WEEKLY WRAP-UP: May 5-18 (Super-Sized)

Actually, this write-up won't be Super-Sized at all, as I have not preserved good comments and emails as vigilantly as I normally do. End-of-the-semester takes me out of my normal rhythm a little. OK, a lot. I just turned my grades in today ... a great feeling. Now I have to deal with my cluttered, disorganized, messy house, and an In-Box that's ridiculously backed up and scores of donors who still need Thank-You cards, etc. But all the cleaning house is fine by me, as I won't have the go-to-the-office semi-daily grind for another 3+ months. I will still have a grind (of the "write your damned book already, you idiot" variety), but it will be a grind I can endure in my pajamas if I so choose.

Another reason my comment- and mail-saving vigilance has abated is that I've been constructing puzzles like mad. Mad. As in "insane." As in my wife is worried about my losing my mind. Apparently it's all I talk about. How annoying. I may have to take a break.

Here are some comments on the week I missed (week before last):

re: WACS (Tuesday puzzle) John in CT commented: "Also, as a thirty-something puzzle solver, while I am familiar with Francis the mule, I am not familiar with the adventures of his life."

Crosscan echoed my puzzlement at SEDALIA (Wed. puzzle): "While I always say I live in Victoria, BC , I am actually in Saanich, which is a suburb with more people than Victoria proper. However, despite the appealing SAA, I would never expect to see it in a puzzle as most solvers would consider it an obscure 7 letter random city starting with S. Along comes SEDALIA and the bar has been lowered."

My minor tirade against a poorly constructed Star-Tribune puzzle resulted in some funny comments from people who tried the puzzle themselves and somehow survived. Wade wrote: "Man, what a weird sensation to read another xword blog (the Star Tribune blog link Rex provided.) It's like discovering life on another planet, or the Bizarro-World episode of Seinfeld--there are all these people out there like us, but stranded in a different world and in another space-time continuum, making do with inferior puzzles. Dennis, C.C., Thomas . . . . I'm so, so sorry. . . . How long have you been there? Where are your people? . . . . Rex, do something, dammit! Save these people! Are they not crossworders? Prick them, do they not bleed?"

And green mantis: "That Tribune puzzle terrified me. It's like Nam over there. Gory. I don't know why those poor villagers don't run. It really is like they have been lulled into compliance by some sort of mediocrity Kool-Aid. I'm staying well away from that puzzle from now on, for my own safety, and I suggest you all do the same. If you go back, don't blame me when you're wandering around in nothing but a dirty sarong worshipping Ler and muttering about all your lost vials of galipot."

And who could forget abigail's incisive comment on the Wed. 5/14 puzzle?: "i Nice Blog .Christmas Games And puzzle Ideas For Kids, Family. i first free UK bingo 90 ball game. Play free collectable card games online and dpnight jpg great. expenses free readable christmas bingo card.Bingo online games for primary elementary pushout bingo cards free christmas printable bingo bible lotto esl bingo generator st clarence free ride bingo rules operator precedence regulations." Well said.

Back when Ernie PYLE was in the puzzle, I got this note from William N.: "Re: your comment on Ernie Pyle. Pyle was in the ETO before he went to the Pacific. He knew Hemingway there, which led to Hemingway's jest that he was Ernest Hemorrhoid, the poor man's Pyle."

My remark that the spelling of ERROLL (in ERROLL Garner) in Sunday, May 11's puzzle, was startling and odd, I was gently corrected by reader Erroll H. (seriously): "More info on Erroll with two L's, which is the preferred spelling. Apologies to Mr. Flynn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_of_Erroll"

Having nothing to do with puzzles, my wife (Sandy) sent me this interesting link, accompanied by the message: "'50s plastic' seems like the best euphemism ever for 'crazy racist $#!#.'"

Word of the Week! What should it be? Well, we need two - one from two weeks ago, and one from last week. OK, from two weeks ago, let's go with: pepper (since it caused so much weird derision and animosity to be directed my way). Def. 7 leads us to: PEPPER GAME -

a group warm-up usu. preceding a baseball or softball game consisting of short quick throws bunted in return by a single batter

However common this is, I am having trouble picturing it. Perhaps because the dictionary does not appear to know what "bunting" means. Other descriptions I read on-line describe the ball being hit (in a controlled fashion) back toward 3+ players who are standing rather close to the batter (20-30 feet away). It's a warm-up exercise that many ballparks have outlawed, allegedly because of fan safety, but, according to this article, more to keep the field pristine for gametime.

