"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...

    

   

A Month In Crosswords: Are Anonymous Submissions A Good Idea?

A few days ago, I was reading the comments at Diary of a Crossword Fiend, as I'm wont to do, and commenter Eric H broached the idea of anonymous submissions. Coincidentally, this is something I have been thinking about a little bit lately, so I decided to write a post about it.

To my knowledge, Peter Gordon at Fireball is the only editor who explicitly allows anonymous submissions. I don't know the inner workings of any crossword publication, so I don't know how much attention, if any, editors give bylines. I suspect nobody openly plays favorites, but I know from my days peer-reviewing academic papers that it's not easy to be totally objective evaluating work of people you know personally. Bylines for me were often unwelcome distractions.

So, I was thinking, if I was a crossword editor, I would give serious consideration to doing anonymous-only submissions. The upside is that it would be totally fair; the downside is that it wouldn't yield a roster of constructors with the type of diversity some solvers want. Well, I probably shouldn't just state these things as fact. Let's look into them a bit more deeply.

Would anonymous submissions be totally fair?

I mean, nothing is totally fair, but I think this would be as fair a process as reasonably possible. The obvious criticism of it is that editors, particularly straight, white, cis, male (SWCM) editors, would still be biased against non-SWCM constructors, because there would be different content in puzzles by such constructors, and editors would be less familiar with and thus less likely to accept this content (perhaps subconsciously). I've always been kinda uncomfortable with, and skeptical of, this argument -- uncomfortable, because it tacitly relies on stereotypes of what SWCM and non-SWCM people would or wouldn't know or find interesting/acceptable in crossword puzzles; skeptical, because a lot of the cited evidence of this type of bias I've found to be either outright inaccurate or misleadingly taken out of context.

But let's say for the sake of argument that the editor isn't SWCM, or let's say he is, but he's not the only editor. Let's say there's a team of several editors, and it's a really diverse team, like, United Colors of Benetton-ad diverse.* And then the team selects and edits puzzles as a group, or if they can't come to a consensus, they take turns.** Would anonymous submissions be totally fair in this case? 

*So, apparently I'm envisioning editors of different colors, who happen to all be young, thin, conventionally attractive and topless.

**I don't know how realistic having a team of equal co-editors is in practice -- salaries, budgets, and whatnot -- but it could be approximated by having assistant editors and test solvers/consultants who think differently from the head editor. And maybe some publications already do this.

If you were a rejected constructor, it certainly would be hard to claim bias was the reason. The editing team couldn't be biased against you personally, because they wouldn't know it's you, and if nobody among a diverse group or editors chose your puzzle, then it's probably also not any sort of implicit bias. So, yes, I think this would be a very fair way to do things.

But fairness isn't the only consideration, which brings me to my next question.

Would anonymous submissions be equitable?

No, I don't think so -- by which I mean I don't think it would close the gap between the number of puzzles published by SWCM and non-SWCM constructors you see at most mainstream publications. It might even widen it. I have no reason to believe there is any difference in quality between puzzles made by SWCM constructors and non-SWCM constructors, and so what would happen, if submissions were anonymous, is that, over a large enough sample, the acceptance percentages would almost perfectly mirror the submission percentages. And according to everything I've heard, submissions to mainstream crossword publications are dominated by SWCM constructors. I think it has gotten a little bit less lopsided in recent years with the rise of social-media-based crossword collectives, diversity fellowships, and the solicitations of veteran constructors (not me, but better people than me) to tutor new constructors -- all commendable efforts, by the way -- but the numbers still seem pretty far away from those of society overall. The last time I saw the NYT stats published, for example, well over 50% of the submissions were from male constructors.

Tangential question: Why is there this gender imbalance?

It's something I've thought about a lot, not just in crossword puzzles, but in many activities I love (like math and Scrabble), and I've come to this profound conclusion: I don't know. My best guess is that there is something we are doing as a society that makes girls less likely to take interest in such things. It could be some form of sexism, but it doesn't seem to be anything direct -- most crossword (and math and Scrabble) communities I've encountered are very encouraging and welcoming to everybody -- so I don't think it's a problem with crossword publishing, per se, or something crossword editors can, or should be expected to, somehow solve on their own.

To get a better idea of what I mean, consider not crossword constructing, but competitive crossword solving. The male-female disparity among the top solvers is even bigger than it is among constructors. Of the top 100 finishers at this year's ACPT, only about 25% are women; among the top 10, this number falls to 10%; among the three big-board finalists, 0%. In the past 20 years, I believe there have been only two female finalists and no champions. (Ellen Ripstein won it in 2001.)

The question again: Why is this the case?

The answer again: I don't know.

But whatever it is, I don't think it's the tournament's fault. I don't see anything in the rules that would inherently favor men; the puzzles are constructed by both men and women; the tournament is administered and refereed by both men and women (and they do a damn fine job, whoever they are!); and there isn't, to my knowledge, some sort of cabal among the top solvers to keep women our their ranks. So... I don't know. I've asked a few women their opinions on the subject, and their response is usually the same as mine... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Getting back to construction, it's time for the final bold-face question.

What submission procedures would be both fair and equitable?

Ay, there's the rub! I don't see a way to do this right now. If an editor wants, say, half of all puzzles to be published by women, it seems to me the only way they can do that is by fiat -- decree it as so, and then in some way give preference to submissions by women until they get the percentages they desire.

And if an editor wants to do that, then that's their prerogative -- more power to them -- but it's definitely not my preferred system. It's not because such a system would work against me as an SWCM constructor (well, maybe that's, like, 3% of it, but no more than that). It's because it doesn't feel appropriate to me to evaluate somebody's work based in any way on their identity characteristics. If editors do this, in effect what they must tell certain constructors is: Sorry, I would accept your puzzle, but I already have my limit by constructors who look like you. You probably don't know these other constructors. They probably aren't relevant to you or your work in any way, and you might be otherwise total different from them, but you kinda look like them, so, regrets.

That just doesn't feel right to me. It doesn't seem like progress.

The other thing about explicitly taking into consideration one's identity characteristics when evaluating their work is that you run the risk of stepping into the "who qualifies?" briar patch. In a previous post, I poked fun at the NYT Diverse Crossword Constructor Fellowship,* asking "how gay do you have to be to qualify?" It's a joke, obviously, but maybe not actually that ridiculous a question. For instance, if you mostly present as SWCM, but you like to have sex with men every now and then, do you qualify as a member of the LGBTQ community for the purposes of this fellowship? What if you just fantasize about having sex with men every now and then? Or what if you're biracial -- like, you look pretty white, but your mom is from India? And is anybody actually checking this, or is it all based on self-identification? Looks like we have an application from somebody named Dolezal... Rachel Dolezal.**

*I don't dislike this fellowship, by the way. In theory, I don't love the idea of categorizing people by identity in this way, but I'm also not a huge "in theory" guy. Ultimately, it's just new people getting into constructing, which is not something I'm ever going to hate on. Plus, I read the profiles of the first class, and everybody seems lovely.

