LAT Puzzle

I haven't been doing much at all with crossword puzzles the past few months. I dropped my book right before the New Year, and then I participated (virtually) in a Boswords event, and then I helped officiate at ACPT, and then I got a little burnt out, I guess. I've been solving regularly because crosswords are a crucial component of my daily word game habit (along with Wordle, Spelling Bee, and Anigrams*), but I haven't been constructing or submitting much at all. I haven't had any good ideas randomly pop into my head, and I haven't had the desire to brainstorm. I've temporarily lost my vim. It happens. But don't worry, I'll be back soon enough, piling up the rejections, and Shortz willing, the occasional acceptance.

*I'm stuck on today's GOAT word. The letters are ACDEIILNT, and I thought I had it with INCIDENTAL and then INDELICATE only to realize those are both too long.

I also haven't been reading the crossword blogs much at all. But I sought out Crossword Fiend today because I constructed the LAT puzzle, and I wanted to see what they say about it. I should have skipped it, as the review is short and negative. Actually, I don't really mind. I'd rather somebody say good things about my puzzle than bad things, of course, but not everybody is going to like every puzzle, and it's okay to be critical about somebody's public work when you think it's warranted. It comes with the territory, and it's not necessarily a bad thing to be on the receiving end of it. As Aristotle maybe once said: "There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing."

Plus, I'm my own harshest critic -- everybody says that but I have the documentation to back it up (see link to book above) -- and although I like my puzzle better than the reviewer (Stella Zawistowski) I agree with some of her critique. YARE, for example, was not in the grid I originally submitted. That corner looked like this:

But Patti Varol, the LAT editor, suggested it be changed to the published version because she doesn't love the neological variant WOAH. Who am I to disagree?

Also, it should be said, some people enjoyed the puzzle. A lot of commenters on the LA Times Crossword Corner said favorable things about it and thanked me for it (to which I say, You're Welcome -- actually, I am getting pretty buff these days; I mean, not Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson buff, but, like, non-celebrity middle-age dad buff). I also got a kick out of the picture of me accompanying the write-up. It's my LinkedIn head shot, and I don't love it, because it's from that in-between stage where I was clearly balding but hadn't yet started shaving my head, but still it's fun.

Alright that's all for now. Until next time... 

 

A-C-P-T Twenty Twenty Three

The whirlwind weekend that is ACPT has come and gone once again. It was a blast as always. For the second year in a row, I worked behind the scenes on the Tech Team scanning puzzles. It's a good way for me to experience the tournament. I like competitive solving, but I don't like like it,* and I very much enjoy the perks of being an official. This year we got Sunday breakfast in the concierge lounge on the 16th floor, with a view of the majestic New York City skyline and the slightly less majestic WWE corporate headquarters.

Of course, we do a lot of work to earn these perks. Distributing, collecting, marking, scanning, and sorting nearly 5,500 puzzle in almost real-time is no easy feat. It makes me wonder if someday this tournament will be totally paperless. I don't think it will ever be totally virtual -- people like gathering (that's kinda the whole point) and solving by writing (as opposed to typing) -- but it could still plausibly go paperless.  Like, everybody could solve in the ballroom together with a stylus on a tablet, and then everything could be scored and uploaded to the web instantaneously. The need for human judges would then be almost completely obviated. Man, I hope that doesn't happen in my lifetime. It's a scary thought. Some people fear ChatGPT; I fear ChatACPT. Don't make me pay for my room and board!

*To give you some idea of my solving ability, I can tell you that I finished the final puzzle (using C-Division clues) after the C-Division winner but before the C-Division runner-up. Second place -- not bad! Now, it was pointed out to me that the people solving on the big board had to do so with several hundred people watching them. But I responded that I perform better under pressure, so had I actually been a C finalist, I probably would have won. It's absolutely untrue, but it's a decent retort, nevertheless.

The work of being a scanner can get monotonous at times, but just when you feel yourself starting to space out, something crops up to command your attention. One of those things this year was the same thing, with the same competitor, that caused the B-Finals debacle back in 2019. Said competitor writes in nice, thick black ink, which is great, until he makes a mistake and has to write over it. When he does that, it causes our scanners to think it's a black square, which inflates the number of words it thinks is in the puzzle, which gives him more points than he should have (each correct word is worth 10 points). It's very annoying.