And for this week, let's go with the non-proper noun version of quixote, which was (oddly) clued as [Visionary] in this past Saturday's puzzle. My dictionary has simply "a quixotic person," so here's "quixotic" -

idealistic and utterly impractical; esp : marked by rash lofty romantic ideas or chivalrous action doomed to fail <~as a restoration of medieval knighthood -M.R. Cohen> syn see IMAGINARY

"Visionary" misses everything particularly interesting about the word. It also contains in it an element of implicit cynicism, as if any "vision" of a better world is foolish. "You may say, I'm a QUIXOTE ... but I'm not the only one." Please keep in mind that when used as a general noun, quixote is pronounced 'kwik-set [that "e" should be a schwa, but I can't find the key that makes that symbol]

OK, that's all. More organized wrap-ups begin again in a week.

RP

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WEEKLY WRAP-UP: May 6-12, 2008

It's finals week here in Rex Land, so no time for a weekly wrap-up. I'll do a Double-Stuf edition next Monday.

Tuesday's write-up is on its way. After I eat.

rp

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WEEKLY WRAP-UP: April 28 - May 4, 2008

Rarely does Tuesday provide most of the week's fireworks, but this past Monday featured one of the most absurd SE corners in Tuesday puzzle history. SYZYGY, which, SethG tells me, is the name of the Carleton women's ultimate frisbee team, sat next to the ultra-odd FERULE, and both were crossed by the rare SFC. My biggest problem, though, was not being able to spell SOYUZ. Haven't been so soundly defeated by a Tuesday puzzle since last year's infamous PFUI puzzle. Crosscan, after having cleverly suggested on Monday that I should change my name to ReChrist (so as not to offend the Lord), summed up my feelings about FERULE quite succinctly: "FERULE goes into my NABES file." Jim in Chicago had trouble in another part of the puzzle. His comment about 1A: No stranger to the slopes (ski bum): "All I can say is that I wrote in SHERPA for 1A and it was all downhill from there." That made me laugh, until I realized that the "downhill" part was supposed to be a cutesy play on words - referring to "ski bum," and then my laughter turned to wincing. SHERPA as a dreadfully wrong answer is funny in itself - doesn't need the cutesy additive of a play on words.

Friday's puzzle brought out some great comments, including Howard B's off-the-cuff performance of Skee-Lo's "I Wish" (such as his brain could remember it):

"I wish I was a little bit taller.
I wish I was a baller.*
I wish...something something rabbit in a hat..
..something something Impala."**

Why is even that much still swimming around in my head?!? Any idea, Rex? I'm stumped.
It was catchy, though.

* (basket, not melon)
** (paw-la?)

Here's the actual song, in case you want it to get stuck in your head too.

Wade offered an apt description of the awkward pseudo-clever cluing of both PAVER (2D: One of a lot of workers?) and UNBURNT (36D: Still "well," but not beyond): "It was kind of like watching a drunk guy play charades." And Byron was very quick to answer my plea for a Chris Rock riff on the Jeremiah Wright controversy:

Chris Rock on Jeremiah Wright: "[He's a] 75-year-old black man who doesn't like white people. Is there any other kind of 75-year-old black man?" When asked to respond to the quote at his National Press Club speech, Wright retorted "I think it's just like the media. I'm not 75."

On Saturday karmasartre shared a helpful mnemonic for spelling Lee IACOCCA's name:

I
Am
Chairman
Of
Chrysler
Corporation (of)
America

While meandering around the internets I came across an old (pre-Shortz) article about the NYT crossword, which contained a piece of a letter from former NYT Sunday Times Magazine editor Lester Markel to the woman who would become the NYT Crossword's first editor, Margaret Farrar. With the looming recession, I thought it was eerily relevant:

I don’t think I have to sell you on the increased demand for this kind of pastime in an increasingly worried world. You can’t think of your troubles while solving a crossword …

So whatever else happens to the world, at least crosswords will thrive. Friday also taught us that another word for "gunman" (of the criminal / hitman variety) could be TORPEDO. Here is a fabulous glossary of hard-boiled terminology. Well worth reading, and maintained by a very knowledgeable guy: "Twists, Slugs and Roscoes"

With YENTL's appearance in today's puzzle (yet again), I thought it worth directing your attention to a link I added late to Saturday's write-up: Nelson Muntz (the main bully on "The Simpsons") singing (in painful earnestness, just as the composer surely intended) "Papa, Can You Hear Me?"

