ACPT 2026

This blog is never dead. It's just put into an induced coma for a while. And now it's unshaven Ryan Gosling waking up to find out he needs to save the world.

I went to ACPT this past weekend, and had a blast, as always, and I did something I told myself I'm going to do every year and then never do: I took a bunch of pictures.* I didn't get one with everybody I wanted to, but I hit probably about 80%. My biggest omission is the folks in the tech room. I spend the most time with them, but we are always so hard at work, and then I just forget during those brief moments of downtime. Oh well, next year...

*I don't know the etiquette of posting pictures like this in a public forum. I didn't explicitly ask people if I could do so, and it would be far too time-consuming (and weird) to do so now. I think I'm okay, however, in that nobody will care and not many people read this thing when I posted regularly, let alone now, after a three-year hiatus. So, I'm just going to do it, and if perchance somebody sees this and does not want their picture up, simply say so in the comments, and I will remove it (and delete the comment).

 

 [Me before Puzzle 1.]

 

[Me, Kevin, Rich, and Eric.]

 

[Brian, Mike, Shannon, and Me.]

[Brendan and Me.]

[Me and Ian.]

 

 

[Elizabeth, Zach, and Me.]

 

[Two lovely people whose names I don't remember, Dan, and Me.]

 

 

[Me, Parker, Finn, Josh, Malaika.]

 

[Me and Tracy.]

  

[Me and Will.]

[Christina, Me, and Adrian.]

 

[Mike, Ben, and Me.]

[Me and Andrea.]

[Jazzy, Robyn, and Me.]

 

[Me, Wyna, nice guy whose name I forgot, and Adam.]

 

[Byron, Me, and Kareem.]

 

[Me and Mike.]

 

[Michael, Me, and Ruth.]

 

[Me, Shehroze, Zach.]

 

[Mary and Me.]

 

[Brian, Shannon, Me, Dan, and Mike.]

LAT Puzzle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

A-C-P-T Twenty Twenty Three

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Me.]

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

 

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

 

[Me, Will Shortz, and Shehroze Aamer.]

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

And that was ACPT 2023.

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

Meta Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until next time...

A Remembrance of Puzzles Past

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

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

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

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

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

 Until next time...

Will Must Send Regrets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her: What's the title?

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

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

Me: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

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

Until next time...

How Did I Miss My Puzzle?

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

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

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

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

Also, HUGE announcement coming in a few days.

Until then...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think there are two things going on here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until next time...

    

   

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...