The JimH Crossword Blog

Good feathermanship

We last heard from Elizabeth A. Long just a couple of weeks ago with her whirligig of a puzzle called Shapes Up. With the Wednesday, July 30 puzzle (answers) she goes from gimmick to quote and even though I'd heard it long before it was worth going to the trouble to solve the puzzle to pull it out. I realize this is completely subjective.

What goes through a constructor's mind while she's working out the clues? Consider KNEECAP. This is a rare answer word appearing only twice before in my database so it's not exactly crying out for a fresh definition but each previous occurrence was "patella" which is, let's face it, boring. Ms. Long wants to be clever or funny or something better. She goes straight for dramatic with "gangster's target, maybe." Combine that with SMACK DOWN and you have to believe she's a formidable woman.

The word of the day is PHLOX which I can't recall encountering before. Jacob's ladder doesn't refer to the angelic staircase or the climbing arc in cheesy sci-fi flicks but rather to the flowering plant Polemonium which is, I guess, synonymous with or perhaps a kind of phlox. It's a great word.

Leading lady Laura LINNEY is nicely alliterative. If you're a Buddhist who has attained Nirvana through rigorous discipline and ascetic practices, you already know that you're an ARHAT, sometimes spelled arhant. If you don't live in the northeastern U.S. you might not know that a SWALE is low marshland.  BWANA apparently means "master" or "boss" in Swahili. GODS and Monsters is a great film but it may no longer pack the punch it did when it was released ten years ago.

Special thanks to guest blogger Danny Glasser who filled in for me yesterday. Perhaps I should make Puzzle Poker Predictions a regular feature.

Dye in temporary tattoos

Let's START at the very beginning, a very good place to start. Roger Baiocchi follows that advice to get his NYT crossword career off to a good start. His Monday, July 28 puzzle (answers) takes that and some other answer phrases literally in this nice early-week theme. These sorts of self-referential clues tap into the same kind of pleasure that made Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid such an absorbing read twenty years ago. Well, at a rather different level.

The Sam Houston clue gets his TEXAS political career in chronological order. He was President of the Republic of Texas, Senator after it joined the U.S., and finally Governor. The state named a major city after him calling it, I believe, Sam.

HENNA is almost always clued with a reference to a redhead's dye so the temporary tattoo twist was nice. James AGEE's combination of last-name letters is a gift to constructors. Both The African Queen and Night of the Hunter are fascinating screenplays. AJAX was one of the greatest warriors in the Trojan War. You may recall that Homer describes him poetically as being "stronger than dirt." I didn't know who Pinky Lee was, but Peggy Lee still gives me shivers. What a great voice.

In an attempt to crank up the Freshness Factor™ of this site, it's time to bring in a couple of Guest Bloggers. I have more traditional crossword folks in the pipeline but the crazy twist on these next two is that they are people I actually know. In fact,at one time or another I reported to each of them in my day job. John Ludwig will post Friday but tomorrow we hear from Danny Glasser.

Danny hails from what would be the fourth largest city in the U.S. if it were, in fact, still an independent city. He's still pining for the Dodgers to return from L.A. His main qualification here is that he quotes Groucho in daily conversation even more often than I do. People find this extremely annoying, of course, so perhaps he'll avoid that temptation. We'll see.

Cousins of oribis and dik-diks

Both ELEANOR RIGBY and MR. WIZARD make their NYT puzzle debuts in today's Saturday, July 26 puzzle (answers) by Barry C. Silk. Mr. Silk seems to be a crossword machine. This is his ninth puzzle this year. The last one was less than a week ago — last Sunday's chess problem.

The Beatles clue worked perfectly for me: "title woman of song who lives in a dream." I read the clue, saw the word song, and by they time I got to "lives in a dream," four musical notes floated through my head. After a few moments of da-da-da-DA-ing the title hit me. It's so satisfying when a puzzle pulls a dormant factoid out of your memory like that.

This crossword is appropriately Saturday tough. So, for example, how familiar are you with your sub-Saharan antelopes? Sure, you got your oribis and your dik-diks, but what's that one in the picture again? Oh, right, a RHEBOK. There's a shoe company that got its name from a variation of that spelling.