Now, one's first impulse might be to say, "Stop solving with thick black pen, jerk!" But really the software should be able to handle this. It should be able to recognize that something is amiss with the word count and alert us so that we know to make a manual adjustment. Plus, the solver is not a jerk at all. He's actually quite nice and very scrupulous and self-reports whenever this happens. Dude just wants to solve in pen -- it's not an unreasonable ask. And we got everything resolved before final scores were posted, so it was no big deal. I'll definitely be on the lookout for his puzzles next year.

The best part about being an official -- the best part about attending ACPT in any capacity, really -- is meeting and getting to know a bunch of cool people. This year, I spent a lot of time talking with fellow Tech Teamer Shehroze Aamer. He's a really nice, super interesting guy, so it was a pleasure swapping stories with him. The thing is, there are so many brilliant, amazing people at this tourney that it can be kinda surreal at times. Sometimes it feels like I'm watching it as an outsider, like I'm not actually a part of it. It's not imposter syndrome. I don't feel like a phony. It's more like I feel that somehow I'm not actually there. Every now and then, I have to tell myself, You're a part of this too! Seriously, you are! Maybe that sounds kinda hokey or humblebraggy, but it's truthful.

The other thing about there being so many cool people there is that it can induce some serious FOMO, as there's no way you can meet and talk to everybody. On Friday night, for example, I was super tired, walking back to my room after a beer in the bar, and I saw two people talking, both of whom I would have loved to have met. But I was exhausted and felt kinda weird about interrupting them, so I just skipped it. Then I couldn't even sleep (it's the same story every Friday at ACPT), so I just lied in bed, regretting my decision to even come up to my room in the first place. Oh well... next year.

I did get to meet a few new people I admire this year, such as assistant LAT crossword editor Katie Hale and final-puzzle constructor Kameron Austin Collins. Katie I actually got to talk to a bit because she was also an official, which was neat, but Kameron I only met briefly. However, we did get our picture taken together a couple times by the tournament photographer, one with Wyna Liu, another constructor I really like, and I'm hoping those pics get published to the ACPT website at some point. I wanted to get one with my phone, but I was late on the draw, and Kameron got pulled away before I could do so.

In general, I gotta start taking more pictures. I don't like taking them, but I really like looking at them later, and it's tough to look at them later if you don't take them in the first place. I mean, I've traveled to and from the tournament with the same DC/VA crew four times (shout out to Brian, Mike, and Dan), and I realized I don't even have a picture of the four of us together. Oh well... next year.

I did take a few good pics, though (or rather I asked other people to take them, so that I could be in them). I'll post them below* and call it an entry.

*I think that's okay. I'm never totally sure what the etiquette is of posting pictures of people on-line. But I think when they were taken at a public event like this, it's fine. On the very off-chance somebody in one of them sees this post and wants me to take it down, I will -- the picture, that is, not the entire post.

[Me.]

[Me and Tracy Bennett. My Wordle thread freaked out when I texted them this pic and told them she was the Wordle editor.]

 

[Me an Sam Ezersky. If you can get pics with the Worlde and the Spelling Bee editors, you gotta do it.]

 

[Me, Will Shortz, and Shehroze Aamer.]

Oh, by the way, Dan Feyer won the tournament (his 8th championship) in dramatic fashion, edging Paolo Pasco, only because Paolo paused for a few seconds to think about whether his final entry should be SIP or NIP (it was NIP, which he registered just a touch too late).* I was sitting very close to the front of the room, which sounds good, but I actually had a bad angle and couldn't really see Paolo or his board, so I didn't realize how close it was until the audience gasped. Tyler Hinman came in third, finishing well after the other two. Guy's one of the greatest solvers ever, but it wasn't his puzzle, wasn't his day. Oh well... next year.

And that was ACPT 2023.

*I was reminded that this isn't actually what happened. He paused for a moment to decide between MADRE and PADRE. (It was the former.) Earlier in his solve, he wrote "N/S" in a square that could have started NIP or SIP, and then came back to it later and immediately filled it in correctly. The puzzle commentators mentioned this, and apparently it caused me to misremember things.     

Meta Me

My first ever published meta crossword ran this week as a Fireball contest puzzle. I think it went well. The puzzle was, I suspect (and I heard from a few solvers), on the easier side for a Fireball meta, but that's okay. Not every puzzle should to be geared toward the stud solvers -- it's good to mix it up a bit.