**She would qualify anyway, because she's a woman, but it's still a pretty good joke. 

In general, I would like it if in Crossworld we de-emphasize identity. To me, the ideal system is not one in which exactly x% of puzzles are constructed by women, y% by people of color, and z% by LGBTQ folks (with ε% added each time the initialism is extended by a letter). To me, the ideal system is one in which nobody would ever even think to calculate these percentages, in which doing so would be as silly as categorizing constructors by blood type or hair color or innie/outie bellybuttons. Is that too unrealistic? Well, you may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

Wait, I think I just quoted John Lennon unironically. It's time to wrap up this post.

Until next time...

A Month In Crosswords: Fill It All And Let God Sort It Out

The big news in Crossworld this month, at least my minuscule corner of it, is that I got Covid again. I contracted Delta this summer, which laid me up pretty good for a few days, and last week Omicron wormed its way into my upper respiratory tract. I figured that, with my previous infection and the vaccine and the booster, I'd be sufficiently well-protected, but this virus is nothing if not persistent. It was still able to breach the moat and storm the castle. Thankfully, an order of antibody knights was able to repel it in relatively short order.

I could have become infected a dozen different ways. I basically went back to living life as if it's the "before times," but it's not the before times yet (ever?). I don't have any regrets, though. That's the risk; the reward is that I got to live life kinda like a normal human for nine months. It's a good tradeoff, as far as I'm concerned.

Because, although I tested positive, I didn't really get sick. I felt a little crummy Friday night, fell asleep on the sofa (which I never normally do) watching hockey and woke up feeling pretty much back to normal, other than being drench in sweat (I got the chills and bundled up before I nodded off). The worst part about the entire thing was the quarantine. My wife and kids tested negative, which is good, but it made me kinda lonely. I stayed in my basement for almost an entire week. It reminded me that as much as I like being by myself, I'm only half-introvert, at most. I need social interaction. It also made me realize that I could never be a deadbeat dad-- I missed my kids right away, and talking to a 6-year-old and 9-year-old through a closed door doesn't really work -- so that's good I guess.

It also gave me an opportunity to do even more crossword puzzles than usual. Let us discuss some of these puzzles.

Kudos Where Kudos Are Due 

My favorite solve this month was this one from Michael Paleos -- just a really nice puzzle. The thing I like most about it is that all the adjectives describing the animals are spot-on for a party. Often when you see themes like this, there's one example that's just a little bit off -- like, you get it, but you think to yourself Yeah, but I would never actually say it that way. There's nothing like that in this case. They are all perfectly apt. ROCKING, WILD, DRUNKEN, and RAGING are all terms to describe a party, and none of them sound the least bit contrived. Also, the revealer is the perfect bow. This is a "Wish I Had Thought Of It" puzzle for sure.

Actually, I'm pretty surprised this theme hadn't been done yet. It seems like the type of idea I would get, get really excited about, and then check Cruciverb and see it had already been done a bunch of times, and then I'd have to decide whether it was worth it to try to make a sufficiently different version or just give up on it. But no -- it looks like this is legitimately the first time this theme has been done.

And I wonder if the constructor was sweating it out while his submission was under review. Whenever I get a theme idea that seems like it should have been before but hasn't been, I rush to make a puzzle and submit it as quickly as possible. Then I dread the impending "Regrets on your [theme x] puzzle, we already have a [theme x] puzzle in the pipeline" email. It's not an unfounded fear. This is the second most common form of rejection for me. "Your puzzle just isn't that good" (phrased much more tactfully) is number one by far.

I also liked solving this puzzle because it made me think about the ROCKINGest, WILDest, DRUNKENest, RAGINGest parties I've ever been to, and those are some fun memories. To be honest, I've always actually kinda disliked WILD parties -- I'm more of an intimate soirée type of guy -- but I have been to a handful that were really fun. I remember a New Year's Eve house party in Mount Pleasant, DC, circa 2006, that was super ROCKING and DRUNKEN and WILD and RAGING. The dance floor was hopping, I made out with the hottest chick in the house,* and one of the members of Fugazi was there.** It was so awesome.

*I had good game in my late twenties: Hey, baby, you ever wonder who makes the crossword puzzle?

**I didn't know this at the time. The friend I was with, a big punk fan, told me about it after the fact. I'm glad he waited, as then there is no way I could have acted weird around him -- well, I mean, I could have, and might have, but at least it wasn't "whoa! you're, like, a rock star!" weird. 

Anyway, back to crossword puzzles. The clue of the month, perhaps even the year, is from this puzzle by Ryan McCarty and Yacob Yonas: "Rolls dough?" for CAR PAYMENT. So good! The misdirect of "Rolls" qua verb to "Rolls" qua noun is brilliant. I did see a few commenters say that somebody who could afford a Rolls Royce wouldn't need to actually make a CAR PAYMENT -- and that did cross my mind too -- but I'm not sure that that's actually true. I bet a lot of luxury cars are financed. For one thing, just because you can pay for something up front, doesn't mean you want to. For another thing, there's the whole businessman-buys-a-car-he-can't-afford-to-look-richer-than-he-really-is trope. There are probably examples of this in real life.

Although, I suspect not as many as there used to be. The whole car-as-status-symbol thing is mostly a relic of the past. Well, I say that, but we just got a Tesla a few months ago, and I'd be lying if I told you I didn't want people to check it out sometimes -- like after I work out, if I see one of my gym buddies in the parking lot, I might put my gear away a little more slowly and deliberately, in hopes they will catch a glance.

Of course Teslas might not even be cool now. We bought it just in time to avoid soaring gas prices, but also right before their owner became one of the more insufferable public figures. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before the calls come for him to be ousted from grids (if they haven't happened already). I have a feeling the North Carolina university is going to have a strong renaissance in crossword puzzle clues.

Anyway, final kudo of the post: David Steinberg published an NYT Sunday crossword with both his parents, which is legit awesome. It's a very fun, well-constructed puzzle too. I once, many years ago, made and submitted a puzzle with my dad, but it got rejected -- I think by both the NYT and the LAT -- and we didn't pursue things any further.

I sometimes wonder if my two boys will be into crossword puzzles or any word games at all. As yet they aren't showing too much interest, but I didn't really get into it until I was in my twenties, so you never know. Whatever. I try not to push them too hard in any particular direction. I'll make them little puzzles from time to time, but for the most part, they can do what they want to do during their leisure time. I'm not happy about the amount of time they spend watching YouTube videos of other people playing video games, but, hey, maybe in fifteen years they will have their own channel with thousands of subscribers, earning their own living -- or maybe they will be unemployable burnouts with no real life skills because they spent all their time watching others play Minecraft. Hopefully the former.

The Meta-Verse

I'm on a roll with the Fireball meta. I solved another one, my third or fourth in a row. One of these days I'm going to get lucky and win that sweet Fireball swag. I should probably subscribe to the Matt Gaffney weekly meta, as I very much enjoy meta puzzles (and Matt has been a super nice guy the few times I've met him). But as I've mentioned before, I obsess over metas and get down on myself when I can't solve them. I don't want to take on that mental obligation right now.

Wayward Word Watch 

I was wondering when DOUCHE would make its mainstream crossword puzzle debut. I once toyed with the idea of putting D-BAGS in a submission, but I chickened out and put D-BACK* instead. Well, now I know, at least, that DOUCHE is acceptable, as it appeared in a very fun NYT puzzle by Andy Kravis on 5/18/22. The reaction was... interesting.