MOUE is an odd word. It means a pouting or, I suppose, an "unhappy face." Pronounce it moo. I've already whined that B MOVIES aren't necessarily bad, but I accept that I’m on the losing side of this battle against current usage.

The 1966 Pulitzer-winning poet is Richard EBERHART. His experience with the horrors of Word War II made him wonder, "Was man made stupid to see his own stupidity?" At the other end of the cultural scale, VANNA apparently holds the record for TV clapping. What an honor.

Since this is Saturday, "ready to be put to bed" didn't even have a question mark and we had to figure out it was TYPESET. So when I got to "players with saving accounts?" and saw that question mark, I knew it had to be an interesting clue. If you've ever sat next to a GOALIE in the bar after a big game, you know they like to relive every blocked shot as they suck back Molson Canadians. It's a great clue. It's an excellent puzzle.

The President's Daughter

John Farmer brings HASHEESH to the crossword party for the first time. He also introduces the wonderful word SOJOURNERS and then JAM PACKS 9 other fresh answers into this creative Friday, July 25 puzzle (answers.) It’s a big jump up from yesterday’s difficulty level. Welcome to Friday.

Don’t touch the AREOLE because today it’s the “prickly area of a prickly pear.” It’s such a useful combination of letters but it needs to be clued carefully lest anyone accidentally think of nipples.

ROB ROY MacGregor was a famous 18th Century outlaw known as the Robin Hood of Scotland. Liam Neeson played him in the 1995 movie.

NAN Britton developed a teenage crush on President Warren G. Harding and, as they say, one thing led to another. After Mr. Harding died and the Harding family refused to honor the president’s wish to support the child Nan claimed Warren had fathered, Ms. Britton wrote The President’s Daughter starting a tradition of kiss-and-tell books that is still popular today. It includes a scandalous sex scene taking place in the coat closet in the executive office of the White House. There’s nothing new under the sun.

I’m a fan of Jessica Williams and was happy to confidently enter her name for “jazz pianist/composer Williams” at 9 Down. Unfortunately, MARY LOU Williams also fits the description and has the same number of letters in her two-part first name. It’s a nice coincidence that they’re both very fine performers and composers.

APOLLO ONE could have broken the back of the American space program. Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died while conducting an on- the-ground “plugs-out” test. It was such a shock after the previous Gemini and Mercury successes. NASA always uses numerals not spelled out numbers but it’s legitimate crossword transliteration.

I loved “inclusive words, fittingly” for ALL SIZES. The APNEA specialist is an Ear Nose and Throat doctor. The only long Stones hit I could think of happened to be correct or I would have been in big trouble. I don’t know why UP A CREEK is Dutch-like but it’s presumably some expression I don’t know and I’m hoping someone can enlighten me.

Introducing Quick Search

There’s a new module in the top right of this page, pushing Quick Clues down a notch. Quick Search automatically searches both XWord Blog and XWord Info for any string you type. I don’t index clues, but Google does that for me so you can type in a clue and see where it’s been used before. It sometimes misses references here or there but it’s amazingly good.

Google includes sponsored ads and it’s fun to discover what it comes up with sometimes. I’ve amused myself by typing in random clues and seeing what commercial sites pop up in response to one or another of the words entered.

Ethan Frome's wife

Last April I wrote about a fine puzzle by Will Nediger where all the theme answers start with A and end with Z. Today's Wednesday, July 23 puzzle by Henry Quillen (answers) is doubly clever. Like Bilbo Baggins, it goes There and Back Again in an ingenious interlocking construction that's only mid-week difficult despite a very high Freshness Factor.

RENE Magritte is easy for puzzle solvers to love. Most of his paintings feel like "?" clues in crosswords. If your French is rusty, he's written "this is not a pipe" at the bottom of his painting of, of what? Not a pipe.

