Understandably, puzzles and puzzle blogs might not be first and foremost on people’s minds right now, but it’s all I really have to offer at the moment—and most other moments…
Three puzzles to discuss this month.
The first is by MOI. It dropped this evening in the NYT online edition and puzzle app. Looking back on it, I notice it has a Francophile feel to it with MOI joining long entries QUEBECOIS and JE NE SAIS QUOI. That was unintentional, although it is true that my wife loves French, can speak it quasi-fluently, and has both our kids taking online French classes, which they mostly willingly endure. I'm not a huge Francophile myself (although I thought the NYT Sunday puzzle this week was kinda fun). But I did take French in college, and I took a seminar class on the history of French-Canadian nationalism. I mean, I was required to take them, but still.
To graduate with a math degree, I had to take two years of French, German, or Russian, and I picked the former, because the teacher was young(ish) and attractive. What? It was just as good a reason as any other. I never really learned to converse en français, but I could conjugate the shit out of some French verbs back in the day. I also had a computer science teacher who was French, and I loved the way he said C++: cee ploose ploose.
I took the French-Canadian nationalism class my final quarter as an undergrad because I needed to take one more seminar course to graduate with honors, and it was literally (and I mean that literally) the only one on offer. It was dreadfully boring -- no shade to the QUEBECOIS, I'm just not really a cultural studies guy. I remember once I had to give a presentation on a group of people called the Rouges, but I read it wrong and wrote the Rogues in all my notes. So, for the first five minutes of my talk, I kept calling them the wrong name, until finally the teacher corrected me. I was wondering why the other students were looking at me funny -- legit embarrassing.
Anyway... this was my last themeless in the NYT pipeline, so it will almost surely be my last NYT themeless published for a while. (I still have a couple of themed puzzles waiting in the wings.) Partly this is by choice; partly it is not. What happened is, in the mid-2010s I went themeless crazy, spending the vast majority of my free time constructing themeless crosswords. It was fruitful -- I got a bunch of puzzles published -- but I also burnt myself out. So, I took an extended break, but then when I was ready to come back, the bar had been raised, and it wasn't as easy to get themeless puzzles accepted as it was before (and it was very hard before!). The rejections have been piling up a bit, and once the rejections start piling up, it's hard to stay motivated. As it is, I get apprehensive every time I check my email, wondering if there is going to be a rejection notice in there. It really makes me question why I put myself through this. Yeah, it's nice when I do get a puzzle published, but is it worth a regular reminder that I'm not good enough?
Also, I've been spending a lot of time doing other things. One of these actually has to do with crossword rejections. I've saved almost every puzzle I've submitted to the NYT since my first submission about two decades ago. I didn't really mean to do this, I just never deleted them. But I'm glad I did because I've been putting them together in a book, which I plan to self-publish by the end of 2022: Will Must Send Regrets: 101 Rejected Crosswords, Constructor Commentary, and Pointless Anecdotes. Don't worry, I 'll keep everybody posted when it comes out. You'll have a chance to buy a copy.
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Next puzzle: this Sunday crossword by Stephen McCarthy. It's a Schrödinger puzzle, in which the central entry can either be STAR TREK or STAR WARS, depending on how you filled in the crosses. I'm a huge fan of the Schrödinger genre, so I very much enjoyed this puzzle and thought it was excellent work by Stephen.
But that's not why I bring it up now. I bring it up now because a friend of mine who isn't really in the crossword scene (I don't even know if she does crosswords), emailed me a tweet she saw about it. In said tweet, the tweeter talks about what a cool puzzle it is, and all the commenters basically say the same thing -- how creative it is, how exciting it was when they figured out the trick, whether they're STAR TREK or STAR WARS people, etc., etc. And it was a nice reminder about how vast the NYT solvership is, and how differently different types of people experience the puzzle, especially the Sunday puzzle, which is the only one some folks do.
I mean, as I said above, I very much liked the puzzle, but I wasn't at all awed by it because Schrödingers are kinda old hat to me by now. I can name most the puzzles on this list from memory. I even constructed one of them, and I made another earlier one, which isn't on the list, but should be.* But I'm probably among, like, the top 2% of solvers when it comes to crossword obsessiveness, and since you're reading this, you probably are too. What about the other 98%? Most of them probably don't even know what a Schrödinger is, let alone remember specific past examples. Maybe the CLINTON/BOB DOLE puzzle is reasonably well-know (it was in Word Play, after all), but I'm not even sure about that. I have an acquaintance who does the NYT crossword semi-regularly, so I once brought up that puzzle, and not only had she never heard of it, she thought it was weird that I knew about a crossword from 25 years ago. She does the puzzle in bed with her husband, and their attitude is We're just happy when we have enough time and brainpower at the end of the day to finish one.
