The JimH Crossword Blog

Walkin' After Midnight

The Thursday, July 31 puzzle by Allan E. Parish (answers) starts out heavenly, gradually comes down to earth, and then descends into the fiery depths of hell. My pop culture ignorance meant I had more trouble with this than a typical Thursday but I liked the stratified theme.

AMAHL and the Night Visitors is the only opera many people have seen. In fact, it may be the most watched opera in American history although it's rarely performed live. NBC commissioned Gian Carlo Menotti to write it for television. It premiered in 1951 and was a Christmastime TV special in one form or another for decades.

I didn't know MUFTI meant civvies. It's a name for a Muslim legal advisor who would have to be a civil official. "Lingerie drawer items" weren't actually items of lingerie but rather SACHETS to make the rest of the dainty items smell pretty. The "footnote word" is IDEM which means "the same as previously mentioned." It's similar to ibid. or ibidem which means "in the same book, chapter or page." Given a choice of SEDANs, pick the Infiniti Q45 over the Ford Mercury Grand Marquis.

There is a trio of impressive women in this puzzle. Patsy CLINE had a huge impact in not just country but popular music in general before her death at age 30 in a plane crash. Hilary Hahn is one of the most successful solo violinists in the world right now at the tender age of 29. And Elizabeth Cady STANTON organized the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls in 1848 when she was only 33. It's hard to believe that in America women have only had the right to vote since 1920.

Tomorrow I turn the keys over to new guest blogger John Ludwig. He's a former software company Vice President I reported to while working on something called Windows 95. I had no idea we had a shared passion for crosswords until he became one of the earliest commenters on this blog. He's now a partner in a successful Venture Capital firm meaning he'll personally give you piles of money if you have a good enough idea.

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Garson Hampfield, Crossword Inker

Whatever you think you know about the box team that puts together the crossword puzzles that you take for granted every day, you must watch this video. You'll learn something of the history, the craft, or rather the crucial art of boxing. DO NOT leave this page until you have watched this video:

If you prefer, this link has a higher resolution version of this amazing video. If your name is Michael A. Charles and you created this animation, please drop me a line. We need to chat.

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.

Mediocre Trotsky of Russia?

Allow me to introduce myself: My name is Danny Glasser and Jim has asked me to guest blog about today's Tuesday puzzle (answers) by David Kwong and Emily Halpern. I'm not sure why, as whenever Jim and I engage in a Peer-to-Peer Voice Chat Over Ambient Air Network — what in pre-Interweb days was called a "conversation" — about the daily NY Times puzzle, I express my disdain for this style of puzzle. Furthermore, my active days as a NY Times puzzle-solver are in the distant past, dating roughly from 1978 through 1984. But those are both stories for another day.

I did indeed finish this puzzle and was able to complete all but one letter in one go. For a solver of my modest abilities, this is quite good, even for a Tuesday. I suspect that I was able to do this because I was tired; generally instinct triumphs over deep thought at this sort of puzzle solving. Case in point: When I read 66 Down, "Arthur of Maude", I thought of the character of her neighbor, played by Conrad Bain, and wondered how he could fit into three letters. Of course the correct answer is far more straightforward: The actress who played the title role is BEA Arthur. While we're on the subject of Bea Arthur, I note that she was mentioned in the NY Times last week in Estelle Getty's obituary: "In The Golden Girls, Sophia [Getty's character] was the mother of Dorothy Zbornak, played by Bea Arthur who, in real life, was older than Ms. Getty." I also feel compelled to put in a plug for her brief but stunning cameo as Larry David's mother on Curb Your Enthusiasm.

64 Down has to be my least favorite clue in the entire puzzle. "Trotsky of Russia?" Of Russia?! Is that all you can say about one of the most influential and controversial political operatives of the 20th Century? I think he deserves at least "Lenin ally" or "Bolshevik leader" in the clue; being mortally wounded by having an axe buried in your head should merit some measure of posthumous respect. Or you could go in a completely different direction for this clue and use "Retro singer Redbone."

I am trying to imagine the celebrity poker game that the answers to this puzzle conjures. Of course Arthur is holding court, telling incredibly filthy jokes and goading Trotsky about what a putz he was for letting Stalin take charge. For his part, Trotsky and ITALO Calvino (70 Across) are trading shots of vodka and grappa and commiserating about how "true Communism" went awry when the wrong people took charge. GREG Kinnear (3 Down) tries to keep up on both fronts but is hopelessly outmatched. LEEZA Gibbons (21 Across) flirts with Kinnear but keeps getting interrupted by Arthur's zingers and Trotsky's advances. ARLO Guthrie (63 Down) tells IONE Skye (7 Down) about all the crazy stuff he and her dad did before she was born; none of it is true, and she knows it. Who walks off with the big pot at the end? "Barbie's beau" KEN Carson (69 Across) -- What? You didn't know he has a last name? -- courtesy of the perfect poker face. And he takes Leeza Gibbons home, but sadly nothing happens due to their mutual lack of genitalia.

You may still be wondering how I could complete all but one letter of a puzzle. Well, I didn't know the answers to two intersecting clues: 37 Across and 31 Down. I had S-K-E-_-N and R-_-A_T_A. There aren't many options for this box, and I guessed the correct answer on the first try, but it was the one letter where the guess was based completely on linguistic probability and not at all on the meanings of the words.

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.

Going Every Which Way

Greetings, Gentle Reader. I mean, S'UP DOG?

Here's the best part of this puzzle. Next time I lose my glasses, I can refer to 137 Across which tells me exactly where to find them. What a useful crossword!