I TOO is a short but powerful poem by Langston Hughes. You can read it here. Or, you can peruse the latest news from ITAR-Tass in English here. Paella is a Spanish rice (ARROZ) dish. I love "N.Y.C. country club" as a clue for THE U.N. It's a club of countries. They probably play country music there. Ethan Frome in the novel of that name by Edith Wharton is a little bit country. He marries ZEENA which turns out to have been a mistake once Mattie enters the story. Stiller and MEARA was a much more successful marriage. They were a big comedy duo in the 60s.

Answer words unique to today's puzzle include OIL BARON, WENT TO POT, and the wonderful-sounding ZIRCONIA.

If you're a constructor doing a theme like this, the XWord Info Finder Page is a great place to seek ideas. You can easily see previous answers that go from A to Z or Z to A or whatever other pattern you need.

This seems to be a debut for Mr. Quillen. Congratulations. It's an excellent crossword.

 

Update: According to a reliable source (you can guess) someone named Henry Quillen was a top money winner on Jeopardy in 2002. Perhaps the cash has finally run out and he's looking to tap into crossword constructing for his next big jackpot.

I got mail asking what LINEARA was all about. Try searching for Linear A. It was a Greek script used before, you guessed it, Linear B.

 

Update2: SethG reports on the Rex Parker site that some paper editions have the wrong puzzle. The following correction appears in today’s NYT:

Because of a production error, some copies of Wednesday’s paper contain an outdated crossword puzzle and its solution. If you look here first, proceed with caution. If the answer in the solution to one across also appears in the puzzle above it, you have a paper with the wrong crossword. If the solution to one across matches Tuesday’s puzzle, you’re in the clear, and on your own.

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!

Grand Caricaturama

The July 19 puzzle by Todd McClary (answers) is full of Saturday-tough clues and a few nice surprises. I learned more than average from this puzzle which I always like.

For example, I have lots of theatre experience and I know what GOBOS are. They’re filters you add in front of the lens in lighting instruments to do various kinds of special effects. The simplest ones have patterns punched out so the stage has an outline of a palm tree or something. It turns out that word is also used for sound-isolation shields in recording studios. If you’re a studio drummer you’re used to being surrounded by these things.

I didn’t know anything about the Selective Service. If you’re 20 to 25, in America, and MALE, you pretty much have to register. The official government web site explains reassuringly that once registered, “a man will not automatically be inducted into the army.” Yeah, I feel better already. I was over 26 when I arrived on these shores so I’m safe.

Did you meet your Waterloo on this puzzle? (You can’t win ‘em all.) How odd that of all historical battles, it’s Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 that gets immortalized in the common phrase. That was after, not ‘ere he saw Elba, by the way.

“Snowy locale of song” is a terrific clue for OLD SMOKEY. I like “lies along the waterfront” for YARNS too. “Took evening courses” is ATE DINNER. Mmmmm. Best of all, “drug store” is STASH. Very clever.

I had to look up “Creator of 1867's Grand Caricaturama." Here’s a bio of Thomas NAST, the Father of American Caricature. Although indeed Grand, his 33 huge (8 foot by 12 foot) paintings scrolling across a stage accompanied by piano and narrated by an actor did not add up to a financial success.

There's been discussion in the comments recently about whether my Freshness Factor™ formula could be improved. Almost certainly, but I might not bother. It's true that an ERA or an AREA will drag you quickly down and some sort of sliding scale might be kinder. I had thought perhaps a logarithmic approach might be useful. But just by coincidence, the current method nicely scales from a low of 28 to a high of over 96. The resulting values seem to more or less map to my intuitive sense of freshness. (Yes, it's easy to find exceptions.) I'll keep pondering this and let you know if I change.

Note that puzzles will exhibit a kind of "freshness entropy" over time. Whenever a new puzzle is posted it will ever-so-slightly pull down the scores of every other puzzle that shares any of its answer words.

I didn't need to know that

Och! Too Much Information, or TMI for short.

If it's Friday, it must be Mike Nothnagel. He's been on a roll recently and more than half of his puzzles are of the Friday ilk. Today's July 18 crossword (answers) is full of facts I had forgotten or never knew. And if that weren't enough, and by gosh don't you think it ought to be, I also fell head first into most of the traps. "Turndown?" I have to pay more attention to that question mark. The answer is DOG EAR, as in what one does to a page to mark ones place in a book. I remembered Emperor TRAJAN and even Molly IVINS was somewhere in a dark corner of my brain but much to my chagrin, I couldn't recall that KEVIN BACON was in Diner. What's your Bacon number?