And your word of the week...

Well, this week was a toughie. FERULE (47D: Punishing rod - from Tues.) looked to be a shoo-in, as it is probably the rarest word we've seen all week, and it @#$#'d me up good - and on a Tuesday, no less. But then, just as the puzzle week neared its end, a dark horse came riding up from out of the mist ... a word so silly that it could not be denied. A word so silly that my brain neglected to register it when I did my write-up. That's right, I speak of none other than:

BLAT! (95D: Be noisy - from Sun.)

At first glance, it looks like little more than an overly creative Batman sound effect. But look more closely:

vi 1: to cry esp. like a calf or sheep: BELLOW, BLEAT {the calf blatted in fear as it was borne to the ground - F.D. Davison} 2a: to make a senseless or raucous noise {like an oboe blatting ... inside a barrel of feathers - R.P. Warren} b: to talk loudly and often foolishly {someone has to be constantly blatting around the house - Wilder Hobson} ~ vt: to utter (as an opinion) loudly and often foolishly or unthinkingly: BLURT {you don't want to go blatting this all over town - Mary S. Watts}

What I learned from the above definition is that BLAT came into existence because groups of people repeatedly failed to find the word they were actually looking for and ended up saying "BLAT." It is some kind of unholy hybrid of BLEAT and BLAB, but much, much funnier (and more fun to say) than either of those. I love the oboe quote too. Whoa, added bonus: just now, I found out (via the OED) that my favorite author once used the word - from Raymond Chandler's The High Window:

I went up the stairs. The radio I had heard over the telephone was still blatting the baseball game. I read numbers and went up front. Apartment 204 was on the right side and the baseball game was right across the hall from it. I knocked, got no answer and knocked louder. Behind my back three Dodgers struck out against a welter of synthetic crowd noise. I knocked a third time and looked out of the front hall window while I felt in my pocket for the key George Anson Phillips had given me.

Of course, if you want to combine FERULE and BLAT into one sentence, you really can't beat Orange's suggestion:

"If you don't quit that infernal blatting, so help me, I'll thwack you with my trusty ferule!"

-RP

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WEEKLY WRAP-UP: April 21-27, 2008

Not a terribly eventful week, what with NABES nearly completely off the horizon. Aw ... let's just stay with NABES (and last Monday) a teeny while longer. Last Monday's puzzle (NABES part deux) was unusually tough for most people (relative to Mondays, that is). Here's John, expressing succinctly the problem / challenge that a novice solver would have faced:

• I've never heard of or seen PITH (42D). [didn't find this word odd]
• I've never seen APERCU in a puzzle (50A). [yeah, that's a late-week word, for sure]
• I've never heard of or seen SENNA (63A). [another befuddler, if the number of Googlers I got is any indication]
• I've never heard of or seen SWAIN (30D). [now that strikes me as an almost ordinary word]
• I've never heard of Tom EWELL, AUDIE Murphy or Red ADAIR. [they are all frequent puzzle denizens]
• "A Lesson from ALOES"????" [yeah, that word in the plural is like nails on a chalkboard]

Monday also featured a fascinating observation by "Anonymous" re: NABES in the Monday grid: "You can also change NABES to LABIA with no problem." And he/she was absolutely right: NET goes to LET, ASEA goes to ASIA, and PSST goes to PSAT. I'll take LABIA over NABES any day (!), as it is far less disturbing. You can clue LABIA without reference to female genitalia, but nobody's going to buy it, so all this hypothesizing is moot. Fun, but moot.

Wade issued a challenge on Monday:

[C]ome up with a clue using as many of the "crossword only" words you can put in there. It would be, like, totally awesome if the answer turned out to be a pantheonic word, but that may be overreaching. So I'm asking all you bygone cager sloganeers to step up to the plate. Second prize is a tripe taco at the greatest taco truck north of I-10 (in the vacant lot next to Wendy's on Durham.) First prize is you don't have to eat a tripe taco at the greatest taco truck north of I-10 (in the vacant lot next to Wendy's on Durham.)

My best shot, which is bad on many levels: [Bygone "It's the Water" sloganeer, slangily] => OLY. As in "Olympia Beer." Check out these ads- there are a lot of them on youtube, but this set actually uses "OLY" - ah, the early 70s. Thank god I wasn't born any later than I was. Good times.