*By the way, isn't the nickname D-BACK for a member of the Arizona Diamondbacks one of the worst in sports? Whenever I hear it, I imagine a PA announcer: And now the lineup for your Arizona Douchebags!

Rex Parker objected to the clue for DOUCHE -- "Medicinal rinse" -- because it didn't specifically mention the vagina: "... you can say 'vagina.' It won't hurt you." This is a weird critique because, for one, anal douches are a thing (so I'm told), and, for two, the word "vagina" has already appeared in NYT clues, almost a dozen times, with reference to Eve Ensler's work "The Vagina Monologues." See, for example, this puzzle or this puzzle.

 

Amy Reynaldo also objected to the DOUCHE clue at Crossword Fiend:

This needs some clarification. While an older relative was indeed advised by her gynecologist to douche regularly because of her pessary, those drugstore products aimed at “freshening” and scenting the vagina are not something I’d call “medicinal rinses” since doctors recommend against their use. If you’re gonna break DOUCHE into the crossword, please clue it better and more responsibly. (I wonder if the women on the editorial team argued against this clue and were outvoted by the men.)

I find this also to be a strange objection. There is nothing in the clue that implies that everything marketed as a DOUCHE is medicinal. I mean, it's a crossword puzzle clue. You have, like, six words. Some sociopolitical context is going to be omitted. Also, I could see somebody arguing that the clue is expressly responsible because it emphasizes the legitimate, medicinal use of DOUCHE and not the bullshit vagina-freshening use.

As to Amy's parenthetical remark, unless she has some sort of inside information, it seems like an incredibly fraught thing to speculate about. I mean, maybe it's true -- I certainly have no way to know -- but I find that, in general, things almost never break down nicely like this along gender lines. Surely, there are a lot of women who disagree with Amy and a lot of men who agree with her. Amy does this type of stereotyping sometimes (Rex too, actually), and I don't understand it -- like, isn't it bad to suggest all the women think one way and all the men think the other way? It certainly doesn't seem very progressive to me.

But I think the problem might be me -- how I read the blogs. I'm reading them as if they are meant to be assiduously researched opinion pieces on "The Way Crossword Puzzles Ought To Be." But clearly they are intended to be more like reaction videos in blog form. They're diaries, not analyses. (I mean, duh, the word DIARY is in one of the titles!) They are somebody's immediate feelings after solving a puzzle, so of course they don't always make sense to me. My own feelings don't always make sense to me.
 
Anyway, I think DOUCHE is a fine entry, and I think it has a fine clue. I certainly wouldn't mind seeing it clued it differently -- would "Obnoxious guy" fly? -- but I don't think it's disingenuous or irresponsible or anything like that as is. It just seems like a normal clue to me.

Well, that's all for now. Until next time...

 

A Month In Crosswords: So Much Great Crossword Content

No puzzles published by me this month, and I already wrote about my experience at ACPT last entry, so, since I'm the star of Crossworld in my own head, as far as I'm concerned, there is nothing of great interest to report this month. But pretending for a moment that I'm not a self-centered narcissist, I'll still write about a few things.

Kudos Where Kudos Are Due

• The New Yorker has expanded its roster of constructors and moved to a five-day-a-week format (up from three), including a themed Friday puzzle. This is good news -- the more puzzles the merrier -- although it means I'll have to make even more room in my already stretched allotment of puzzling time, or I'll have to set some puzzles aside and lie to myself about doing them later, until the backlog gets so big that I just trash everything and start from a clean slate. That's currently how I manage my podcasts, and it's a decent system. If only I could tap a button to increase my solving speed to 1.5-time.
  
  
• Speaking of increased solving speed, I heard that Paolo Pasco solved an NYT Monday puzzle in under one minute. That. Is. In. Sane. The last time I heard a solving feat that impressive was when somebody (I think Andy Kravis) posted that they did the entire week of NYT puzzles in under 22 minutes, which would be close to a record time for me just on the Sunday puzzle. Paolo is so fast it seems like only a matter of time before he wins an ACPT. But, you never know; the faster you go, the more likely you are to make errors, which is what dropped him to the B-board this year. It's like being a quarterback, you can rack up the yards and the touchdowns, but if you don't also avoid turnovers and sacks, you probably won't be the best of the best. And I really should move on to a new subject now, before I start comparing individual crossword solvers to NFL quarterbacks and lose the few readers I have.
  
  
• And speaking of the Friday themed New Yorker puzzle, Andrew Ries had a nice one yesterday. It's a clever tweak on a standard crossword theme type -- a "wish I had thought of that" puzzle for sure. I also loved seeing TOTAL BS (which I struggled to parse at first -- TOTAL B'S? What does that mean?) and SAVAGE LOVE in the grid. Growing up in the Seattle-area, I cut my gay-culture teeth reading Dan Savage back when his column had a name I will link to but won't write and when reading about such things felt transgressive. I was born in 1977 making me solidly Gen-X but young enough to pal around with millennials, and one of the biggest differences between the two generations is the acceptance of gayness into everyday life. The progress that's been made along these lines is remarkable and, if I may get a bit sanctimonious, often not properly acknowledged even by people as old as their mid-30s today.
  
  
•  I thought this puzzle by Matthew Stock was wonderful. The fill is just normal-really-good NYT-themeless fill, but the cluing really sings. So many gems -- "They've got their own problems" for MATH TESTS; "They might smell fishy" for CAT TREATS; "They can have you going the wrong way" for HEAD FAKES -- but the true stroke of genius is "Joe carter?" for COFFEE URN. It's kinda a niche stroke of genius, but a stroke of genius nevertheless. The only baseball clue I've seen that rivals it was in a puzzle a few years ago when Trea Turner played for Washington, and TREA was clued as "Nat Turner".
  
  
• Two other puzzles I really liked are this and this Fireball meta (especially the former). I was able to solve both of them, and I've noticed my enjoyment of metas is directly correlated to whether or not I'm able to solve them.
  

• The LA Times has a new crossword editor! Longtime assistant editor Patti Varol has moved into the lead spot, and Christina Iverson is the new assistant editor. The LAT puts out a really good puzzle, especially their Saturday themeless, and I certainly don't expect things to change now. Congrats to Patti and Christina!

Wayward Word Watch

Let's check in on one of my favorite topics to discuss: entries some solvers didn't like.

The big one this month is CAR BOMB, which appeared in Sam Ezersky's 4/24 NYT Sunday puzzle with the clue "Irish ___, popular St. Patrick's Day cocktail". Unbeknownst to me at the time of my solve, this is a controversial drink name, as noted in the review at both Crossword Fiend and Rex Parker. I think the objection here is mainly due to the clue, in which case, yeah, okay, I'd probably change the clue, if only to avoid getting hassled. You gotta pick your battles.* However, I don't think it was some sort of grievous error by the NYT editorial team to clue it as they did because the drink's name is in fact "Irish CAR BOMB" -- that's what most Americans call it, without even thinking anything of it. So then it becomes a debate about whether crossword puzzles should reflect culture as it is, including the bad parts, or some curated version of culture in which uncomfortable subjects are not allowed. Reasonable people can (and do) disagree about this, but I very much prefer the former.

*Wait, is it offensive to use that phrase in this context?