"Private modes of transportation" is a wonderful clue for JEEPS. There are various varieties of the IXIA flower. That's one in the photo. And of course a doll can NEST, at least if it's a Russian matryoshka.

A few years ago I read an absolutely fascinating Scientific American book on the CIRCADIAN RHYTHM. You can work out the definition if you don't know the word. Circadian means "about a day." It turns out we humans do have a built-in sleeping and waking rhythm but it's closer to 25 than 24 hours. You can measure it by sticking volunteers in the bottom of a very deep mine shaft for several days and letting them sleep and wake up when they want.

Why 25 hours? Nobody knows for sure but one theory is that it's an evolutionary throw-back to a time when the 25-hour tidal cycle was more important than the 24-hour solar cycle. Now that's deep genetic memory.

Colorful lawn or garden fixture

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.

What a swell party this is!

Long, long ago, in years gone by, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, in times past, one of my favorite words was antediluvian. It means long, long ago, but the genesis of this word fascinated me back when I was a boy. You already know it means "before the deluge" or "before the flood" referring to that unlikely event involving Noah and a few million species of animals. Two of each, in fact.

Today's Tuesday, July 15 puzzle (answers) is full of antediluvian phrases. It's the first NYT puzzle in nearly three years from constructor Leonard Williams although he had one each in the L.A. Times and the N.Y. Sun last year.

Thor Heyerdahl was an ambitious Norwegian who had crazy ideas about ancient peoples being able to cross vast oceans in primitive boats, and then went on to demonstrate them himself. 25 Across refers to his attempts to cross the Atlantic from Morocco to Africa in the late 1960s. Although RA I has been clued many times as an "historic Heyerdahl craft" I'm not sure it really existed. The first boat was the Ra. The second was the Ra II. One could argue that the existence of the second requires a disambiguating suffix on the first, but I'm not sure Thor or his crew of tars ever used that name.

WORD is indeed a "popular Microsoft product" and it's nice to see some non-Apple software get mentioned. Speaking of trade names, Cherry GARCIA is very tasty. In the endless quest for new clues for OREO, we've never before talked about the floral design. Soon we'll be reduced to discussing the chemical composition of the crumbs since every other possible descriptor will have been used.

 

Update: Our favorite PsuperSleuth has dug up some fascinating info on today's constructor as well. Dr. Williams is a Professor of Political Science at Manchester College in Indiana. He teaches Political Analysis, Public Policy, Constitutional Law, and even Feminist Theory. Among his many books, essays, and articles, his most recent, published in New Political Science is titled "Anarchism Revived." You can read all his academic side on his Manchester College page.

What his awestruck students don't know is that he has another side. His Animated Adventures puzzle is #30 in a collection called Banned Crosswords, stuck right before Bedtime Ritual and right after Penis! Penis!

One other note: I've added a new feature to xwordinfo.com. There's a search box right on the home page which allows you to look for any word or phrase in both xwordinfo and this blog. This is particularly useful for looking up clues, for example, which I don't index.

 

EVAH is only possible in crosswords by mentioning Cole Porter. He wrote the song for his 1939 musical Du Barry Was a Lady. Put on your top hat, drink a little too much Champagne, and sing along to this excerpt. Why don't I evah get invited to these parties?

Have you heard, among this clan,
I am called "The forgotten man"?
Well, did you evah?
What a swell party this is!
Have you heard the story of
Dexter boy being gypped by love?
Well, did you evah!
What a swell party this is!

What frails, what frocks!
What furs, what rocks!
What gaiety! It's all too exquis!
That French champagne!
So good for the brain!
That band, it's the end!
Kindly don't fall down, my friend,

Have you heard the poor dear Blanche
Got run down by an avalanche?
Well, did you evah?
What a swell party this is!
Have you heard? It's in the stars
Next July we collide with Mars.
Well, did you evah?
What a swell party this is!