A New Old New York Times Themeless Puzzle

[Grid shot lifted from Diary of a Crossword Fiend]

The good thing about getting a crossword puzzle published in the New York Times is that you get a crossword puzzle published in the New York Times.  It's a big audience, certainly in the thousands, probably in the hundred-thousands (in the millions? probably not), and likely containing a handful of very famous people, by whom I would be completely star-struck if I peeped into their kitchens in the morning and saw them solving my puzzle over cups of coffee.  (Being a huge baseball fan, after seeing Wordplay, I like to imagine Mike Mussina has done a few of my puzzles.)  The bad thing about getting a crossword puzzle published in the New York Times is that the process is l-o-ng.  The turn-around time -- the time it takes from submission to publication -- is at least a few months and often (and in this case) a few years.

In the past, this hasn't been such a big deal.  The solver doesn't know (or care) when a puzzle is submitted and the essential elements of a good crossword puzzle aren't usually that time sensitive -- a good bit of word play in 2015 is still going to be a good bit of word play in 2017, and if a splashy word or phrase doesn't hold up for at least a few years, it's probably not as splashy as you think.  Lately, however, I've been finding the submission-to-publication lag very annoying.  The reason is that about three years ago I started constructing themeless puzzles that were good enough to publish.  I built up an NYT cache of five or so puzzles and now they are starting to run.  (One ran in September, another ran in April.)  This is fantastic, I'm stoked about it, but it would have been fantasticer, and I would have been stokeder about it three years ago, when the puzzles were representative of my current work.  I've really tried to make strides toward improving my themeless puzzles, and I feel like I have, so it's a bit -- I'm not sure what the right word is, dismaying is too strong -- irksome? -- that's not right either, but I'll go with it for lack of a better option -- it's a bit irksome to see work I did when I was very much a themeless-puzzle novice being published today when I've since stepped up my game.

I can't help but focus on the flaws of my earlier puzzles -- the things I would change today -- instead of just enjoying them.  I did it a bit with my last two NYT puzzles, and I'm doing it big time today.  The first thing I did when I saw this grid recently was cringe at the bottom section: REPOT, TSOS, ARBORED, MERLINS (partially saved by Will's Harry Potter clue) all in the same section, with INSTR just a stone's throw away -- that's just shabby fill.  There are many good things in this puzzle too (it did get published after all), but the bad parts bother me more than the good parts make me happy.

And it's not just that I'm being my own worst critic.  I recently had a themeless puzzle run at BuzzFeed that I made just a few months ago that think is superb (seriously, check it out, if you haven't already); it's that I know I could do this puzzle better today, and so it feels as if I'm looking at an inferior version of my work.  And that's a little frustrating.

But, when it comes down to it, nobody but me really cares anyway, so let's do some quick bullet points and call it a post...

• The highlight of this puzzle for me is definitely WIFFLEBALL.  It's a nice lively answer, with a major personal connection, as I spent much of my youth playing Wiffle Ball Home Run Derby.  In fact, one summer, when I was about 14, I played a full "season" of it with my friend Jeff, where we each adopted a major league lineup (he was the Braves; I was the Mariners) and carefully record our stats after each game on his Apple IIe computer (it was old even back then).  Because I'm such a baseball obsessive (have you seen my book?), I would bat from the same side of the plate as the real player I was emulating even though I couldn't really hit left-handed.  Come to think of it, I couldn't really hit right-handed either.  I didn't win very often.

• I got BELLYLAUGH from Jenny McCarthy's book "Belly Laughs," which is currently sitting on my bookshelf.  I'm not exactly sure how it got there, and I haven't read it, but I bet it's hilarious!  I'm being sarcastic, if you couldn't tell.  Jenny McCarthy is not funny... especially when it comes to her "well-researched" views on vaccines.

• Where have you gone, Mr. AYKROYD?  I saw Ghostbusters again recently (still holds up, for the most part), and one thing I was struck by was how much the Ghostbusters smoke throughout the movie.  I don't think that would fly today.  Your protagonist can smoke bad guys without remorse, but he (or she, but mostly he, it's Hollywood after all) can't be shown smoking a cigarette.  It's a bad message for the kids.

• I posit that Queen's ARENAROCK anthem "Another One Bites the Dust" is number one on the "Songs that are Actually Really Good But that You Can't Stand Because You've Heard Them Over and Over and Over Again" list.  Seriously, the bass line is great, and Freddie Mercury kills it on vocals.  If I had never heard Queen before, and somebody played me this song, I'm sure it would blow my mind.  Instead, when I hear this song, I want to blow off my head.  (Not literally -- stop gun violence!)

• I will leave you with the song "Blackbird."  It was originally performed by those Fab Four MOPTOPS and later used in a cover of EAZYE's song "Boyz-n-the-Hood."  It's a fitting way to go out.

