Today's Tuesday, July 22 crossword (answers) is the fifth this year for Lynn Lempel. (Did you know xwordinfo has one-page thumbnail views for each constructor? Here's Ms. Lempel's ouevre in a nutshell.)
Somehow in all that activity she ended up with a batch of superflous Ns. She used them all today to good effect N-serting them into common phrases to create wacky answers. DIADEM was my crowning achievement as a solver — an odd word for a Tuesday but gettable from the crosses. Were western pioneers really SCALPED? Apparently so, but it's an icky clue.
Does moonshine production need YEAST? I'm not an expert but I would have imagined that particular beverage was distilled, not fermented. Live and learn.
That's THEDA Bara in the image. She was the original vamp, short for vampire at the time. In the silent era, she was one of America's biggest film stars but she's little seen today. A 1937 fire at Fox's nitrate film storage vaults in New Jersey destroyed forever 37 of the 40 films she made.
If you're intrigued by the Wordplay movie but happen to live on the Left Coast as I do, you can experience a miniature version of the big event in Alameda, California on Sept. 13. Here are the details for The Bay Area Crossword Tournament. If you've never been to a crossword competition, it's more fun than you might guess. Just hanging out with other people who love puzzles is a treat. Check it out.
Finally, I asked a few days back what portion of all the answer words in my database have appeared only once. It turns out it's just over half. I added yet another new page to my stats site. Unique answer words shows a different random selection of one-timers each time. It's interesting and sometimes surprising.