Anyway, I don't really know where I'm going with all this. I guess I'm just wondering if there's some sort of "silent majority" of solvers who experience the NYT puzzle very differently than the types of people who write and comment in the crossword blogosphere. Or do the hardcore crossword fans decently reflect the general solving population? I don't know.
*I also had a quasi-Schrödinger run at ACPT 2018. Just don't ask how it went over with most competitors.
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The last puzzle to discuss is a meta contest from Fireball Crosswords. I typically shy away from metas, not because I don't like them, but because I specifically really like them. I get totally engrossed by metas once I commit myself to trying to solve one. It is all I want to think about, making it difficult to do other things, like work or sleep or pay attention to my family. I become prepossessed trying to figure it out, and I feel like a failure -- not just as a puzzle solver, but as a human being -- if I have to give up. Usually, I'm prudent enough to avoid this situation and not get involved in the first place (I could figure it -- I reassure myself -- if I tried, but I'm not going to try), but every so often I'll feel particularly sadistic and give a meta a whirl.
So it went with Peter Gordon's "Down Periscope!" puzzle. I completed the grid easily enough, and then set out looking for the meta answer. If you ever need an example that the human brain will create patterns from noise, this puzzle is for you. Because of the title, I started off looking for answers that somehow protrude upward or downward like a periscope. I noticed OONA embedded in AS SOON AS, and thought, this means something since AS SOON AS crosses OONA OUT OF ORDER. Noticing AGE protruding upward at 8-Down and intersecting AT AN ADVANCED AGE, only confirmed that I was on the right track.
Then my train of thought really went off the rails. I noticed that if you cut the AGE out of CARTHAGE, you had CART and then pivoting at the H, you had HORSE: PUT THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE! That's gotta be it! I then spent way too long trying to justify this as the answer. But I just couldn't figure out exactly how it ties together with the other theme answers (because it doesn't).
Thankfully, I had to take my kids somewhere, which helped break the put-the-cart-before-the-horse spell, and when I came back to the puzzle later, I decided to try to clear my mind and start from a clean slate. Almost immediately, I noticed the real theme -- three four word phrases, in which each word of a phrase begins with the same letter -- and started looking for other similar phrases within the grid. Picking out the S-words as a likely candidate, I put them all into one big google search, which led me to the answer -- SIGHTED SUB, SANK SAME -- a phrase I had never heard before, but which was surely correct given the title. I then made a mental note to submit my answer and possibly win some Fireball swag, but I forgot, which is fine. Not feeling like a metapuzzle patzer is its own reward.
- ORCA WHALE appeared in a puzzle a few weeks ago and both Amy Reynaldo and Rex Parker objected to it as a legitimate phrase, saying it's ORCA or KILLER WHALE, but not ORCA WHALE. Well, I've heard it called ORCA WHALE, and you can easily find that phrase in legitimate "real world" sources online. (In the comments of Amy's blog, I give links to two newspaper headlines using it that way.) Google, people! If you want to say something doesn't sound right to you, then that's fine; if you want to say something isn't right in general, you should at least do the minimum amount of research to back up your assertion. No disrespect, just a puzzle pet peeve of mine.
- This Kameron Austin Collins puzzle is excellent -- a beautiful open center, filled with a bunch of interesting entries. Kameron might be the best themeless constructor going right now.
- Although, he gets some stiff competition from Aimee Lucido, whose recent Friday I thought was excellent. Aimee also constructs great themed puzzles, which really makes her stand out as a top constructor.
- It was 2/22/22 this week, on TUESday, no less, and we saw a couple publishers take advantage of this wordplay syzygy. The NYT put out the rare Tuesday rebus puzzle (by Jacob McDermott), which I thought was pretty good (great gag; fill was quite rough, though).
- However, I thought the more impressive construction was USA Today’s puzzle (by Erik Agard) with the huge 2 grid. You’d think with a layout like that there would be a lot of compromises, and there are a few, but just that—a few. And most the longs are solid, and the grid art is spot on -- that's a 2 alright! I hear solvers complain sometimes about “stunt puzzles,” but I usually think they’re cool. I wouldn’t mind seeing them pop up in Crossworld more frequently.
Until next time...
Update: Reading some comments online, I see that PILAU tripped up a few solvers, since PILAF is probably the more common rice dish to American solvers. Well, we were visiting my in-laws this week, and before our return flight this afternoon, what does my mother-in-law make me for lunch? You guessed it: PILAU! She threw in some crosswordy RAITA, to boot.