Also, it's unclear to me how offensive the drink name really is. Wikipedia says it's "considered offensive by most Irish and British people, with many bartenders refusing to serve it," but the evidence for this claim is incredibly thin. If you actually read the cited sources you don't find anything more damning than a handful of anecdotes that some Irish people don't like it -- and even this is balanced out by other Irish people saying they don't mind it. It's almost always this way. So often when I hear something is offensive to people of a certain identity, I find it to be true and not true and everything in between. There are people of that identity who are offended by it; there are people of that identity who aren't offended by it; there are people of that identity offended by the notion they should be offended by it; and there are people (most people?) of that identity who shrug their shoulders and get on with their lives. No matter what opinion you hold on these types of issues, somebody you're supposed to "listen to" has cause to tell you you're wrong. 

One quote from an article I want to requote: 

“I don’t think the name offends people anymore,” Ford said. “The British and the Irish have a long tradition of using humor and satire to deal with serious issues. Putting some satire to the name of a drink would be a coping mechanism rather than something that is offensive.”

Yes! This speaks to me. In a different article, somebody says calling it an Irish CAR BOMB is like calling a drink a "Flaming Twin Towers," and I thought to myself I'd ordered a Flaming Twin Towers. It'd be two flaming Dr. Peppers served side-by-side in highball snifters, and then after you drink them, you smash the glasses, and Mark Ruffalo questions how they shattered so quickly. 

Gallows humor -- some people need it.

Moving on... another crossword entry that generated some negative feedback recently is RETARD, which appeared in a WSJ grid (3/29) by Lucy Howard, edited by Mike Shenk. The clue was "Slow down," as in The chemicals in the fire extinguisher will help RETARD the spread of flames. So, this is a different word, pronounced differently, used in a different context from the middle-school insult of the same spelling. In fact, when I see RETARD used as a verb, its pejorative cousin usually doesn't even enter my head. The verb is just a normal word I associate with chemistry.

And so, it probably goes without saying that I have no problem with RETARD being in a crossword grid. And it also probably goes without saying, given that this word has the same letters in the same order as an ableist slur, that some people feel differently from me. You can read the comments of such folks in the linked article above, or you can search Twitter.com where I saw a few indignant tweets asking how in 2022 could a crossword grid contain such a word? that were cosigned by some people in Crossworld whom I like and whose opinions I respect.

To be clear, I have no problem with somebody saying they don't like RETARD (or any other entry) and wouldn't put it in a grid. I take issue with people saying nobody should be allowed to put it in a grid. It strikes me as a very self-important way to look at something: I'm bothered by this, therefore it should be off-limits for everybody.

Actually, it's kinda interesting, on the same day RETARD ran in the WSJ, the aforementioned Paolo Pasco made his debut in the New Yorker, and a commenter (again linked above) criticized it for having too many "unfair" proper nouns to which Paolo replied:

sorry to hear that! just send me a list of all the things you, personally, know and i’ll make sure this mistake never happens again 

This is a brilliant retort, as it succinctly and humorously illustrates the absurdity of a solver expecting a crossword puzzle meant for a broad audience to cater to their personal knowledge base. And yet this is basically what people want when they demand a word like RETARD be stricken from puzzles because they, personally, don't like it. I'd suggest we respond to such demands by also asking for a list, but the person might not get the joke, and they'd actually give us a list, and then we wouldn't be able to use entries like ABC and OREO, and then where would we be?

There is no way for constructors and editors to respect the sensibilities of every person, or every type of person, or every group of people in their entire solving audience, unless this audience is smaller than, like, five people. The only way to ensure that nothing will be in a grid that you find unpleasant is to hire your own personal crossword constructor, in which case, I'm available. I'll make a puzzle that's nothing but sunshine and lollipops and Marianne Williamson quotes, for the right price. Actually, I'd probably make that puzzle for free. It sounds like a kinda interesting project, and I'm generous with my services that way.

Contrarian Corner: The Teaser

I started writing a whole other section here, in which I post things bloggers or commenters or other constructors say about crosswords with which I disagree, and then I state that I disagree with them and explain why. But it got to be too long, as it morphed into other broader crossword topics, so I cut it with the idea that I'll finish it and post it later, perhaps over several entries. But I'll at least give you a little taste of what I had going on.

• The Old-Guard Canard --  The fallacious (in my opinion) notion that there's an Old-Guard of straight, male, white crossword gatekeepers, who aren't interested in and often actively discourage or disallow crossword content that doesn't appeal to a stereotypical older, straight, white, male solver.
  
  
• The regressive practice of some crossword bloggers and commenters of perpetuating stereotypes as a means of measuring equality.
  
  
• How gay do you have to be to qualify for an NYT Diverse Crossword Constructor Fellowship? Do you have to be, like, full-on gay, or can you just be kinda bicurious? And aren't LGBTQ folks already pretty well-represented among crossword constructors? If not, then my read on certain people is way off the mark.

That's all I got for you. Until next time...

A Month In Crosswords: ACPT and Me

ACPT. It came. It went. It rocked, as always.

It was also exhausting, as always. I never sleep well at ACPT. I never sleep well in hotels, period. That's one of the ways in which I'm becoming an old man. I'm not there yet, but I'm definitely developing some old-man-ish attributes, such as never wanting to sleep anywhere but my own bed. And I'm a fussy fall-asleeper in general. I need to have everything just so to easily conk out. I need to be in my own bed, with my own pillow, feeling the tender touch of my own wife as she passes gas and grunts at me for hogging the bed sheet (I just have broad shoulders!). Absent these things, I will often lie in bed for hours wondering how little sleep somebody could get and still function like a normal human the next day. I think I slept about two hours Friday night, and that's a personal high for the first night of ACPT.

I participated in the tournament as a judge -- my third "straight" ACPT in such a role. I rode up Friday afternoon with my usual DC/NoVa crossword/trivia crew -- Dan Felsenheld, Michael Berman, and Brian Cross. I hadn't seen any of them since before Covid, so it was nice to catch up. The company for the drive was good, but the traffic was not, so we got into Stamford later than expected. The judges dinner was already underway when we arrived, and I was kinda starving, so I didn't have a chance to mill around the lobby and glad-hand a bit like I would have liked to have done.

[Damon Gulczynski: ACPT 2022 Champion, Super-Stud Division]

There was a small issue with my room, in that they first told me I didn't have a room, which is very bad, and then they told me I actually had two rooms, which is much better, but still not ideal, because it meant I had to pick between two other judges to room with. (Thanks for putting me on the spot, hotel guy!) Puzzle 7 constructor Mike Shenk was one of the options, so I picked him, because I roomed with him once before and found him to be a perfectly nice guy, and I had never met the other judge. I felt kinda bad about it though, because I thought maybe the guy I didn't pick was going to get his own room, and so by being a perfectly nice guy Mike was getting the short end of the stick.

I'm not sure if this was actually the case, but there definitely was a mistake because the next morning while sitting in the lobby drinking my morning coffee, I overheard the tournament organizer apologizing to Mike for a room mix-up and asking him if having me as a roommate was okay. It was one of those awkward situations where two people start talking about you, right in front of you, but don't realize it. Thankfully, Mike didn't say anything even remotely negative about me (perfectly nice guy, remember), and I quickly interjected with something like "actually your roommate is right here!" so that they'd know I was, in fact, right there. I had to make a quick decision to either reveal myself or try to blend in with the chair like a chameleon. I went with the former and I think it was the right move. Things could have gotten really awkward if I didn't say anything, and then they noticed me sitting there silently.

