score a little and very common words drag the score down a lot. Today's puzzle has a rather low score despite 6 unique words, reflecting the need to keep the puzzle simple enough to withstand the thematic oddness. Any puzzle with ERA, ERIE and ALA is going to score poorly. Scoring 70 is fresh, 80 is piping hot, and only 12 puzzles score over 90. The highest score in my database is an amazing 96.4. High score doesn't necessarily mean great puzzle, of course. One of my favorite puzzles scores the lowest: 28.0.
An interesting feature of the Freshness page is that you can see at a glance all the answer words unique to each puzzle. I might not have guessed, for example, that yesterday's MERRIER and ROADHOG were both debuts. More on Freshness in an upcoming post.
