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I originally made this puzzle as a 15 x 16 non-meta with the revealer MEET CUTE in the center of the grid, and both costars were clued as costars, but the fill was pretty rough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...