The JimH Crossword Blog

Elementary, my dear Plato

Plato thought the universe was comprised of four elements. Later Aristotle added a fifth, æther, the divine substance which makes up the heavenly spheres but since this is a Monday puzzle, we only have the first four to deal with. Besides, it's not clear how to add that first-letter ligature into Across Lite. Platonic philosophy seems a little goofy now since we're so much smarter and even know the Atomic Number of Oxygen, but his world view turned out to be very useful for over a thousand years. What ideas have you had lately that will last that long?

The June 2 puzzle seems to be a NYT debut for Barry Boone. It's a solid crossword with four theme answers and an additional 15-letter theme explanation; a remarkable accomplishment at a Monday level. I'm always happy to see KAOS in any puzzle. Oh, and it's one Q shy of a pangram. As Max would say, "missed it by that much."

Monday is often the hardest day to blog about since, by convention, these puzzles can't be too adventurous. Not that they're all the same, exactly, but they vary within narrower parameters. Long-time readers have noted that in such circumstances I sometimes resort to a recitation of random statistics.

It struck me today that there is another class of commentators who face a similar dilemma — baseball writers. There's a new game nearly every day and, with apologies to the fans, of which I'm one, they're all more or less the same. Somebody wins, somebody loses, the heroes and the goats can be enumerated, blah, blah, blah. Here's a quote from an AP write up of a Mariners game played yesterday. Tell me if this doesn't sound like a JimH Crossword Blog paragraph only slightly tweaked:

The Mariners have won three of four. The Safeco Field roof closed in the second inning after a light rain started falling. It was the 11th time it’s been closed this season in 29 home games. The Tigers were held to two hits for just the second time in the last two seasons.

Just embarrassing. On the other hand, this blog is apparently good training for my next job at ESPN.

Can you keep a secret? Get Smart was mentioned at 10 Across and that's reason enough to include a clip:

Dental carries the puzzle

My guest bloggers rock. It's good to be back but it's nice to know I'm not indispensable. Thanks PhillySolver for being the latest to fill in for me.

Before we get to the Monday puzzle I do want to add my own praise to Spy Glass, the Sunday masterpiece by Elizabeth C. Gorski. All those these answers, symmetrically placed, in chronological order, along with some appropriate glassware. Will Shortz called it "a breathtaking feat of construction." That would be a great quote to add to anyone's résumé, not that Ms. Gorski needs it. What a nice way to ring in the Ian Fleming centennial.

Here's my Favorite Fun Fleming Fact: besides creating Bond, James Bond, he wrote the children's story Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Huh? Does this make any sense at all? Think about it. The spy on her majesty's secret service always had a cool car with lots of gadgets and special capabilities. Ditto Chitty. Bond had Pussy Galore and the rest of his suggestively-named Bond Girls. The sex kitten in Chitty Chitty went by the delicious moniker Truly Scrumptious. Yep, all from the same brain.

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The Monday, May 26 puzzle by Mark Sherwood (answers) left me squirming in my seat with its oral healthcare theme. Speaking of squirming, SEX gets clued as "reason for an R rating." Sex has undergone a remarkable transformation in just the past few years. Not long ago when you filled out forms you were often asked about your sex. The accepted answers were generally either male or female. Nowadays, people don't have sex, they have gender, a word which formerly had only a technical grammatical meaning mostly useful for studying foreign languages. The result of this queasiness has, as usual, had the opposite of the intended effect. We can't casually say sex because that would deeply offend our prim sensibilities, so now that formerly safe and useful word only has naughty connotations. Ok, I'll dismount my soapbox now.

Two thumbs up for seeing SISKEL and EBERT together again. Theirs is such a wonderful story — the two formerly bitter rivals who become best friends clashing over their shared love of film.

I wonder how many NYC restaurateurs I'm going to have to learn to keep doing these puzzles...

Update: I forgot to mention that the grid pattern on this puzzle, by which I mean the distribution of black squares, is a very popular one. It appears 10 times in my database, making it the fourth most common pattern. I'll have more to say about this in a future post. My Grid Art page shows two lovely Saturday-level grids that each appear 9 times.