I had a new position this year within the tournament administration apparatus. I was a member of the tech team! My job was to take graded puzzles (wrong answers marked with highlighter) and scan them into a computer. It's not that simple, though, because you have to make sure everything scans correctly, and you have to make fixes manually if it doesn't. Something in Puzzles 1 and 4 were tripping up the scanner (they had circles in the grid, which was probably it), so I had to count the number of incorrect squares and words for about 95% of those puzzles by hand. Luckily there were relatively few mistakes on those puzzles. Had that happened on Puzzle 5 (a wonderfully brutal BEQ offering) it would have been a legit disaster.

I wouldn't say the job was "fun," necessarily, but it suited me just fine. It was very satisfying, and I enjoyed bonding with the other tech people the way you do when you spend 13 hours over two days accomplishing a common goal. The biggest downside to it is that you don't get to interact with that many other judges. You are in the tech room all day with the same seven or eight people (and you don't get a chance to work the ballroom, which is probably the funnest judge job). Beyond some basic pleasantries, I didn't get a chance to talk to as many of the other judges as I have in years past. I did get to hang out with fellow tech teamer John Lieb (he of Boswords fame), so that was cool -- he's a good guy. And I had a few delightful conversations with Tracy Gray and Robyn Weintraub. They're both great -- just a lot of fun.

After the work was done for the day, I'd go to the lobby/bar area and talk to whoever was willing to talk to me. It's an interesting social dynamic because you meet so many people, but you can't meet everybody, so you just see people around and know who they are without ever actually meeting them. And then sometimes I actually forget if I've met somebody or just thought I met them because I've seen them around so much.*

*This is another getting-to-be-an-old-man-ish thing. Twenty years ago I never forgot meeting anybody. I used to pretend I did though, so that I wouldn't seem like some sort of stalker-y weirdo, especially around girls. Oh, hey, you're Summer Lang, we had freshmen English together three years ago, you sat in the third row, wore baggy jeans and a backpack with a sunflower on it, and once you wrote an essay about the time you saw Rage Against the Machine with your sister at The Gorge... no, we never actually met or even talked, I just remember a lot about you for no particular reason, never struck me as the world's greatest pickup line.    

The tournament itself went pretty smoothly -- no major gaffes on our end. We had a mini panic when we couldn't find the last puzzle for a top B competitor (Jenna LaFleur), but it turned out she overslept and didn't solve it! That really, really sucks. She was on pace to be a shoo-in for the big board, and instead she dropped way down the rankings. I feel terrible for her, and I don't even know her. But at least it means we didn't lose a crucial puzzle.

The A division finals was very chalky with Dan Feyer, David Plotkin, and Tyler Hinman making the big board. Tyler won, which is cool, but I always pull for Dan, because I'm friendly with him and we seem to have similar puzzling sensibilities. I don't think I've ever met either David or Tyler (though I've certainly seen them around a lot).

It was a reasonably close finals between Tyler and Dan. Tyler got off to a better start and held on as Dan closed the gap a bit toward the end. (At least I think that's what happened; it's kinda hard to tell who's winning and by how much when you're watching it live.) David really struggled. He finished well behind the other two, and he had an error to boot. It's weird; he always does so well on the "regular season" puzzles -- he finished in first place this year -- and then he always comes in third at the big board. It kinda sucks for him, but, on the flip side, if we think of this like the Olympics, he's got like a half-dozen bronze medals to his name and that's certainly nothing to sneeze at.

Anyway... that was ACPT 2022.

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In other news, a puzzle of mine dropped in the New York Times this evening. I think it's pretty good. I like puzzles like this where most of the word play is in the clues. They are a good change up to the usual entry-based word play puzzles. (Here's another one like this I made a few years ago.) I don't have a ton else to say about it. I might hop back on with an update after I read the blogs and some of the comments.

Although, I can probably guess already what the bloggers will say.

XWordInfo: Jeff will point out the merits of the puzzle before comparing it to a similar puzzle, possibly one he co-constructed, from seven years ago. Although he won't say it explicitly, you'll get the impression he liked the older one better. Also, there will be dad jokes.

Crossword Fiend: They'll point out that in cluing LEHRER as a white man, I missed an opportunity to highlight the accomplishments of Salvadorian-born landscape artist MIA LEHRER. The comments section will then burst into flames.

Rex Parker: Rex will pick a nit -- possibly about how the RNC is a hate group or how LAMÉ is an ableist slur -- write five paragraphs about it, and then briefly mention that my theme is either stale or clever (it's about 50-50 with my puzzles). Whatever the case, the conclusion will be that the NYT needs a new crossword editor.

Wordplay: They'll provide insightful commentary because everybody who writes there does really great work and has brilliant takes on crosswords. And I'm not just saying this because they are the in-house blog for the New York Times who published my puzzle. That's totally a coincidence.

I kid, I kid... I mean, it's all kinda true, but still, I kid.

Actually, Jeff really could compare my puzzle to a similar puzzle, but not one that he co-constructed, nor one that was written seven years ago. Sam Donaldson published this excellent puzzle in Fireball a little over a year ago. Sam's puzzle has the same basic idea as mine, but the roles of clues and entries are reversed. Also, he uses a bigger grid with more themers.

In a previous entry, I discussed the phenomenon of similar themes, and this is a great example. I hadn't seen Sam's puzzle prior to creating mine (my puzzle had already been accepted when his ran), so there's no way I could have copied him, even subconsciously. We both just thought of the same basic idea at about the same time, totally independently. It happens. I guess Sam and I are the Leibniz and Newton of our day.

By the way, to find the link to Sam's puzzle, I went through my old emails to get the date it was sent out by Fireball, and guess when it was... January 6, 2021. This might explain why I don't remember being particularly bothered by the fact Sam had kinda beaten me to the punch -- we all had real things to fret about that day.

And on that cheery note...

Talking Crosswords (and a Few Other Things)

My employer, RouteSmart Technologies, has a podcast, and I was on the latest episode talking crossword puzzles. Have a listen here if you are so inclined.

A Month In Crosswords: On Three Puzzles

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.

[Image copied from Diary of a Crossword Fiend at the above link] 

 

 

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Five quick-hitters before I go.

• 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.

[Yes, it was delicious.]

A Month in Crosswords: Ten Questions Answered

I've gotten some positive feedback about this blog over my last few posts. At least five people who aren't related to me told me they like it, and although it's possible they were just being nice because I gave them my word lists, that's more than enough encouragement for me to start a regular monthly column.

This is the first entry of my A Month in Crosswords series. The questions in this post are all from real readers -- and by real, I mean fake.

1. What are the ethics of constructing/publishing a puzzle that is very similar to one already published?

The debut NYT puzzle of Andrew Linzer ran on Thursday, January 6. It's a well-crafted puzzle, with a very clever theme, but not a totally original one. Paolo Pasco published a strikingly similar puzzle in Fireball Crosswords a few years ago.