I originally made this puzzle as a 15 x 16 non-meta with the revealer MEET CUTE in the center of the grid, and both costars were clued as costars, but the fill was pretty rough and the CUTE wasn't spelled out in order. I knew I needed a bigger grid, and after playing with some options I settled on 17 x 17 with the revealer moved to the title. But then I kinda randomly noticed that at least one costar from each pair has a name that is also a non-proper English word.* So, I decided to make the meta puzzle that I made.

*PULLMAN and BULLOCK are the only pair in which both names have this property.  

I actually made the entire puzzle before I pitched the idea to Peter at Fireball. I usually do that because I have a (completely irrational) fear that after pitching an idea and getting the green-light, I won't be able to make the actual puzzle for some reason. So, usually I have at least the grid done before I submit a proposal. It takes a little more time, but it's peace of mind. And it's fun to construct! That's why I do it. It's certainly not for the money. (Although, don't get me wrong, getting the occasional three-digit check in the mail is a very nice perk.)

I'm glad to see the reviewer of my puzzle at Crossword Fiend (Conrad) used the center line MOVIE GENRE TROPE as part of his solve. This was a late addition to the grid after GENRE came up naturally as a potential central entry. I figured some solvers would miss it, which is fine (you don't really need it), but I thought it was a good touch, so I glad it see it help at least one person.

Okay, that's all I have to say about this puzzle.

Until next time...

A Remembrance of Puzzles Past

I got a kick out of seeing today's NYT puzzle by Chase Dittrich. I got a kick out of it because it reminded me of a puzzle of mine that ran in the NYT many years ago, and I'm very vain, and I like being reminded of my old puzzles. (I mean, duh, I wrote an entire book on the subject.)

The conceit in both puzzles is that you can remove a letter from an entry and still have the clue make sense. For example, in Chase's puzzle, one of the clues is "Alternative to 2% … with or without the shaded letter", and the answer is GOAT MILK. The G-square is the one that's shaded, implying the other acceptable answer OAT MILK. In my puzzle, one of the clues is "Serious", and the answer is SOMBER. The M-square is circled in the gird, implying the other acceptable answer SOBER.

Both puzzles are good, but in my not-at-all-humble opinion, mine is better. For one thing, the theme trick works on both the across and down clues in my puzzle. (The entry that intersects SOMBER at the M in my grid is MIKE, and the clue is "One of a candy box duo". Are Mike & Ike still popular? I loved them as a kid and feel like I haven't seen them in years.) For another thing, the circled letters spell out the word EMPTY, so my puzzle has a meta element to it. And, perhaps most importantly, the clues for all my theme entries work naturally with and without the circled letters. In Chase's puzzle some of them feel very forced. Jeff Chen of XWordInfo points this out in his notes (linked above), and I agree with his assessment almost line-for-line.

One area in which Chase's puzzle is far superior to mine, however, is grid cleanliness. His puzzle has almost no dreck, and mine is filled with awkward word forms like REPEGS and DREAR, Crosswordese-y vocab like LISLE and ESKER, and the obscure, foreign dialectal LEAL (which I'm just learning now, I've actually used twice in puzzles -- see 57-Across). But it's not really fair to compare a puzzle from 2023 to one from 2008. The standards and tools of grid-filling are completely different now than they were back then. It's like how middle-of-the-pack baseball relievers today put up numbers that look like Mariano Rivera's from 15 years ago. You always need to adjust for era when making such comparisons. Maybe I need to develop a CLEAN+ metric for crossword puzzle grids.

That was a baseball-nerd joke, by the way, and speaking of baseball, my reference to LEAL made me think of one-time mainstay in the Toronto Blue Jays rotation Luis Leal. So, I'll leave you with his Donruss baseball card from 1982, back when starting pitchers were expected to go nine innings and wear a luxuriant mustache while doing so.

 Until next time...

Will Must Send Regrets

In my last post I said big news was coming, and so it is: I wrote/constructed a crossword puzzle book!

It's titled Will Must Send Regrets: 101 Rejected Crossword Puzzles and the Stories Behind Them. It's now available at Amazon. So, you should click this link and buy a copy!

Even if you have no intention to read it or solve any of the puzzles in it, it's a great book for your shelf to show you have erudite hobbies like crossword puzzle solving. (And I totally don't mind pity purchases.)

