About Tomorrow's Puzzle ...

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

About Tomorrow's Puzzle ...

For those of you solving tomorrow's (Thursday's) puzzle in AcrossLite or online, here is a link to a .pdf of what the grid is supposed to look like (not replicable in e-formats)

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/wordplay/100121xword.pdf


I solved it just fine on-line, but the .pdf is worth a look, in case you're wondering what the grid looks like in the paper (it's pretty predictable).

See you tomorrow a.m.

13 comments:

lit.doc 10:44 PM  

Holy crap! Never seen what the dead-tree version looks like. How many ways is it wrong that the editor's name is prior to, above, and in larger font than the constructor's??! @Rex, you've commented about this before, if memory serves, but I had no idea how effed up it really is. Thanks for the early heads-up post.

retired_chemist 11:07 PM  

I did it in AL, but I wish I had had the heads-up before I solved. I'd have been faster, but it was fun anyway. I will defer other comments until Rex posts his blog.

cefulan?

dk 11:11 PM  

5 years of grad school beat that concern (authorship order) out of me. My research partner also found her research as an uncited chapter in a fading professors book.

7 hours from now I shall hear the reassuring thump of the NYT on my front stoop.

George NYC 11:46 PM  

What r_c said.

Lon 12:03 AM  

Thanks for the pdf. It makes more sense to see the corners actually cut. I usually never get the puzzle themes until after I've solved the puzzle. In fact, some times, I have to go to this blog to find out the theme. But this one, I actually figured out the missing "nothing" theme and used it before finising.

Thanks again.

des 1:07 AM  

Yes, it would have been nice to have Rex's hint before doing this one. As it was, I really needed the theme answer to understand what was going on (that, and the reality that 1A made no sense without something else, much less 13D).

What took me the longest time, however, was finding 49A. Is that going to be the word of the day or is it going to be 26D?

lit.doc 1:47 AM  

@des, I'm guessing 49A. Look forward to the a.m. post. At 12:30 CST, six googles and an hour in, I'm looking at NENEIDS and SLOTENS. And, at least as unpromising, ZOD at 44A. And a blank square at 34A EN_ANT. Ack.

lit.doc 2:05 AM  

Damn (BTW no spoilers here). Less than two minutes later, grad school kicks in and I see the error in 26D which lets me see the now-obvious 34A. Damn. Still staring at SLOTENS and ZOD. G'night. Damn.

chefwen 2:11 AM  

That sure would have helped. Looking forward to complete write up tomorrow because I really struggled to make sense out of this, brain would. not. engage! Was going to make a comment about one of the answers but I don't want to be a spoiler.

andrea michaels 3:13 AM  

Elizabeth Gorski can do no wrong! :)

@litdoc
Check your spelling of 20D and you'll be fine, son...but you'll need "new material" to make 49A/50D work

sillygoose 3:51 AM  

Wow. This was an awesome puzzle. The dead tree version might have sped things up, but that might have actually made it less enjoyable. This took a while but I really enjoyed every minute of it.

@lit.doc LOL I had some similar troubles :-)

lit.doc 6:22 AM  

@andrea, you're an angel.

retired_chemist 9:29 AM  

Seinfeld and Costanza (cf. 63A) would love this - it's a puzzle about nothing. Gotta wonder if 63A is a shout-out to the theme.

Very nice in any case. Thanks and props to Ms. Gorski. I'd go for medium - some of the clues seem Friday level to me.

Had _CCA_ for 14D and thought about trying to make OCCAM fit. There was a "comedy" in organic chemistry some 50 years ago in which one side of a controversy (almost exclusively H. C. Brown) used Occam's razor as its prime argument. Turned out he was probably wrong, or so it is generally believed now. Brown subsequently received the 1994 Nobel Prize in Chemistry tor unrelated work.

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