I forgot to mention, in my Sunday write-up, the fact that as I was scanning over my puzzle before after finishing, looking for answers to talk about, I could not figure out how HAS A GOAT could possibly be an acceptable answer - nor could I believe I had failed to notice a clue that would result in such an answer. Sadly, the answer was actually the far more pedestrian HAS A GO AT.

As for mistakes, I have two favorites. First, there was one made by multiple people in Saturday's very tough puzzle. The clue, [Something damned with faint praise, in British lingo], stumped many people. Some of us eventually hacked our way to the correct answer, CURATE'S EGG, but several of us got stopped at other answers along the way. Most popular stop appears to have been PIRATE'S EGG, though commenter roro offered up the equally compelling CYRANO'S EGG. If you don't know the origin of the phrase, then really, it could be anybody's egg.

The other great wrong answer was one I and several others had on Tuesday. The clue: [What a gal has that a gent doesn't?]. The answer: HARD G. My answer: HER DG. My rationale: EMEER looks as good as AMEER to me, and the possessive pronoun fit the clue, and maybe DG is some slang I've never heard of. This mistake resulted in what is clearly the comment of the week, submitted by Ms. Orange. It's bold, it's daring, it's probably dirty, and best of all, it's succinct: "My DG itches."

Oh, I almost forgot about the UEY / UIE controversy from Thursday's puzzle [Turnabout, in slang]. I would say that there was also a UWE controversy, as many people insisted (publicly and privately) that UWE (crossing DOWN) was just as good if not better than the "correct" answer, UIE (crossing DO IN, which apparently some people parsed as the non-existent but awesome-sounding word DOIN!). Sorry, UWE is an obscure hockey player, if it's anything. You have two choices: UEY and UIE. The former is more common and, IMOO, better.

As for mail ... nothing terribly interesting this week. One reader (forgive me, I copied your message unattributed onto my stickie note), wrote me about her out-of-the-blue memory of having frequented a coffee shop in Las Cruces, NM at one point in her life, a coffee shop whose name ... was NABES. Tried desperately to get a photo, but when she emailed her friend, she was informed that NABES had been out of business for years. That's what happens when you give your coffee shop a ridiculous name.

In the "bitter letter out of nowhere" category, we have this gem from a 6-weeks-ago reader, re: Anita HILL: "Anita Hill's public degradation was due to her propensity for telling lies." I have a weird theory that this guy is also the Xmas guy is also Grampa Mike, the very first person ever to comment on my blog. That comment:

First, please do not comment on puzzles the day they are printed. Further, many across the country get today's puzzle next week, so you shouldn't give away the fun for them.

Second, many of the words you are objecting to are entirely familiar to anyone who has solved puzzles even relatively briefly.

Your criticism that some of these words are not familiar to all people generally is an unfair criticism. Like any pastime, this one has its own world, and that includes stars with interesting names, animals familiar to those who watch the Animal Channel, etc.

This blog is just a bad idea.

IMHO.

And thus "IMOO" was born. Thankfully, that comment was followed immediately by one from one of my first loyal readers, lhoffman12:

This site is one of the best I've seen on crossword puzzles. Good graphics, good references...highly entertaining! If grandpa mike doesn't want to have hints about the puzzle, no one is forcing him to look at your site. I hope you keep it up.

And I did.

Aviatrix wants you to watch an ad that involves two pilots trying to solve a crossword puzzle, so enjoy.

And now, our Word of the Week: CURLEW

(43A: Cousin of the sandpiper - from Saturday's Brad Wilber puzzle)

any of a number of wide-ranging chiefly migratory birds (family Scolopacidae) esp. of the genus Numenius having long legs, a long slender bill that curves downward, and plumage variegated with brown and buff

I love when dictionary entries sound like poetry. If you are looking to be able to distinguish CURLEWS from sandpipers, good luck. There is also a bird called the "CURLEW sandpiper": "a sandpiper that is widely distributed in the Old World and has a curved bill like that of a curlew." Thanks for the help, dictionary!

There's also a CURLEWberry, a CURLEW bug, and a CURLEW jack, all of which are defined by words that I would have to look up to understand ("crowberry," "corn billbug," and "whimbrel," respectively).