I do genuinely think it's a really good book, though. Not all the puzzles are fantastic (they were rejected for a reason, after all). But for each puzzle, I include its rejection email from the NYT editorial team, I give constructor notes, and I provide a (very) tangentially related anecdote. So, even if the puzzle is bad, you can read a bunch of entertaining commentary after you solve it.

I'm super stoked to finally have it finished. I put a lot of effort into it -- or rather I put a long effort into it. The first puzzle in the book was rejected in 2004, so, in a way, it's been nearly 20 years in the making. But I really started working on it about five years ago -- just chipping away, an hour here, a half hour there.

I basically had everything done around Thanksgiving, and just needed some motivation to put it all together, and I got that a few weeks ago, when I was asked to construct a puzzle for the Boswords Winter Wonderland tournament. I eagerly agreed (super stoked about that too!), and then I found out there will be constructor interviews in the tournament, and so I told myself I needed to totally finish my book by then, so that I could plug it. I need all the help promoting this thing I can get. I have almost zero presence on social media (I tweeted about my book today, my first tweet since 2020, and it currently has one like ... lol... maybe I need to buy one of those blue checks) and not many people read this blog consistently.

But, it's done, it's up, and I'm happy about that.

I did have a brief moment of panic a few days ago, though. Right after I published it, I told my wife about it. (She's always, like, 20% interested in my side projects.)  And we had the following conversation.

Her: What's the title?

Me: Will Must Send Regrets: 101 Rejected Crossword Puzzles and the Stories Behind Them.

Her: Oh, you mean Will, like Will Shortz?

Me: Yeah.

Her: He doesn't care that you're using his name like that?

Me: No, I mean, he doesn't know, but I don't think he'd care. Why would he? It's not negative. It's all about my failings. I just thought it was a catchy title.

Her: Aren't there copyright laws or something? Do you include emails he sent you?

Me: Yeah, but that's not illegal. They were sent to me. They're my emails... I think.

Her: Still, I wouldn't be super happy if somebody published a bunch of emails from me and didn't ask permission first.

Me: Really? You think that's, like, a breach of etiquette? Well, I already published it, what should I do?

Her: Just email him and ask if he's cool with it.

Me: And what if he says he isn't?

Her: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I knew she was right, so I sent Will an email, and then waited for a response, trying (and failing) not to obsess over it. The thing is, I wasn't worried he was going to say no, even if he did, I could salvage things by changing the title, removing direct emails, etc. -- it would take some work, but it would be doable -- I was worried he was going to take a while to get back to me, and then I'd be stuck in limbo, wondering what to do. Thankfully, however, that proved to be an unfounded worry, as he got back to me promptly and said he didn't mind at all -- such a mensch.

Well, I think I've spilled enough virtual ink on this for now.

Until next time...

How Did I Miss My Puzzle?

It's a rhetorical question. I know how I missed it. It ran between Christmas and New Year's when my house was abuzz with activities and in-laws. I couldn't pay attention to anything that wasn't related to logistics or eating.

On December 29, the LA Times published a puzzle I constructed, and I didn't even realize it -- or, more accurately, I forgot about it, as I was informed of the publication date several weeks in advance. I also often solve the LA Times puzzle, but haven't been doing it much of late (except Saturday which is a must solve) because I've been busy with other things. So, I didn't have a chance to tell my friends and family about it or promote it to my 12 readers here. I get like three puzzles published a year, and I missed one. Bad form by me.

But it looks like it will be available for a few more days: https://www.latimes.com/games/daily-crossword.  

So, go solve it now, if you missed it too.

Also, HUGE announcement coming in a few days.

Until then...

"Curb Your Enthusiasm", Season 20, Episode 5: "The Swastika Crossword"

I've been quite busy these past few months with a bunch of things (a few of them crossword related, which I'll say more about in the relatively near future), so I haven't had a chance to update this blog. I also haven't had any puzzles published recently, and I haven't been following the latest news in Crossworld very closely, so I haven't had much to write about, anyway. But on Tuesday a friend sent me a text alerting me to the controversy surrounding this past Sunday's puzzle by Ryan McCarty.

Apparently, a bunch of people think it looks like a swastika.

