Pippa

As I mention in my notes at XWordInfo and Word Play, I came up with the seed answers to this one, while watching football, so it's fitting -- in a very stretched way -- that football would be at the forefront of many people's minds this week.  I hate that it's so difficult to enjoy the NFL today.  I used to live for football Sunday.  As a grad student, I would get all my work done by Saturday night, go to the neighborhood sports bar around noon Sunday, order some breakfast and a Bloody Mary, and overstimulate myself with seven NFL games at once.  After I had my first kid, literally the first thing I did when I got home from the hospital was call DIRECTV so that I could get NFL Sunday Ticket.  But now everything is different.  There's CTE; there's Kaepernick being blackballed; there's the fact that I'm a 40-year-old man whose emotional state is somewhat dependent on how a group of kids I don't know perform in a weekly game; and then there's the overriding feeling that the NFL cares nothing about its fans and is just trying to squeeze every last nickle out us (because that's what it's doing) -- TV blackouts, tax-payer-funded stadiums, PSLs, $100 parking, endless commercial breaks, pop-up ads on every highlight video, etc.  At some point, enough is enough.  My compromise this year is that I'm still following football, but I'm not paying for it in anyway (other than consuming the ads of its sponsors, which I can't avoid without tuning out completely).  It's a tenuous deal.

[A good article by Eric Reid (above left).]

Anyway... about my puzzle.  I think this one came out pretty well.  The long answers are nice, and there is not a lot of glue -- at least I don't think there is a lot glue.  I've found what constitutes crossword glue is very subjective.  There have been many times in which my puzzles have been dinged by the critics for containing too much glue, and then I read their examples and protest to myself, "That's not glue!"  In this puzzle, the only two answers I really don't like are RELO, which sounds very made-up-y to me, and ACERB, which is in the dictionary, but for which I can find no references "in the wild," save one:

[From Shakespeare's "Othello"]

I also don't love PIPPA, surprisingly.  I still think she is Crossworthy, but when I conceived of this puzzle years ago she was in the news big-time.  She had just been maid-of-honor in her sister's big wedding, and I figured she was going to hang around like a Kardashian for years to come.  Now it seems like she's hardly in the news -- the American news, at least -- at all.

This puzzle seems to be relatively well-received.  Jeff Chen at XWordInfo didn't love the layout because it necessitates a lot of three-letter words.  That's a critique, I suspect, is shared by less 1% of the solving population.  As a constructor I fret about the word statistics of a puzzle (word count, distribution, cheater squares, etc.), as I solver I never notice them or care -- maybe subconsciously I do, but I dunno.  By the way, I noticed that in my notes I wrote "conservation" instead of "conversation."  I did it at Word Play too -- nobody caught it apparently.

Rex Parker said it was "fun," which is almost the equivalent of a five-star review.  He complained about the clue for MOT, which at first I thought was petty, but now I actually mostly agree with.  One thing crossword constructors and editors should try to do is make the language in puzzles match the language outside of puzzles as closely as possible.  Rex is right when he says nobody ever uses the term MOT interchangeably with "Zinger."  To experienced solvers, this is something we've learned to gloss over, but to newbies, I suspect, it could be a potential turn-off.  With that said, only experienced solvers can handle a Friday puzzle, so in this case, it's a moot discussion.

Amy Reynaldo, over at Crossword Fiend, said she was tired -- not of my puzzle, just in general.  Fair enough.  I blog every once in a while for like 50 people.  Doing what she does must be like a part-time job.

Some bullet points.

• The clue for HOVERBOARDS is weird.  It makes it sound like people actually used hoverboards as transportation today, like they are recumbent bicycles or something.  In the clue I submitted, I referenced Back to the Future II, which I think is the only proper way to write a clue for it.  (Oh, apparently there are things called "hoverboards" that aren't really hoverboards.)
  
• I put TELEKINESIS into this puzzle after watching this.
  
• JOLLY RANCHER was the candy of my childhood, so I'm happy to be responsible for its puzzle debut.
  
• I'm particularly proud of my clues for COS, TRES, and APU.
  
• IN ANGER makes me think of this Oasis song.
  
• Run-DMC and ADIDAS in the same puzzle is a nice touch, if you were an MTV watcher in the '80s.

Until next time...

Crossworld Olio

The puzzle in today's NYT is mine.  It's fine.  I might or might not talk about it more than that.  I have a few other things I'd like to discuss, and my blogging time always goes by sooner than I think it will.

First, I wanted to follow up on my last post about my ambivalence toward constructor pay.  (In the comments section, Will Shortz actually chimes in with some thoughts, which was unexpected and kinda cool -- I appreciate he took the time to do that.)  I did submit a puzzle to the NYT after writing it.  My "constructor block" went away (kinda), and I got what I think is a decent idea, so I constructed it up and submitted it.  I'm reconciling the low pay (relative to what the puzzle brings in for the paper) by not buying a subscription to the online paper.  I still want to read it, so I'm just going to abuse the ten free articles they give you each month -- if you use Chrome and Internet Explorer and your tablet and your phone then that's forty free articles a month, which is more than enough for me.  Normal I wouldn't do that.  I very much believe in paying for the content I consume, if the provider is charging for it.  However, I make an exception when I feel I'm being taken advantage of in some way or things aren't totally "fair," in which case, I have no compunction about using a (legal or at least legalish) end-around the payment process, if one exists.*  So a "free" subscription to NYT seems more equitable to me.