Because of the similarities, a few blog commenters took Andrew and the NYT to task, saying the puzzle should not have been published. Some of the more over-the-top remarks contained the word plagiarism. So, let me dismiss that one straightaway: It's not plagiarism. I can see how somebody who is not intimately familiar with the crossword construction universe might think that, but you can trust me that it is almost certainly not. Andrew says in the notes linked above that he didn't even learn about Paolo's puzzle until after his was accepted, and, being somebody who has seen multiple constructors independently come up with the same theme many, many times, I have no reason to disbelieve him.

But should it have been published?

That one's a bit trickier, but I say yes -- or at least I don't say no. I think constructors should put in a good faith effort of database/blog searches to try to avoid duplicating other people's already published work, but it's never going to be perfect; things slip through the cracks, even for the best constructors among us. So, I think it's okay for an editor to publish a "non-original" puzzle, but it shouldn't be a regular thing. It would be unethical, in my opinion, to publish constructors who are consistently poaching puzzle ideas from other venues, but if it's just a once in a while coincidence, it's totally fine. No harm, no foul, as far as I'm concerned. Congrats to Andrew on making his NYT debut.

2. So, if I'm a budding constructor, and I find a really great theme idea but it's been done before, what should I do? 

I suggest trying to change it a little bit -- try to find a different theme set, a different revealer, or some sort of other twist that would make the puzzle your own. There's certainly nothing wrong with piggybacking on another constructor's idea. If that weren't allowed then there wouldn't be a crossword puzzle industry at all. I solve, like, five puzzles a year where I think Wow! That's something I've never seen before!

The NYT puzzle from last Monday (1/24/22) is an example of this similar-but-different type of thing. It had a QB theme (QUICK BREAD, QUILTING BEE, etc.) with the revealer STARTING QB. Elizabeth Gorski also did a QB theme in a WSJ puzzle, but with a mostly different QB set and a different revealer, QB VII, the Leon Uris novel. (It was also published over a decade ago, so only weirdos like me would even notice.)

If there really is no good way to tweak a theme, then I suggest moving on to the next idea or just making a puzzle for practice. Aside from it being kinda shady to knowingly replicate another constructor's work without proper attribution/compensation, you give editors an easy reason to reject it. I know this from experience. Although, I say that, but it's worth pointing out that the NYT does recycle themes, sometimes even with some of the exact same theme entries. In fact, they just did it a few days ago. So... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

3. Have you ever had a puzzle rejected for being too similar to one that has already been published?

Yes, many times. Usually it's a puzzle that's already been accepted but hasn't run yet, so at least it's clear I thought of it independently. But still, it sucks to get beaten to the punch. Once, I submitted to the NYT a FULL HOUSE themed puzzle, in which each theme entry contained a three-of-a-kind string and a pair string (e.g., IT'S A ZOO OUT THERE), and it got rejected the same day this puzzle ran.

It's gone the other way too, though. Once Tracy Gray told me she had a puzzle rejected because it was too close to this X'S AND O'S puzzle (a Gulczynski classic). She's such a nice person, I felt bad, but, I mean, not that bad.

4.  What are your thoughts on CLEAN COAL?

CLEAN COAL became a point of discussion early this month when the prolific constructor Lynn Lempel put it in an NYT Monday puzzle. Personally, I think the term is an oxymoron, perpetuated by coal lobbyists to make coal consumption more palatable to the general public. There is a concept called carbon capture and storage, which, as I understand it, really does reduce the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere while burning coal, but it still doesn't make coal clean, in part, because carbon is not the only pollutant produce by coal. Also, this technology is very expensive, and so it is not actually practical for wide-spread use.

With all that said, the term itself does not offend me, and I have zero problem with a constructor putting it in their grid. I don't think that using a term is a perpetuation or endorsement of the concept behind it. It also doesn't make me uncomfortable to come across terms like this while doing a crossword puzzle.

In general, I think I experience crossword puzzle solving differently from a lot of other people. I frequently hear solvers talk about puzzles being a "distraction" from the ills of the real world, or puzzling taking them to their "happy place," and those things have just never been true for me. It's too bad, really, as it sounds lovely. I'm jealous of that type of solver the same way I'm jealous of somebody who can fall asleep right when their head hits the pillow. (I'm a lie-in-bed-and-ruminate-endlessly kind of guy myself.) To be clear, I'm not especially distraught or anxious or anything like that when I'm solving a crossword puzzle. I'm my normal self, in a normal mood, so if I come across a disagreeable entry, it's not, like, a total buzzkill or anything like that. I just move past it, the same way I do when I hear an unpleasant news story (seemingly every news story these days) while making my kids breakfast in the morning.

Getting back to CLEAN COAL, I do think the NYT editing team erred by changing Lynn's original clue for it. Per her notes (linked above):

"Clean coal" as an answer gave me a slight pause because it's debatable whether there is such a thing. My original clue included something of a hedge ("Dubious term for a greener energy source"), but the editing team didn't think that was needed.

That's just a bizarre decision. I don't get it, and I strongly disagree with it. CLEAN COAL is a dubious term, and more to the point, the constructor wanted to qualify it as such. I could understand not adding a hedge if the constructor didn't have one in their original clue, but I don't understand removing one the constructor did have. Weird edit.

5. What about Harry Potter references?

I don't care much for them because I never got into the stories. I read the first book when it came out and thought it was... fine. (The fantasy genre has never been my cup of tea.) It's undeniable, however, that the Potterverse has become a massive subset of the pop culture universe over the past 25 years, so I'm not complaining that Harry and his pals (and acquaintances and enemies and teachers and magical paraphernalia...) pop up in grids so frequently. I just memorize enough to get by -- POTTERMORE and HORCRUX being this month's additions to my mental boy-wizard database.

I know there are a lot of solvers who would rather keep all things J.K. Rowling out of puzzles because of her controversial tweets concerning transgenderism. My take on all that: I don't know what she's said that's so bad. I mean I literally don't know what she's said. I go out of my way to avoid this story whenever it come ups. A wise person once said, "You don't need to have a take on everything." I've adopted that philosophy when it comes to J.K. Rowling. She was never one of my favorite authors; I don't know much about her; I really don't care what she says or tweets.

The Potterverse is so much bigger than her now, anyway, and I'm sure a lot of good people have done a lot of great work in it worth honoring. If you're turned off by Rowling, do what I do and think of the late, great Alan Rickman the next time you see a Harry Potter reference in a grid. But think of him in his Galaxy Quest role. That movie was surprisingly funny, as I recall.

Note: After writing this, I read this story about the "culture wars" of the NYT crossword puzzle. It touches on a lot of the general themes I've been discussing (and just discussed) on this blog. Because I got the link from Rex Parker's website, and Rex is usually very critical of Will Shortz (excessively so, in my opinion), I was worried it was just going to be a Shortz slag-fest, but it's not. It's decent and even-handed, and closes with the following quote by a graphic novel writer named Hayley Gold:

“In my experience, Will Shortz has been the nicest guy in the world. I hate all the articles that tried to slander him and make it like, ‘Oh, he’s this old white dude. And he’s trying to keep puzzles, sexist and racist.’…Change is slow and change is happening.”

Amen. No constructor or solver is going to agree with everything an editor does, and of course it's fair game to call somebody out when we think they make mistakes, but in my experience so much of the broad criticism of Will is just not accurate.