Twisted but Fair

At the Crossword Tournament in Brooklyn last winter I met Merl Reagle and bought his Sunday Crosswords Volume 14. His foreword (or rather 4-Wd.) concludes with the motto "My Guarantee—Twisted but Fair." Mr. Reagle lives up to that motto too. His creations are always fun.

But it's not just about fun. Fairness is critical in crosswords. It might seem overly picky but if I as a solver am going to invest a chunk of time, and for a Saturday puzzle it might take me a few chunks, then at least I want it to be fair.

The Saturday, May 10 puzzle by Karen M. Tracey (answers) reminded me of Mr. Reagle's slogan because it just manages to be fair for me. In fact, it nearly fit my personal definition of the perfect puzzle; one that on first glance seems completely impossible but gradually yields its secrets without having to resort to outside help. A secondary definition would be one that defeats me, but when I investigate the missing answers I realize I could have figured them out if I had thought a little harder. That's what happened today.

Ms. Tracey's puzzle was eminently doable, except for the bottom-left corner which tied me up in knots. "Work on it began in Rome in 1817." What an interesting clue! Most Roman multi-year accomplishments that come to mind began well before the 19th Century. What could it be? An opera maybe? Some famous painting? Nothing architectural, right? In fact it is architectural, just not Roman. Work on the ERIE CANAL began on July 4, 1817 at Rome, New York. The same clue without "in Rome" would have been much simpler. Dastardly.

That busy ditch combined with not knowing that "Hebrew or Phoenician" was CANAANITE doomed me.

Some favorite clues: "Make an impressive delivery" is ORATE. "Meat grinder" is MOLAR. "Top suit" is CEO. And for nostalgic reasons, I liked "Commodore competitor" as well. One of the very earliest personal computers was the Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor). It came out in 1977, well before the IBM PC that changed the world in 1981. My first computer was its biggest competitor, the TRS-80, made by Radio Shack, aka TANDY Corp.

I Get Mail

The Wednesday May 7 puzzle (answers) is the second in four days for Richard Silvestri. It's back to the ballpark today after only thinking we might be headed there yesterday.

Other than the dead center, this was a fun and easy romp with so many clues I enjoyed. The "man of principle" is PETER. Back in 1970, The Peter Principle was one of those aha books that suddenly made the world make sense. Everyone you have to deal with is an idiot because they kept getting promoted to just beyond their level of competence, or so goes the theory. It's absurd or at least overly simplistic in retrospect but it made a big impression at the time since it's such a satisfying explanation.

"White house" shows up now and then for IGLOO but it's a great clue. A "big jerk" is, of course, a SPASM. And if I were to signify anything, what would it be? ONE. Got it. That's NEVE in the photo.

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Three recent blog posts have generated A TON of mail. One was yesterday's Sudoku discussion. It turns out there's a lot of passion around that topic. For the record, sudokus are fun, at least when they're not absurdly hard, but the point of my stupid essay is that one aspect of crosswords that makes them special is that they are conducive to interesting conversation afterwards. That's what crossword blogs are all about. The genius of sudokus, on the other hand, is that they require absolutely no special knowledge and no special skills except the ability to think hard for a while. It's a completely different kind of cranial exercise but one that can also be satisfying. What it shares with crosswords and Rubik's cube is the joy of creating order within constraints. Nothing wrong with that.

My second email magnet was the mini-biography on the dark side of Will Shortz. Not surprising.

What I didn't expect was the flood of email when I talked about Nancy Salomon. Ms. Salomon is the Queen of Collaborators. I didn't know is she is the Much Loved Queen of Collaborators. Several people sent private mail telling me how much she had helped them, often pointing to her essays at cruciverb.com as the best collection of advice for beginners. Nancy herself sent me a gracious and modest note, but I hope she knows how appreciated she is. My favorite quote was forwarded by Orange who pulled some remarks by Stephen Edward Anderson from the NYT forum. With Mr. Anderson's permission, I'm including them here. It's an inside look at the creative process. The discussion refers to the recent April 23 crossword (puzzle, blog.)

Having found the four theme entries and arranged them horizontally in a grid, I sent it to one of the most remarkable persons I have ever known. Nancy Salomon sent it back, in her signature lightening turnaround time, with the comment that it might look better with the twin elevens running vertically. 