When you bring together two A-List constructors like Mike Nothnagel and David Quarfoot for a Sunday puzzle, you expect something special is going to happen. Sure enough. The July 27 puzzle Going Every Which Way (answers) is a doozy. I found it considerably trickier than a typical Sunday but eventually possible and very satisfying. It introduces 28 new answer words to my database!

This is their third collaboration. You can see the set in miniature here. I don't want to say too much about today's gimmick because if you came here looking for help I want to encourage you to go back and try again on your own. I'll tell you what. I'll give you a few pointers and then you keep plugging away. If you really get stuck, the answers link above reveals all. As usual on Sundays, the title contains a key clue. (How often do you forget to check that before getting most of the way through a NYT Large?)

Some of my problems came because I wasn't paying close attention. In Wagner, Tristan loved Isolde but depending on your source sometimes it's sometimes Tristram and, as in today's puzzle, ISEULT. Bug is a not a verb but a noun, a VW BEETLE.

The Orcmeister's full name is John Ronald REUEL Tolkien. Who knew? The Unesco World Heritage Site in Jordan is PETRA. The choice word isn't ELSE but rather EENY.

My favorite clue is "result of pulling the plug." It's a great definition for EDDY. Does it really spin the other way if you pull that plug from the southern hemisphere? Why, yes it does.

I've been intrigued with the collection of answers which only appear in a single puzzle. Many of these unique words are wacky theme entries but some of them are surprising. I've added two new pages to my stats site: Random Unique Words picks 30 from a hat and shows their definitions. For a look at all the ones that have cropped up in the past month, there is another page called Recent Unique Words.

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.

Matt Ginsberg, crossword constructor

Matt Ginsberg is an interesting guy. His Thursday, July 24 puzzle (answers) only gets the job half done leaving us the task of doubling up to make the clues work. It's a clever theme. Skip the next paragraph if you hate math, but be sure to read on after that.

The EULER formula is e^{i x} = cos x + i sin x. If x is given the value π and you remember to do the trig in radians you get the elegant identity e^{π i}  + 1 = 0. That one compact equation combines five of the most important numbers in math: e, π, i, 0, and 1, the fundamental operations addition, multiplication and exponentiation, the equality relation, and nothing else. It's a beautiful equation.

It's also the only clue I'm going to talk about so I can devote the rest of this post to an interview. Mr. Ginsberg and I started corresponding after I blogged about his previous puzzle and linked to this year-old bio. For background, you should know he's a well-known figure in the world of Artificial Intelligence.

JH: Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed.

MG: Sure, I'm happy to talk. The RG article got my background pretty well; one thing that they left out is that after my British fiancée dumped me, I needed something to do in the evenings instead of sitting around being miserable. Not only did I write a play, but I also built a stunt plane that I still own and fly around in. It's a real plane, cruising at 165 MPH. I also have very odd (but very deeply held) religious views.

JH: How did you get into constructing?

MG: In 1976. I wrote a program to fill crossword frames (the first one, I think). I revisited the problem from a technical perspective in 1990, writing an article about it that was accepted to the American Association of Artificial Intelligence's annual conference. Then I put it aside until 2006, when my company hired an idiot as president (I'm the CEO). The guy was everything an executive shouldn't be. We fired him around 11/06 but I was such a wreck from the whole process that I took a month off. Two weeks into that month, I got bored and figured I'd try construction. This was partly because a friend of mine named Pete Muller had been doing some and was having reasonable success with it.

JH: Are there particular puzzles or even clues that you're especially proud of?

MG: The puzzle I'm most proud of is called Takeaway Meal. It will come out as a second Sunday puzzle in the Times reasonably soon, I think. The puzzle I'm second most proud of is When in Rome ... It's unpublished because no one else likes it, though!

One of my favorite clues is [Fabled slacker] for HARE. Also [Unstated? (Abbr.)] for TERR. I like cluing, although I don't know if how I do it is legit. I use my clue database tool to get ideas, and then go from there to generate the best clue I can. But a reasonable fraction of my clues turn out to be similar to others that have been used before as a result. Unfortunately, when I do it the other way around (generate the clue, then check the database), they don't come out any fresher. I do work hard to try to make sure that very few of my clues are actual repeats.

JH: Will computers ever be able to construct puzzles as well as humans can?

MG: Computers will eventually be as good as we are at any given task. But it will be a while on crossword puzzles because so much world knowledge is needed -- especially on the construction side. (I'm a hopeless solver, by the way. Wednesdays are my limit.)

JH: How does the grid construction process work for you?

MG: I generally get a theme first. It's usually some sort of weird "idea"; it's very rare that I do puns because I'm no good at thinking them up. I've done a few quip puzzles, generally quips that I find amusing and the puzzle with very low word count. The theme idea pretty much just pops into my head somehow; I don't know how. Probably it is triggered by something I hear during the course of the day. Not an interesting phrase, usually, just an idea I can twist around.

Then I generate a long list of potential theme answers and use CCW to fill a frame. I don't think I'm terribly good at making the frames themselves although I'm getting better. My A.I. comes into it because the search that CCW is doing to fill the frames is a problem that I'm familiar with technically — I know what to do when CCW gets stuck, and can generally do a good job of filling a frame with a lot of theme content. I use a word list that I generated myself; about 3M entries statistically ranked by a wide range of properties (# of Google hits, previous uses, scrabble score, etc, etc).

I did rudely ask about his self-described "odd" religious views and he pointed me to this 62-page document. You might have heard the notion that mathematics is God. Mr. Ginsberg seems to go beyond that and hold that God is, in a very deep sense, Mathematics. Perhaps the Euler Identity can help provide the QED.

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.

An N-igmatic puzzle

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.