Second, I wanted draw some attention to Evan Birnholz's ongoing critique (i.e., panning) of Timothy Parker's Universal crossword puzzle, published in the Philadelphia Inquirer and Boston Globe.  It's hilarious.  Although being that Evan apparently regularly solves the puzzle, I'm not sure who the joke is on.  If solvers complain about the quality of the NYT puzzle, they should take a look at Evan's Twitter feed.  (Although, being better than a daily puzzle from a guy so out of ideas that he literally plagiarized other crosswords is not exactly a high bar to clear.)

[You will have to find Evan on Twitter if you want to read the entire thread.  I couldn't figure out how to link to a tweet.]

My question: What exactly happened to Mr. Parker?  Am I remembering things incorrectly or were his puzzles once halfway decent?  I feel like his old USA Today puzzles, while always being a step below those of the NYT and the LAT, were at least palatable.  I actually cut my constructing teeth as a USA Today contributor.  The summer before I started grad school, back in the mid-twenty-aughts, I was living in the spare bedroom of my sister and brother in-law, and I didn't have much to do, so I would stay up until the wee hours of the morning constructing and listening to The O'Franken Factor on the now defunct Air America Radio.  It was $50 a pop at USA Today back then, and I probably sold them about 15 puzzles in the span of a few months.  Parker would get back to me about a submission within a day or two, and the answer was almost always "yes."  It was great.  Although, being that the answer for puzzles of similar quality at the NYT or the LAT was usually "no," perhaps I am in fact misremembering how good the USA Today puzzle was under Parker.

I went looking for some old USA Today newspapers with my puzzles in them -- I know I had some lying around at one point -- but I couldn't find any.  What I did find instead was a notebook full of "original versions."  (This must be very exciting for you, reader.  You get to see masterpieces in their rawest forms!  It's like when I went to Mozarthaus in Vienna, and they had a bunch of his compositions as he first wrote them with ink and parchment.)  Back in the day, I would frequently construct on graph paper because I didn't always have access to a computer at home, let alone crossword puzzle constructing software (hard to believe, today, and this wasn't that long ago).  Here are a few that I believe actually appeared in USA Today circa 2003.

[I used to number the margins to the right and below the grid in reverse order, so that I wouldn't screw up the symmetry -- pretty smart, huh?]

Pirate puns!  RATED ARRR!  BUCK AN EAR!  Actually, I had to revised this grid, because it contained BOOTY CALL, which was too racy (changed to BABY BOOTY).  I remember I sent this to Peter Gordon first, and in the submission, I explained what a booty call was.  He wrote back a polite "no thank you," but then at the end he wrote something like, "By the way, I know what a booty call is!"  In my defense, in the only picture I had ever seen of him, he was wearing a bow tie.  I thought he was some sort of fusty stuffed shirt who wouldn't know what a booty call is.  I guess I shouldn't stereotype.  Lesson learned: Don't ever wear a bow tie.

The long entries in this puzzle were given punny clues, so it was something like:
"Soldier Field team's lethargy?"
"Talismans belonging to actor Peter and family?"
"Spy work?"
Not too exciting.

This is my absolute favorite -- three coffee-related puns, all pretty weak (unlike how I prefer my coffee), with the revealer COFFEEHOUSE TALK.  Is that even a thing?  Coffeehousing is a thing in board games, in which you chatter idly to distract an opponent, but COFFEEHOUSE TALK?  I don't think that's an actual thing.  No matter.

Well, I'm out of time.  So I guess I'm not going to talk about my puzzle today.  That is, unless I have a chance to jump back on this afternoon.  Sometimes I have things to say after I read the reviews.

Until next time...

Oh, one last thing.  I'm on Twitter, and I currently have a pathetically small number of followers, because I almost never tweet, and I almost never tweet, because I have a pathetically small number of followers.  @DamonGulczynsk1 if you want to help me break the Catch-22.  I've decide to tweet about once a day, so even if I'm lame, I won't be clogging up your home page.

[Update: 10am Friday]
Okay a few last, last things.  I just wanted to give five quick thoughts on today's puzzle.

1. As if you need further proof that crossword puzzle solving is an extremely subjective endeavor, note that Rex Parker, and Jeff Chen and Amy Reynaldo basically say opposite things about my puzzle.  Rex thinks there is "nothing wrong" with it but that it was "flat."  Jeff says that it has "a ton of great fill," but too much "glue."  Amy calls it "zippy" (my favorite description), but doesn't like seeing ENOLA in a puzzle (fair enough, I will try to retire that one).  You can't win with everybody.  I've learned the only person I need to please when it comes to constructing is the man in the mirror... and Will Shortz.
   
2.  Speaking of pleasing myself -- ahem -- I love my clue for FRENEMY.  The first time I ever heard the term (from an episode of Sex and the City, I think), I immediately thought of Reggie and Archie.  They are the epitome of frenemies.
   
3. I've never heard of this Saul Bellow novel Herzog.  My HERZOG power rankings: Werner, Whitey, and there is no third place.
   
4. Sometimes I think I'm really smart, and then I read about people like John Von NEUMANN, and I think "well, I'm at least kinda smart."
   
5. My apologies for the AHAS/LEV/AVEO section of the puzzle.  I know it's awful, but I painted myself into a corner and needed to sacrifice a few squares to save the rest of the puzzle.  It happens. 

*Speaking of which, if anybody has the NFL Sunday Ticket package and wants to give me their online credentials, so that I can logon and watch from my device, by all means, hit me up.  I don't buy it anymore, for a variety of reasons, but I still get a pretty bad yen to watch the Seahawks every Sunday.