In an almost incidental sort of way, she dropped in the grace notes that make this more than just a run-of-the-mill themed grid built around some rather dated movie nags. Checking the database, I found that HADABIT was spanking new. Nancy sagely advised me against giving it a theme-related clue, and likewise steered me away from the flatfooted temptation to clue the theme entries with mention of horses or cowboys: 

"That's what RIDE 'EM COWBOY is for," she wrote. 

What I deserve credit for is having stopped arguing with my wise and kind mentor, who has declined my suggestions of co-authorship: "Looks like a rocky road," says she, self-protectively.

Spaced Out Solar System

Today's Sunday puzzle (answers) is by John Farmer who has become one of my favorite constructors. He has a unique style. I asked him how he thinks about crosswords, and here's what he said:

I got into the crossword habit relatively late, in my 40s, and most everything I learned was from reading comments of Hex and the Cru on the NYT forum, back when it was the only game in town. Like most things I like, I tried my hand at making puzzles and eventually figured out how to make them good enough to be accepted. Not always, but often enough. The tricky part of being a constructor is finding new ideas. I enjoy puzzles that are like nothing else I've seen before (e.g., the "inside the box" puzzle, a baseball-themed puzzle that ran in the Sun), but those themes don't come every day. Sometimes very simple themes work the best. And if the theme muse happens not to visit, I may take a few words I've been kicking around and use them for a themeless. In any case, every puzzle should be fresh in its own way.

Make sure you follow that "inside the box" link above if you don't remember it. The rest of his NYT puzzles are listed here. This one is elegant and this QWERTY keyboard puzzle is especially clever.

Today's puzzle was also delightful. I got the theme right away and since the theme entries were listed in order, I could scribble them all down. PLUTO was, of course, relegated to a themeless clue. Poor wretched planetoid. FRUSTA ("truncated cones, in math") is a great word. There were a few nice mathy entries today.

"Like some twins" is a delicious clue for EVIL. "State quarters" is DORM, of course. And if you're tracking the roos, buck suffix is AROO and switch ending is EROO.

The Vancouver Canucks have a history of stupid logos. The latest is shown above. It's better than either the skate racing downhill or the hockey stick in a rectangle that preceded it. The Canucks missed the playoffs this year, probably out of fashion embarrassment.

Update: be sure to read Mr. Farmer's thoughts in the comments section below.

Update 2: check out the JNotes on this puzzle for a description of how the print version makes this puzzle even more elegant by using shaded squares — a technique not available in Across Lite.

Enforced Letter Order

If you play or follow sports, there's a seasonal rhythm that you accept without questioning: off-season, exhibition games, regular season, playoffs, championship. In NYT crosswords, that slow annual cycle is replaced with a weekly whiplash. Monday is a warm up, Tuesday through Thursday separates the high flyers from the just-wait-until-next-years. Friday and Saturday are playoffs and championships, I suppose, although I'm not sure what to make of Sunday. The off-season marathon?

This rhythm method of graduated difficulty serves an obvious purpose. It provides something for everyone. If you're a regular NYT solver you just accept this and even look forward to it. Surprisingly, perhaps, even as I anticipate the weekend, the early week breezes are still fun, and I can make them even more fun by making them harder.

Do you add extra challenges to the easy crosswords? I used to time myself on Mondays until I discovered how slow I was compared to the pros so that's not as much fun anymore. Yeah, I know I should compete against myself and try to better my own times, blah, blah, blah. Instead, I now do other tricks to make Mondays more challenging. Here's the recipe for my favorite which I call Enforced Letter Order:

• Grab a pen. You're going to do this on paper with ink.
• Fill the letters in order, left to right on the top row, then left to right on subsequent rows until the end.

Do you see what happens? You have to fill in 1 Across first, left to right. If you're not sure because there are multiple possible answers, you look at the Down clues and figure them out, without writing them in. Maybe there are still multiple possibilities so you have to keep looking at various Down and Across clues, keeping it all in your head, until you're sure of 1 Across and then you firmly pen that in. Next, you go onto the second Across clue, and so on. If you're stuck, you can't jump over to an easy clue later on. No skipping ahead. You work out the answer in your head before you go on. The extra-pro version would be to solve the whole thing in your head before you write a single letter, but my ELO idea seems far more sane to me.