Lastly, reader pics - here's one submitted by Andrea Carla Michaels. It features Friday's constructor, Mike Nothnagel (Mr. Smiley on the left) and some of his groupies (wink) hanging out at the ACPT a couple months back (that light fixture behind them is one of the most pathetic things I've ever seen in a non-fleabag hotel):


Here is the sociopathically neat completed Tuesday puzzle of commenter Fergus:


And here is the awesomest cake ever - actually presented this past week to reader ... well, you can see his name right there:


Crossword cake and Yoohoo! Now that's a party...

-PS Pete M. now has a blog about the NY Sun puzzles, so if you do those (which you should), why not check it out?

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WEEKLY WRAP-UP: April 14-20, 2008

Welcome to the first ever "Weekly Wrap-Up," wherein I will share some reader mail, revisit the best of the week's comments, post any crossword-related pictures I might have received, and celebrate my WORD OF THE WEEK.

This week was all about NABES. Showed up on Friday in the 1A position, crossing the anemic / mystifying NET LEASES, which held the 1D position. Then NABES had the temerity to show its head again on Monday (April 21, today). As one commenter on Monday's write-up ("mike") put it, "It went from being killer fill to a gimme in one weekend." That's just the kind of magical power I've been striving for - the ability to transmogrify the difficulty level of words! I knew that complaining about NABES would cause some blowback from readers to whom the word was familiar, but I was heartened when the very first comment I read was from Wade (or the Texan Jester, as I call him ... to myself):

Knowing for absolute certainty that the answer to 1 down was NETLEASE was no help at all with NABES and in fact threw me into an existential quandary wherein I doubted the continued sanctity of life.

That's solving with your whole body, including your soul! That's how you do it! All or nothing! Sadly for Wade, he got perilously close to nothing (Sartre's Nothingness), but he seems to have pulled himself out of his nosedive since then.

Kate demonstrated how bad the effects of a puzzle beat-down can be on your brain: " I would hate to admit how much time I've spent on this fine day reciting "babes, cabes, dabes, eabes, fabes, gabes, habes..." to myself, hoping something would finally make sense." And then there was Asian Badger's zinger from Saturday's Comments section: "About the only thing I liked about this puzzle was that it didn't have "NABES" in it." Funny. Not fair, but funny.

While I have come to accept that NABES is a [choke] valid answer, I will say that I got messages from more than one constructor who told me that they would never let the word into one of their puzzles. One of themwrote: "I would NEVER use NABE in a puzzle of mine, even if it meant redesigning the grid to lose it." This same constructor went on to vent about USH (not in a puzzle this week, but inevitably coming back to a puzzle near you in the near future). I could only nod my head in sad agreement. He couldn't see the nod, as we were communicating via computer, but I'm sure he felt it.

Here's one of my favorite comments of the week. It's from Barb in Chicago (from Sunday's Comments section), and has Nothing to do with puzzles, but I hardly care. It's an EAP ([Literary monogram]) story waiting to happen!

At this very moment a hand is appearing under the 6-foot fence surrounding my yard, and some sort of yummy treats are being slipped to my chocolate lab by my odd next door neighbor. It makes me feel sort of Addams-family-ish uncomfortable, but the dog is deliriously happy.

The most helpful bit of mail I received this week came from "PD" who would like me (and now you) to know that "Lon NOL [in Friday's puzzle] is one of the few politicians whose name is a palindrome. Easy to remember."

My favorite wrong answer of the week is also from Friday's puzzle: several people apparently tried LEMURS as an answer to [What big eyes they have]. Real answer: OGLERS. LEMURS is sooo much better.

And our first ever Word of the Week: CABOTINAGE

(9D: Engage in cabotinage (emote) - from Saturday's brutal Bob Klahn puzzle)

[F, fr. cabotin strolling actor, charlatan (fr. Cabotin, 17th cent. Fr. actor) + -age]: behavior befitting a second-rate actor: obviously playing to the audience: THEATRICALITY

A word for this political season if ever there was one.

I'll leave you with a couple pictures. The first one is of Linus, from the Charles Schulz museum in Santa Rosa, CA, sent to me by reader Steve R. That pic is followed by reader SethG's photo of some of his "friends" on their visit to AYERS Rock, otherwise known as ULURU (great potential crossword answers both). Enjoy the rest of your day. -RP


PS Thanks to Bonafide Hearsay for the nice write-up of my site today. Much appreciated. -RP

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