6. What was your favorite puzzle this month?

Favorite is an impossible adjective, but I really enjoyed a puzzle by Malaika Handa called "Dealer's Choice" that dropped in Fireball mid-month. It has a MONTY HALL PROBLEM theme, which, being 65% math nerd, is right up my alley. It also references the song "DA DOO RON RON," which I've loved since I heard it in an Energizer commercial as a kid: E-n-n-n-ergizer, it do run, run, run, it do run, run...

Incidentally, I solved the MONTY HALL PROBLEM the first time I heard it, in my head, during a five-minute walk between classes. My economics professor posed the problem to us at the end of a lecture, but didn't tell us the solution or give us any background on it. I thought it was just a fun little brainteaser, so I worked it out and didn't think anything of it. Only later did I learn a lot of really smart people found it so vexing. I now consider solving it so effortlessly the greatest thing I've ever done that nobody will ever care about but me. (The relatively recent time in martial arts class I took down four dudes in succession, all much younger than me, to win a toy WWE championship belt is a very close second.)

By the way, here's the solution I came up with: You want to switch doors if and only if your first guess is wrong; there is a 2/3 probability your first guess is wrong; therefore it is better to switch. It's an absolutely inarguable, ironclad proof as far as I'm concerned. 

7. Do you play Wordle?

Of course I fucking play Wordle.

It's really a silly game though. It's super easy to get it in six guesses and getting it in only two or three guesses is almost entirely luck. It's hard to be that good or that bad at it. Still, it makes me think about words and letter patterns, so I enjoy it. What I might start doing is picking a word at random to start with. That's probably more fun (if less optimal) than just starting with RATES every time, which is what I've been doing.

One thing I was I wondering is if it's a solvable game. Is there a decision tree that leads to guaranteed success no matter the correct word? I suspect yes, because each time you guess a word, you can't help but significantly reduce the relevant search space. If you guess "well" -- a lot of matching letters -- then that obviously greatly limits the possibilities, but if you guess "poorly" -- almost no matching letters -- that also limits the possibilities by the process of elimination. It would be interesting, and probably not all that difficult, to teach a computer to play something close to optimally and see if there are any words it couldn't get with certainty.

8. What's a crossword puzzle convention that annoys you more than it should?

The use of "for short" or "briefly" or some other such term when cluing an initialism or abbreviation that is at least as common as the full expression itself.

For example, if the answer is ALS we don't need the "for short" part in the clue "Lou Gehrig's disease, for short." People don't call it ALS because they are in a hurry, they call it ALS because that's what it's called. I bet a lot of people don't even know what ALS stands for. I might not even know -- acute lateral sclerosis? Nope. See, I had no idea that the first word is amyotrophic because almost nobody calls it amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. It's just ALS, and that should be reflected in a clue. Some other common entries along these lines -- MBA, NFL, PHD, ICU, UCLA, IUD, and many, many more. For a person, we accept that often their nickname is their name -- you'd never clue TOM as "Quarterback Brady, for short" -- and I think we need to extend this more frequently to places and things.

In general, I think mainstream crosswords are way too heavy-handed with clue qualifiers, not just "for short" but also "in slang", "informally", "colloquially", and the like. I get they are supposed to give the solver a nudge, but to me they come off as incredibly fusty, a sign that crossword clues are lagging behind the evolution of the English language. BAE, for instance, still gets slapped with the "in modern lingo" tag, and it's been, like, eight years since I first heard that word. What's the scale here? I mean, in a sense, every word we use is modern. (Also, is BAE lingo? I think of lingo as being specialized speech among a specific group of people -- like, baseball fans have baseball lingo -- not just general neologisms.)

Concerning qualifiers, Stella Zawistowski brought up a good point in her review of the LAT puzzle from January, 22.

[T]he clue for LEARN, [Teach improperly?] really rubbed me the wrong way. I hadn’t thought about this much until recently, when I learned that at least one major puzzle venue avoids cluing words as “slangy” because slang to some might be standard language to another. I’m not sure I will never again use the word “slang” in a clue, but “improperly” here sure feels like an unnecessary value judgment.

Well said. We all speak how we learned to speak, and no matter how that is, it sounds right to somebody and wrong to somebody else. There is no definitive authority and no reason to judge.

9.  What do you think of the NYT's (relatively) new online submission portal?

I like it a lot. Part of me misses printing everything out and snail-mailing submissions, but a bigger part of me doesn't. I also like that they put a limit of three submissions in the system at a time per constructor. It saves me from myself.

10. Got any good ideas for future puzzles?

At the moment, not really. I have a document on my phone with ideas that now runs like 50 deep, but if any of them were any good, I would have made them already. Some of them are too simple; some of them are too complicated; and some of them I don't even know what they mean now (I have one that says "themes the breaks", and I don't know if it's a typo or if it's an idea about breaking themes or what).

The worst is when I like an idea but just cannot get the symmetry to work. This doesn't happen often, usually I can massage it somehow -- a 16-column grid, mirror symmetry, a different verb tense, etc. -- but every now and then I can't, so I just give up on an idea. I did that a few weeks ago. I was thinking about multiple discovery (call back to Question 1), and I noticed the phrases GREAT MINDS and THINK ALIKE are both 10-letter long. Then I thought of CALCULUS (8 letters), because that, to me, is the quintessential example of a multiple discovery. It was independently developed by NEWTON (6 letters) and LEIBNITZ (8 letters), and... Wait! 10-10, 8-8, 6 -- that's a puzzle!

But no, it isn't. Do you see the problem? It's LEIBNIZ, no T, only 7 letters. So, it's acutally 10-10, 8-7-6. How do you make a grid out of that? And there really is no way to change any of the themers. Sometimes you can use a plural to get the symmetry to work, but I can't call him NEWTONS. I could use a different theme example of simultaneous discovery, but I couldn't think of one, and when I looked at the Wikipedia page none of the other cited examples seemed very well-known. (Is the NETWON-LEIBNIZ story even that well-known?)

So, not knowing what else to do, I walked away from my computer and moved on with my life. Speaking of which...

Ten Things I Like and Don't Like about Crossword Puzzles

Another crossword puzzle of mine dropped this evening in the New York Times puzzle app (will appear in tomorrow's print edition), meaning I have an excuse to post something new on this blog. Inspired by Zach Lowe's "10 Things" basketball column, which I used to enjoy reading before it moved behind the ESPN+ paywall*, I decided to write my own such post about crossword puzzles.

*I'm not an ESPN+ subscriber on principle. The principle being I feel as if I've given (and continue to give) more than enough money to ESPN (and their parent company Disney) by way of subscription fees and advertisement consumption. I shouldn't have to pay even more to read their best writers, especially considering an ESPN+ subscription doesn't even come with regular ESPN programming.

1. Word Ladders

I like them. I think they are kinda cool and wouldn't mind seeing themes utilizing them every now and then. Relatively recently, I had a word ladder puzzle rejected by the NYT partly because "We’re just not doing many word ladder themes anymore. They tend not to be too popular with solvers." Why is this the case? What's wrong with word ladders?

One thing I've always wanted to do, but almost certainly will never do because there are too many other things I want to do more, is build a digital graph, in which the nodes are the entries in my word list and the edges represent differences of a single letter. Using this graph, you could do cool things like find the optimal word ladder between any two words and find the most connected puzzle entry (the Rod Steiger of crosswords).