Here's an even better suggestion for what to do with an easy Monday puzzle. Find a friend who loves words but isn't hooked on crosswords yet. Sit down with her or him and work it out together. Today's Monday puzzle by Christina Houlihan Kelly (answers) with its theme of punny impediments would make a great introduction to our sport.

The genesis and evolution of a neologism

I guessed who wrote today's Friday puzzle (answers) before I even read it. With only 21 blocks (black squares) it had to be a Manny Nosowsky. Check out my list of puzzles with the fewest blocks. Only two puzzles have fewer and one, the record holder at 19, is also by Mr. Nosowsky. Of the 14 puzzles with 21 or fewer blocks, 9 are by him and 5 are by everyone else put together.

Fewest blocks is different than fewest words. Today's word count of 66 is far from the record. It all depends of block distribution, and Manny doesn't compete at the top of that list. He prefers the dense looking grids even with the higher word count. The record lowest word count is 52 held by Frank Longo, who together has 3 of the lowest 4. (I don't have a page for word count on my database site yet.)

Not only was today's puzzle dense, it was fun. The 15-letter answers in both the top and bottom three-stacks were all good solid phrases. My favorite is "have cosmetic surgery perhaps" for IMPROVE ON NATURE.

Brilliantly done, Manny Nosowsky. And speaking of talented constructors...

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My previous post posed the question: what do you call a sneaky clue like "something Elizabeth II has" for ZED where the has refers to the word itself rather than the subject of the sentence? (Not that a queen could be a subject — that makes no sense at all — but you know what I mean.) My readers came through with some suggestions. PhillySolver proposed autologal based on Greek roots but that sounds like an adjective to me. My favorite, suggested by Joon was a "Quarfoot special" after devious constructor David. I prefer to further reduce it to a pure eponym and call it simply a Quarfoot.

There's no central authority for the English language so how do we (let's make this a joint effort) make it official? Only through common usage, and here's where I need your help. Drop this handy word frequently in casual conversation, or better yet in your next NYT Op-Ed piece. Years from now scholars will debate the first reference and the mysterious Joon will show up in an archived web search sparking great debate in academia.

Of course words continue to evolve. The capitalized Quarfoot will soon become merely the quarfoot and eventually just the quarf. Similar clues will be described as being quarfy, and the even more clever clues of the future will be called neoquarfotic. I can hardly wait.

Did anybody notice I managed to juxtapose "genesis" and "evolution" in my title? I realize this may only amuse me.

Could you reword that, please?

I've whined before on this blog about how crossword humor is sometimes on the corny side. Hilarity, of course, is in the ear of the behearer but I found the Sunday puzzle Sound Moves by Daniel C. Bryant (answers) to be clever and witty.

So often the payoff isn't worth the effort. You struggle to finally get all the theme clues only to read some lame quote that could have been lifted from a 1964 Readers' Digest. This puzzle was unusual in that not only were the jokes amusing but each one had to reveal itself, at least to me, individually.

Think about that. Usually when the first theme clue is solved, the rest of the trick entries fall right out. I had to work on the theme answers right up to the last letter in some cases. That means they probably wouldn't make great gags at a bar, but they're perfect crossword humor. Bravo.

Mr. Bryant has six published NYT puzzles. Half are Thursdays and the other half are Sundays. I wonder how he decides which he's going to do next.

Note: this puzzle has two names. The original Across Lite file was titled Sound Moves but that has now been replaced with the correct print title Could you reword that, please?

What makes an educated man?

When you play poker, much depends on the luck of the draw. In the long run, the better player will prevail because the randomness averages out, but any individual hand is determined to a significant degree by chance. You're wondering where the crossword analogy is, aren't you? Crosswords depend on a unique combination of cleverness and factual knowledge and your relationship to those facts is the crossword luck of the draw.

It's one of my goals to know everything but since I haven't yet got to rock singers, TV stars or R&B singers, I have some gaps. Since none of the theme answers meant anything to me, today's puzzle was not nearly as fun as it might have been. I realize your mileage may vary. Maybe you've never seen Lohengrin so yesterday's Elsa clue was just as befuddling, but at least it wasn't a 15-letter theme answer. One of the great aspects of crosswords is that they encompass an incredibly broad range of knowledge. I learn something nearly every time.