The Making of BuzzFeed Themeless 8: A (Darlene) Love Story

I had a great idea.  I was going to make a three-minute video about the making of this crossword puzzle.  It’s just the type of silly, self-indulgent project I would find enjoyable.  I was going to put the empty grid of my puzzle on the screen, and then show it being filled in while I provide background narration, talking a bit about the process, but mainly giving fun facts about the marquee entries.  I was also going to show relevant pictures and YouTube clips.  I was going to do this for every crossword puzzle I make -- this one would be the first.  It was going to be a new “thing.”  And it was going to be great!

The problem is that I don’t really know how to do this.  The only software I know how to use that can even kinda make videos like this is PowerPoint, but when I actually sat down to make such a PowerPoint presentation things quickly fell apart.  I made a short test video, and the sound quality was not great, the animation was choppy, and my narration was stilted.  Nothing flowed.  I probably could have lived with this, but the bigger problem is that I could not figure out how to make the YouTube videos work right.  I got horribly frustrated, and then my three-month-old son started crying, so I just deleted everything in a fit of pique, and that was that.  But still, I think it is a good idea.  A short, witty (well, hopefully witty) video about the making of a crossword puzzle – somebody would watch that, right?

Anyway…

BuzzFeed Themeless 8.

[This grid shot was lifted from Amy Reynaldo's excellent "Diary of a Crossword Fiend" blog.  Please don't sue me for copyright infringement.]

I started this puzzle with SWEEPTHELEG.  It was my only seed answer.  It comes, of course, from the 1984 film “The Karate Kid.”  I saw this movie in the theater when I was seven-years-old, and I remember three things from it: 1) It was the greatest movie I had ever seen (mainly because I was seven and it was the most recent movie I had ever seen); 2) My grandpa stayed home to watch football instead of seeing it, which makes much more sense now than it did then; 3) My mom made sure to point out that the adult (Sensei Kreese) was the “real” bad guy, not the kid (Johnny).  And in watching the clip below, I say she was right.

[Sensei John Kreese was played by actor Martin Kove.  Is KOVE crossworthy?]

I really like the northwest stack of SWEEPTHELEG, THEREYOUARE, and AARONSORKIN, especially so since it led the way for HOOBASTANK to make its crossword puzzle debut (to my knowledge, anyway).  I had heard the name Hoobastank, but thought I didn’t know any of their songs, but I actually did know at least one of them.  “The Reason” got some pretty good radio play in the early twenty-aughts.  Not really my type of music.

Caleb had me redo the northeast and southwest corners because each one contained an objectionable short answer (EME and ELG, respectively).  I think the revised versions are better, although I don’t like STRIATED because it’s boring, and I don’t like LYINEYES because … well,



I do however like the pairing of IRONMIKE with TYSON, because it reminds me of one of my very favorite Nintendo games: “Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!”  If you are not familiar with this game, you control a boxer who has to fight his way through a circuit of ethnically offensive stereotypes (a weak Frenchman, a mystical Indian, a drunk Russian, etc.) to earn a championship match against … a convicted sex offender!  It’s incredibly fun, though.  Just remember, a quick body blow on the third hop is the only way to defeat Bald Bull’s bull charge.

The southeast stack took me about as long to finish as the entire rest of the puzzle.  In my experience, this isn’t unusual, because by the end of the puzzle you have so many things already locked into place that there aren't that many workable options.  My breakthrough was SUPERSOAKER, which I like a lot because it's a good entry and because it's not on any of my word lists.  I just saw it organically.  Actually, I saw that SUPER------ would fit, so I just started going through all the “super” things I could think of, hoping something would work -- and something did.

I think that’s actually a decent tip for novice constructors: If you get an entry from a word list that doesn't quite work, take a moment to see if there might be a similar entry, perhaps not from a word list, that does work.  I found this to be a good way to come up with decent, never-before-used entries – or at least to finish a section that AutoFill would tell you is impossible.

Anyway, that’s my puzzle.  Hope you enjoyed it.  Here's some Darlene Love for the road. 'Tis the season!




Bonus bullets:  I wrote everything up to this point last night before seeing the final edit, so a few quick thoughts now that I've seen the final version.

• Most the clues are my clues, but Caleb changed some to, I think, make the puzzle more BuzzFeed-y, which is good.  That's what an editor should do.  
• I have no idea what Pen 15 is; I've never heard of "Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl;" and I disagree that technology has rendered ROTE learning useless.  (I actually think there can be great value derived from brute force memorization, but that's a whole other topic.)
• The SUED clue got cut off in my .puz version, but it was supposed to reference a joke Bill Maher made about Donald Trump being the spawn of his mother and an orangutan.
• Two clues I wish would have stayed: "Fighter who once chewed a man's ear off ... literally" for TYSON, and "Her boots were made for walking (and that's just what they did)" for SINATRA.  Oh well.  No biggie.
• I like Caleb's clues for ERI, MEATPIE, FRAT, STRIATED and WARP (good misdirection, using "pervert" as a verb) better than my original clues, which were all kinda boring.
• I think this went well.  I hope to contribute to BuzzFeed again in the future.
• Oh, did you notice my head-shot photo?  Dapper!