So, yeah, I like word ladders, and I have another confession: I don't mind quote puzzles either.

2. Word Lists

I don't like how reliant constructors are on their word lists and automation. This is probably just me misremembering "the good old days," when my only construction tools were a pad of graph paper, a sharp pencil with a good eraser, and a big-ass dictionary, but I do miss the feeling of satisfaction of filling in grids "by hand."

This is similar to my old-man gripe about the ease with which unknown things can be easily looked up online. Sometimes when I'm watching a movie and I know I know an actor from something else but can't place them, I intentionally won't look them up, just so that I can have that great a-ha moment when it finally comes to me. It's annoying and distracting to not know, but when it finally clicks that the dad from Towelhead is the art teacher from Six Feet Under, it's so worth it.

I don't do this with crossword construction, however, because I would never get a puzzle published if I did. I can barely keep up with the competition using huge word lists, commercial software, and my professional-grade coding skills.

Speaking of huge word lists, I use four: All, Monday, XwiWordList, and Hybrid Master. All is my personal word list curated solely by me over the past 15 years; Monday is All with a bunch of non-Monday-level entries eliminated; XwiWordList is the XWordInfo list, which I purchased; Hybrid Master is All and XwiWordList combined. I will gladly give All and Monday to anybody who wants them for free. The other two aren't mine to give, so I can't do that.

3. Asymmetrical Grids

I don't hate hate them, but I definitely don't like them. USA Today will sometimes publish grids with no black-square symmetry, and I'm surprised by how off-putting I find this as a solver. Symmetry doesn't seem like it should be a big deal, but for some reason it is for me. In general, I find that when you eliminate rules you often detract from creativity, rather than enhance it, because removing obstacles removes clever solutions around them. But before I saw an asymmetrical grid, I would have thought I would not have even noticed it was different. Maybe this is another curmudgeonly take, but I do notice it, and, unless it directly ties into the theme somehow, I don't really care for it.

4. Dupe Pointing-Outing

I don't like it when dupes are used as a demerit against a puzzle. I rarely notice dupes as a solver, and I don't care about them when I do notice them, even when they intersect. If you want to put DO UP, UP TO, and TO-DO all in the same section, fine by me (as long as the rest of the puzzle is good). I get more annoyed by solvers pointing out dupes than I do by actual dupes.

5. Aspirations for Theme "Tightness" 

This falls into the same category as dupes. I don't like it when theme tightness, or lack thereof, is used as a criterion in evaluating a puzzle. (See this XWordInfo entry for an example of what I'm talking about.) After I finish a puzzle, I almost never go back and see if I can find other entries that fit theme. But if I do, and I find a lot of them, I don't count this against the puzzle. What difference does it make? Why are themes with only a few possible theme entries better?

If anything, having lots of theme entries makes construction more impressive to me, because it adds another layer of difficulty -- judicious decision-making. All constructors who have pored over a massive list of theme candidates knows how nerve-wracking it can be to try to pick the best ones (i.e., the ones you think the editor will like the best). Aspiring for theme tightness makes little sense to me.

(On a similar note, I couldn't care less if "hidden" words span all parts of an entry of not.)

6. When People Label All Boring/Common Fill as Crosswordese

I don't like this. To me, a defining characteristic of Crosswordese (which I once wrote an entire post on) is that it is specifically overused in crosswords vis-à-vis the real world. Not all boring or common fill qualifies. OREO, for example, is a word that appears often (arguably too much) in grids, but I would never call it Crosswordese, because every solver knew what an OREO was before they started solving. Contrast this with something like OREM, and you see what I mean.

Tangentially, are we sure Crosswordese is even bad? It probably is, and I don't like it now, but when I first started solving it was a fun code I had to crack. Is OLEO S-shaped molding or is that OGEE? This was a part of the draw for me -- learning a new weird language. There's a prevailing thought that Crosswordese is a turnoff for most new solvers -- and maybe it is -- but for what it's worth, it was the opposite for me.

7.  The "If I Don't Know It, It Must Obscure" Attitude

I call this the Priyanka Chopra Principle, so named because a person in a blog comments section once insisted, over several increasingly stubborn posts, that the international movie star/model, getter of over 75 million Google hits, and wife of a frickin' Jonas Brother is not a well-known celebrity.

Perhaps I'm particularly sensitive to this, because solvers have criticized my puzzles for using too many proper nouns (I remember this one particularly getting called out), but this is one of my least favorite attitudes among solvers. Even the best trivia knowers among us have big gaps in their knowledge, and you probably aren't one of the best trivia knowers among us. If you do enough crosswords you are likely to come across things and people -- important, famous things and people -- that you don't know. It doesn't mean that this thing or person is obscure or unworthy or that their inclusion in the grid is unfair. If the crosses are inferable, then it's fine.

Hot take: Even if the crosses aren't inferable, it's still fine. I'm not that bothered by the occasional "Natick." If you get a square wrong once in a while because you guess incorrectly, so what? 

8. ANOS Hate

I'm not down with the ANOS hate. ANOS appears sometimes in grids clued as something akin to "Spanish years." But the word in Spanish is actually AÑOS, with the tilde-N, so every time it pops up, somebody will complain about it and point out that it actually means anus, not years. But I don't get this because ANOS is completely in line with other foreign words in Crossword puzzles. The default convention is to transliterate non-English words using the standard, 26-letter English alphabet. In grids it's RENE, not RENÈ; it's NINO, not NIÑO; it's BRONTE, not BRONTË. Why should ANOS be treated differently?

Also, the fact that ANOS translate to anus is irrelevant to me. A lot of solvers don't know that, and even if they do, who cares? There is nothing inherently untoward or lewd about an anus. It's just a body part -- one used mostly (but certainly not exclusively) for pooping, sure -- but a body part nonetheless. Actually, this brings up another thing I don't like about crossword puzzles...

9. The Prudishness

Would it be so bad if mainstream puzzles could have anatomical words like ANUS and PENIS and VAGINA in them? I don't think so. In previous posts, I've made pretty clear my dislike of censorial guidelines in crossword puzzles, and this sentiment extends to private parts. We've just taken it as a given that such words are no-nos, but it doesn't have to be this way. And maybe it won't be someday. If G-SPOT can make regular appearances in the NYT, why not CLIT? I mean, the latter is shorter, has more convenient letters, and is an actual term people use, outside of article writers asking if it's real.

10. This Puzzle

I really like it, and it makes me super jealous I didn't create it. I used to be a big BOGGLE guy, unbeatable in my heyday,* and I've brainstormed so many different ways to make a BOGGLE-themed crossword puzzle over the years, but I never hit the jackpot. Trenton totally nails it. Coming up with a grid that can fit three synonyms of BOGGLE (an angle I never considered) in a BOGGLE board and as regular entries in the grid is brilliant in both its conception and execution. Kudos, Mr. Charlson; Kudos indeed. 

*I probably was beatable, but I don't remember ever actually losing. One of my finest moments came at a party, many years ago, when somebody randomly busted out Boggle and got a big game going. All the participants but me were close friends who had played each other before, and it was just assumed that one guy would win, as he was clearly the resident champion. I played it cool, like I was some normy bro and not a huge word nerd, and then proceeded to unseat the king in spectacular fashion. All the shorties in the house were flocking to me afterward, I assure you of that.

Until next time...