I certainly didn't notice it when I solved it on Sunday, and I still don't really see it. I mean, yes, I can see what people are talking about, but I still don't look at this grid and think Nazis! In the link above, the constructor calls it a "whirlpool," and Jeff Chen, the blog author, calls it "a cross between a windmill and a hedge maze," both of which seem like much better descriptions to me than a swastika. In order to see a swastika, I have to ignore all the parts that don't look like a swastika (like those fat corners connected to the rest of the puzzle), but you could say that about a lot of things. Some shapes resemble other shapes, even evil shapes.*

*It's worth mentioning that not all people view the swastika as evil. When I was in India I saw it a few times, as it's a good luck symbol in Hinduism. 

At first, I thought this was just some Twitter nonsense that wasn't worthy of a response beyond a head shake and a "whatever." But then the story seemed to gather some steam with a bunch of major news aggregators picking it, and politicos on both the left and the right tweeting critically about it. (It was also mention on the podcast Blocked and Reported -- possibly paywalled). And the NYT even issued a response about it. So, I decided to formulate my thoughts on it for this blog.

Here are my thoughts: It all seems really farcical to me. It seems less like something that should be happening in real life and more like something that would happen in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. I mean, what do people think, that The New York Times crossword editing team is secretly pro-Nazi, and they decided to demonstrate this by releasing a puzzle with a grid that is kinda-sorta ambiguously swastika-like, on the first day of Hanukkah?*

*This is another part of the story that makes the whole thing seems like a joke to me. A bunch of people mentioned the timing of this, as if it's at all relevant, as if displaying a swastika on a different day wouldn't be as equally terrifying and terrible.

Is that the implication, or is it that The New York Times is somehow negligent in their recognition of evil symbology, or are they subconsciously antisemitic and decided subliminally to run a pro-Nazi puzzle? What's the specific allegation of wrongdoing? Nobody really gives one because they would sound like a conspiracy-theory nut if they did.

I think there are two things going on here:

1) People just want to hate on The New York Times. I think that's pretty clearly what's going on with the rancor from the right. They see the NYT as the poster child of the "elite liberal media" and never miss an opportunity to bash it, warranted or otherwise. But there is also an element of this from the other direction. A lot of hard-core lefties are also endlessly critical of the paper because they once ran that op-ed by Tom Cotton and did that deep-dive on puberty blockers and what have you.

2) Good old-fashioned call-out culture. In certain online spaces, like Twitter, you gain social cachet (and dopamine-inducing likes) by calling out other people as antisemitic, racist, transphobic, etc.

I so loathe call-out culture. (It's the main reason, I pretty much stopped using social media altogether.) First and foremost, it's super shitty for the person getting called out, especially if they've committed a minor (or nonexistent) infraction. In this case, people might think of The New York Times as being a faceless, soulless corporation, but somebody put a lot of effort into making that crossword puzzle (and, by the way, it's really good!) and a team of editors signed off on it, and now they're being implicated in the media as being part of some sort of absurd antisemitic scheme. Even if you have very thick skin, that totally sucks.

Also, whenever this type of thing happens it has a chilling effect on everybody else because nobody wants the anti-[fill in the blank] finger pointed at them. I'll admit that I was a bit hesitant to even write about this for that very reason. (But that's when I make myself write about it -- you can't be controlled by fear. Plus, very few people actually read this blog, anyway.)

Another thing is that by overstating the amount of hate aimed at a group, you are unnecessarily adding to the psychic toll paid by that group. That's one thing I wish more liberals would understand. Constantly telling groups of people how oppressed and hated they are is not a benefit to that group. I mean, for god's sake, there is enough real antisemitism out there -- Charlottesville, Tree of Life, Ye -- let's not add to that burden with a bunch of nonsense about crossword puzzle grids.

With all that said, I completely understand that there are solvers out there who looked at the grid saw a swastika and were legitimately put off by it. And that's okay. We're allowed to have feelings about things (and we can't help it, anyway). But those are personal feelings and should be handled at the personal level. For example, a turned-off solver could skip the puzzle that day and come back the next day when there will be a totally different grid pattern.

This is a general point I've made before about "controversial" content in crossword puzzles: You can't expect the constructor/editor, creating a puzzle for a huge, wide audience, to adopt your personal standards on what is or isn't problematic. Sometimes a puzzle just isn't for you. Sometimes that's because it has too many pop culture references in it you don't know, and other times, apparently, it's because it has a grid that reminds you of Nazi iconography.

Until next time...