The JimH Crossword Blog

That's one small misquote for mankind

Of course we want to romanticize the past. I romanticize my own past all the time. In fact, if I believe myself, I used to be a heck of a guy. Neil Armstrong meant to say "one small step for a man" but it came out wrong. He botched his line. The man with the robotic self control who piloted the LEM to the lunar surface for the first time showed he was human after all. "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." He dropped the indefinite article and the result made no sense but I love that little goof. It's always the one part of the show you don't rehearse that gets you in the end.

I really like the theme of today's Monday, July 21 puzzle (answers) — women who for one reason or another are wearing enigmatic smiles. It's a theme that made me smile too.

"Barrio grocery" seems to refer to an east coast convenience store chain called BODEGA. [See comments for a correction.] I never did understand the appeal of FURBYs but yo-yos are still cool. Can someone explain to me why the music to God Save the Queen got repurposed as an American anthem? Anyway, fun Monday puzzle.

More on The XWord Info Freshness Factor™

Here are the answers to the questions I posed a few days ago regarding the freshest puzzles of the Will Shortz era as defined by my formula. There are only 12 crosswords with a FF rating over 90. Amazingly, four of them are by Frank Longo. Click the date links to see the puzzles and then click the "Freshness" link to see the analysis. Remember, words unique to that puzzle are shown in red.

The links in the table below reveal the full solutions but before you click them, try solving the Freshest puzzle in Across Lite. Warning: it's hard. Here's an incredibly unhelpful hint: it has 21 answer words not seen in any other puzzle. Yikes.

Saturday, December 15, 2001	96.4	Frank A. Longo
Friday, January 21, 2005	95.7	Frank Longo
Saturday, July 15, 2006	93.6	Patrick Berry
Saturday, December 22, 2007	93.4	Harvey Estes
Saturday, May 07, 2005	93.2	Patrick Berry
Friday, October 24, 1997	92.8	Frank Longo
Friday, January 04, 2008	92.1	Raymond C. Young
Saturday, January 20, 2007	91.6	Harvey Estes
Saturday, January 01, 2005	91.4	Raymond C. Young
Saturday, December 01, 2007	90.3	Robert H. Wolfe
Saturday, January 21, 2006	90.2	Brendan Emmett Quigley
Friday, August 22, 1997	90.1	Frank Longo

At this level, they're all Friday or Saturday puzzles and to score this high, several of the unique words are a little iffy but some of the crosswords here are very good. By the way, I want to thank Kenneth Berniker for the idea behind the FF. I don't think any other crossword database has anything similar.

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.

Swing alternative

I love this puzzle.

The last time we heard from Joe Krozel he deceived us all with his grid full of lies. He also confounded us in back on August 23, 2007 with a single list of clues not separated nicely into Across and Down. Neither the Across Lite version nor my database page do that one justice but the notepad explains the trick. Try the Across Lite without looking at the Notepad for the best experience. Mr. Krozel is clearly a constructor to watch.

Today’s Wednesday, July 16 puzzle (answers) has another unusual and, I have to say, pretty grid with it’s two-deep layer of white icing all around the outside. The eight double-stacked 15-letter answers that wrap up this puzzle present are all smooth and natural too.

The most unusual feature of the grid is the eight two-letter answers scattered symmetrically around the edges. Only one other puzzle in my database had answers that short — the famous Patrick Merrell mistake puzzle I’ve blogged about earlier. The theme of these shorties would be gettable since the puzzle itself is fairly straightforward but since it’s Wednesday, the included note makes it explicit. The ordering seems to be random but perhaps there’s a method to the distribution that escapes me. Any theories?

Speaking of explicit, “Delta of Venus” caught your eye, didn’t it? I’m a musician and it still took me a few moments to get the right sense for “swing alternative.” It’s BEBOP. For fun at your next party, ask the jazz musician looking cool in the corner to define bebop. Schubert’s ERL King is another nice musical clue. Even if you don’t think you like German Lieder, I bet you’ll find that one catchy.

Here’s your chance to prove you’re smarter than I am. I don’t get 3 Down. The clue is “purview of the I.C.C.” and the answer seems to be RRS. Does the International Chess Club deal with Railroads now? Go ahead. Make me feel dumb.

Things to look forward to:

• Ryan and Bryan are hosting Lollapuzzoola '08 on August 23 in The Big Apple. I'm on the wrong coast so I won't be there this year but Mike and Doug and Ellen and other crossword luminaries will gather for fun and frolic and presumably puzzles too. R&B have a terrific blog as well so check that out whether or not you lollapuzzool.
• Some puzzles are fresh as a daisy and some are, uh, not. I'm starting to incorporate the XWord Info Freshness Factor™ calculations into my stats site. The rarer the answer words the higher the score so lay off the OREOs if you want to lead the list. Which puzzles are the freshest? Who has constructed 4 of the freshest dozen? (Take a guess.) Stay tuned to this blog for news that's never stale.

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!

Medium bra size

Just yesterday I whined about about quip themes, and today’s Monday, July 14 puzzle (answers) is by Ed Early. No, it’s not a quip theme, it’s a getting mired in the muck theme, but still Mr. Early is the exception who proves the rule. (Grammatical aside: this odd expression uses the older definition of prove which meant “to test, or to establish by trial or experience.” Brits still call a test flight a proving flight.)

Mr. Early’s previous puzzle included a Chico Marx quote, and you know I’ll never complain about that. Before that was Oscar Wilde’s wise observation that “Work is the ruin of the drinking classes.” I particularly remember his December 28, 2006 puzzle with a quote by James Russell Lowell. Rather than link to the answers, try it yourself from the NYT web site. You need to be a Premium Subscriber to open that Across Lite file.