Answers to Michael Langwald's Wednesday puzzle are posted. I got to feel smug for getting that "Angered and enraged" were ANAGRAMS without any letters, so that was fun. It helped that I remembered that Barry Silk clued ANAGRAM last December as "cheaters, to teachers" which is also a great clue.

So, am I a cultural idiot for not knowing these gentlemen: Messrs. Frey, Boyle and Cooke? In this modern digitally-connected democracy, there's no such thing as a definitive list of facts that an educated man can be expected to know. (Back in the old days when that was a question that could reasonably be asked, feminine anomalies like Marie Curie or George Sand were exceptions that self-respecting misogynists could conveniently ignore.) Nowadays, information flows freely without regard to any authority. And yet, cultures are bound together by common stories, a shared sense of what's important and what's not. Who decides what is worthy for us to embrace and what we can ignore?

The answer, for better or worse, is nobody. Or better, it's some large collection of people who work for Fox News, USA Today, The New Yorker, Encarta, and so on. You'd have to include The New York Times in that last. And to a tiny but measurable degree, Will Shortz. There's something about inclusion in the NYT Crossword that legitimizes people, ideas, and certainly words.

Richard Wagner doesn't need any help from a crossword. Rock fans, I imagine, would argue that neither does Glenn Frey. But now that I see him immortalized in tiny squares, I have the vague notion that he must be important, that he's someone I should spend the effort to get to know. Do you feel the same?

 

Update: It turns out Peter Boyle the Emmy winner is the same as Peter Boyle the movie actor, best known to me for his horrifying turn as the monster in Young Frankenstein.

Crosswords as cultural ambassadors

An OLIO post today starting with another wonderful email. Yesterday I heard from Alla Bean and she's given me permission to quote her here. Alla lives in Switzerland, in a small town founded by Julius Caesar called Nyon. Her native language is Russian but she also speaks French, which meant she had an easier time than most with 1 Down yesterday since she knew Tutelle in French meant guardianship.

I've been doing NYT Sunday Crosswords, which I get on Saturday at "IHT", for a few years now. I've made quite a progress over the years, and now solve or nearly solve the puzzles in a day. It's quite a task for me, since I am not an American, I don't live in America and English is not my mother tongue, though I am married to an Englishman.

So I use Google without any guilt feeling, and all kinds of dictionaries — online ones or from my bookshelf, since most of American trivia, especially in sport or entertainment, is not known to me. But I've certainly learned quite a lot from doing XWords. Few months ago I came across Rex Parker's blog and via (itinerary word) his blog got to yours. So I can check the answers earlier.

Enjoyed this Sunday crossword, witty and clever. Missed only one main clue: STAGECOACHES, because I didn't know BASTE for WALLOP and couldn't think of DEBATE for CAMPAIGN FEATURE. DREIDEL is also new word for me. I'll look it up in the dictionary.

Thank you for your blog.

People outside the U.S. worry about American cultural hegemony. Local traditions sometimes have a hard time competing with American movies, video games, music, and novels. I grew up in a country that still limits the percentage of American content that can be aired on TV or radio.

Crosswords might seem snobbish to some, but they tend to represent America well as they get syndicated around the world. Sure there's the odd DATE MY MOM reference which amuses us all, but crossword don't play to the Date My Mom audience. There's a respect for knowledge, for precision, for creativity, and for intelligence that isn't shared with all other cultural exports. It's not a constructor's job to make sure the homeland looks good in the eyes of the world. It's just nice it works out that way when she or he creates a great puzzle.

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I don't usually blog about the Second Sunday Puzzles because my database isn't smart enough to handle non-standard crosswords but yesterday's Going Too Far by Eric Berlin is great fun. Check it out.

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Speaking of high-brow cultural ambassadors, Elvis Aron Presley entered the army at Memphis, Tennessee on March 24, 1958 and now exactly 50 years later that extraordinary event is immortalized in a Monday puzzle by David J. Kahn (answers.) This puzzle is remarkable for the amount of theme squares jammed into a Monday-level grid including this one that is even more themey than it first appears. I like that. It was also entertaining to learn a new fun fact about a former Secretary of State.

Update: The constructor of today's puzzle, the infamous Mr. Kahn, is speaking about crosswords Wednesday evening at the Mid-Manhattan library, 455 Fifth Ave. in NYC.