SWAMPSCOTT is a tranquil seaside community of 14,600 residents NE of Boston. I didn’t know that but it was easy enough to infer from the crosses. With C CUP appearing at 52 down, that is now the most popular bra size in NYT puzzles. The A CUP has more references but half of them are clued "We'll tak___o' kindness yet" quoting Rabbie Burns. Thaïs is an obscure 1894 opera by Jules Massenet but Tosca made the extra hint superfluous.

There was a tough letter for me where “diving seabird” crossed "coach Adolph in the Basketball Hall of Fame.” Mr. Rupp, known as The Man in the Brown Suit, coached the University of Kentucky from 1930 to 1972 winning 876 and losing 190 for a 82.2% winning percentage, the second highest all-time. I guess that makes him fair game for a Monday.

If you stopped and thought about Beethoven’s Ninth, the Ode to Joy parts you were probably humming in your head are mostly in a major key but since the symphony opens in D MINOR, that’s the answer.

Second Sunday: Puns and Anagrams

But first, some xwordinfo errata:

I received three emails in a row today with corrections for the xwordinfo database. Two came from shiftless joon who discovered a couple of missing late-week rebus puzzles. He found them the same way I usually do, by noticing odd answers in Quick Clues. The first is a Frances Hansen puzzle from Friday, December 8, 1995. The second is a Michael Shteyman construction from Saturday, September 16, 2006. If you're keeping score, there are now 169 rebus crosswords in the Shortz era. I'm no doubt still missing some.

A different kind of error has now made it a little bit easier for every other constructor to catch up to Manny Nosowsky's record. The March 9, 2000 puzzle had been erroneously attributed to Mr. Nosowsky but the real author is Myles Callum. The still-outrageous Nosowsky total now dips to 240. The big news here is that with this proper attribution, Mr. Callum now has a Thursday puzzle and joins the elite Hitting for the Cycle club.

Puns and Anagrams

I'm often asked about cryptic puzzles and today's Puns and Anagrams second puzzle is a good entry into this world. It's not as hard as a typical cryptic but it starts you in the right direction. I don't include these crosswords in my database but I thought I'd do an analysis of the upper-left corner to give newbies a head start on these wacky inventions. I put words to be re-sorted into an anagram inside [square brackets].

1 A: The [press at] meals. REPASTS
13 A: [Giant G, I] see. Replace "see" with "c" and then GIGANTIC is an anagram.
16 A: What drink does [Tina love]? OVALTINE
17 A: More brimming with [fuel] left and right. FULLER combines fuel, L, and R.
22 A: The Spanish is for some Ivy Leaguers. The is EL in Spanish, with IS makes ELIS.
25 A: "Ouch" preceder. RET + ouch makes the word retouch.

1 D: Brook in ['54? True!] 54 is LIV, plus TRUE gives RIVULET meaning brook.
2 D: With [it, "Eagle"] is a cry of the French Revolution. EGALITIE
3 D: Tires out everyone in postscript. ALL in PS gives PALLS.
4 D: Vigil's end is ANTE. Yes, ante means "before" in Latin but vigilante is a word.
5 D: Ado in Belfast, Ireland. STIR is in the words.
6 D: Material in some plating. TIN is inside plating.
7 D: In which writers see [sense]. Again replace "see" with "c" for SCENES.

Get the idea? Go tackle the rest on your own.

Parting Thoughts

Oh, my. There's going to be letters, isn't there.

As for me, I applaud both Mr. Ginsberg and Mr. Shortz for pushing the crossword humor envelope.

Jokes are little Darwinian memes. They compete amongst themselves to reproduce through retelling, they evolve, and when everyone has finally heard them, they show up as gags, er I mean as quips, in crossword puzzles. That's always been my problem with quip themes. If they're funny, they're already common currency. The Matt Ginsberg example in today's Sunday, July 13 puzzle (answers) distinguishes itself by being of questionable taste so that's a big plus. Not just for me, and I have the server logs to prove it. My most popular blog post of all time is What's your Offensiveness Index?

Who originated this joke? I remember it as a common email signature tag back in the 1990s but I had no luck tracking down the creator. Feel free to claim it's you. As far as I can tell, nobody can dispute you. Anyway, tell me what you think, both about quip puzzles in general and also ones that make you scream in terror or at least groan.

This is Mr. Ginsberg's fifth puzzle, all in 2008. I still remember his "1/64 of a checkerboard, maybe: Abbr." clue in January. There are some fine clues today too. "Take heat from" is UNARM. "Veiled comment" is, of course, I DO. I didn't know the word SPLIFF but I'll be sure to use it now. DEMESNE is the "Lord's land" or the area around an estate. Hale-BOPP is the one comet nearly everyone has seen. Charles Dickens is a favorite of word lovers like me and his shortest novel is HARD TIMES. Even if you've never read any Dickens, you're familiar with some of his opening passages. Hard Times begins with these wonderful paragraphs chock full of sage advice for crossword solvers:

“NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!”

THOMAS GRADGRIND, sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir — peremptorily Thomas — Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic. You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind — no, sir!

Update: Some readers have inferred that I thought Mr. Ginsberg was taking credit for the quip himself. Not at all. Constructors quote famous gags all the time and the presumption is always that it's a third-party quote.

I've also been asked in email if I would have loved the crossword if I hadn't already known the gag. The answer is yes but to be clear, I loved it anyway. It's a solid and entertaining puzzle. I'm sure it's more fun for people who haven't heard the joke.

Finally, PhillySolver (who else?) dug up some biographical info on our constructor. It was written a year ago, before Dr. Ginsberg's first NYT publication. It's an interesting read.