Saturday, 4/30/11

In the morning, I’ll be off to my first puzzle hunt! I hear DASH 3 is not as tough as some other puzzle hunts, and you know what? That is fine by me. I’m not keen on partaking of the sort of puzzle hunt that requires people to stay up all night being clever. The DASH site says, “Typical teams should expect to take from 5-8 hours to complete the entire hunt, but expert teams typically finish in 2-3 hours.” Holy mackerel, I don’t know where my team, Honorary Waddle, will fall in that spectrum. Marty Howard and his puzzling offspring (Rachel, Alison, and Philip) and I comprise a team that I hope will verge toward the expert level but who knows? At least the weather’s not supposed to be rainy or cold (but windy ≠ good for working on paper puzzles).

Frederick Healy’s New York Times crossword

4/30/11 NY Times crossword answers 0430

Didn’t we just see NOT SO HOT and SPRUCE UP in other puzzles over the past week? It’s as if the constructors are casting aspersions about our degree of tidiness. Who tipped them off about the STIES?

Highlights in this 72-worder:

• I like literary corner. 48a: ZANE GREY is a [Western master] who wrote lots of Westerns; my grandma liked to read them. 66a: EM’LY is from Dickens, right? 34d and 40d dish out two genres, the crossword< (well, I guess that’s not a genre per se) and SPY STORY.
• 5a. A karate DOJO is clued as a [Chopping center?].
• 15a, 16a. [Bit of avian anatomy] pulls double duty: QUILL and BILL. I kinda wanted a craw and a gullet.
• 24a, 19a. “AFRAID SO, folks.” “What? No! I DOUBT IT. I really don’t think that’s the case.”
• 50a. European river geography is a staple of crosswords, but usually without a hint of cleverness. [Inn’s end] wants you to remember that Innsbruck means “the river Inn’s bridge” and that the Inn is a river in Austria, so you can find your way to the DANUBE.
• 58a. HAVE IT MADE is a great verb phrase.
• 1d. JUBILANT is a lovely word.
• 3d. [Soap ingredient?] gets a question mark to point you towards soap operas and their MELODRAMA. My favorite clue.

Anything bogus in this puzzle? Not really. A few abbrevs, a few mostly-in-crosswords names (ILER, ELIA), the oddball USEE (13a: [One for whose benefit a legal suit is brought]), but no crossings that brought me to a screeching halt.

Four stars.

Barry Silk’s Los Angeles Times crossword

4/30/11 LA Times crossword solution

I don’t much follow baseball, but I do follow Barry Silk’s crosswords so I figured 9d: [2006 N.L. MVP] would be a player for the Phillies, Barry’s favorite team. Yes, RYAN HOWARD plays first base for them. No, the clue didn’t help me much. A gazillion crossings plus “I’ve seen that name before” did the trick.

Overall, the puzzle felt a notch or two harder than the usual Saturday LAT.

Highlights:

• 1a. Great trivia: [Michael Jordan began college as one] clues MATH MAJOR. I had planned to major in math myself, but then I hit calculus in 12th grade and reconsidered.
• 24a. “I HOPE NOT.” Ties to the response at 46d: “Don’t worry, IT ISN’T.”
• 29d. RICE WINE is an [Eastern quaff that’s typically 18-25% alcohol]? Do people drink that stuff straight?
• 58d. Partial RIN is old-school crosswordese, whereas the full name of RIN TIN TIN is better. Better yet: the clue, [Shepherd of old radio], meaning a German shepherd.
• 60a. Took me a while to figure out [Where three’s a crowd]: in a two-person TETE-A-TETE.
• 26d. ACT THE PART, great verb phrase. I’ll bet some people went with ACT YOUR (or ONE’S) AGE.
• 33d. The MGM GRAND has five consonants in a row.
• 41d. [Certain how-to book targets?] are IDIOTS. Dummies are your other choice here, but one letter too long.

I like the fill in this 68-worder a little bit less than the NYT’s, but there’s not enough difference to knock this one below four stars.

Mike Shenk’s Wall Street Journal Saturday Puzzle, “Spell Weaving”

While this puzzle has just 42 clues, every one of them pretty straightforward, it still took me longer than either of the themelesses with about 70 clues apiece. All the answers are “checked” by intersecting answers, but I think it’s harder to look for upward- or leftward-traveling crossers. I’m a glutton for cruciverbal punishment, though, so I wish the clues had been tricker so the puzzle would have taken me lots longer. Four stars.

There are a couple other variety puzzles to point you towards this week. There’s the NYT’s second Sunday puzzle, “Split Decisions” by George Bredehorn (PDF here). Doable, some tough spots, no obscure words to get on your nerves. Didn’t time myself doing the puzzle this evening.

Even if you turn your nose up at regular word searches as too easy, you may struggle with Trip Payne‘s variety word search, “Puzzle 4 U” (PDF here). The 7×7 matrix in the middle of the grid is blank, and you have to figure out what letters go there to complete the answers that cross the blank spots. The letters you add spell out something thematic, as do the unused letters throughout the grid. Note: The word ENEMA is lurking in the grid but isn’t part of the word list so you can pretend you didn’t see it.

Updated Saturday morning:

Randolph Ross’s CrosSynergy/Washington Post Crossword, “I’ve Got the Blues” – Sam Donaldson’s review

Ross has the blues alright, as he pairs up various shades of the color to form four (more or less) common expressions.  Whaddya say we celebrate the theme with a little quiz called “Name That Blue Shade:”  the eight shades of blue used in the theme entries are pictured in this post–can you correctly identify all eight?  Here are the theme entries:>

• 20-Across: [Winston Churchill’s “so few”] is the ROYAL AIR FORCE, so that means we have both “royal blue” and “Air Force blue” here. The clue is a reference to Chruchill’s famous remark that “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
• 33-Across: The [Nursery application] is BABY POWDER, so you’ll see both “baby blue” and “powder blue” (or will you?).



• 41-Across: The [Fighting force on la mer] is the FRENCH NAVY. That means one of these is “French blue” and one is “navy blue.”  As a theme entry, FRENCH NAVY feels a little contrived. It’s not like we all read about the French Navy in our western civilization textbooks. (Unless we did, in which case, then, I was sick that day.)



• 50-Across: The [Edison invention] is ELECTRIC LIGHT, meaning one of these pictures shows “electric blue” (not to be confused with “Electric Youth“) and “light blue.”  True story: at age 8, my family moved from the big city (Portland, Oregon) to a farm outside of a small town of 3,000.  To help me make the adjustment, my parents let me choose the paint color for my room.  My choice was formally labelled “George Washington Blue,” but today I’m pretty sure it’s known as electric blue.  In ten years there, I never wanted to change the color, and I still like it.

At first I didn’t much care for the theme entries, but that was because I thought only one half of each phrase related to the color blue. When I discovered that both halves of each phrase were shades of blue, I instantly became a lot more forgiving. Yeah, no one calls it ELECTRIC LIGHT (except for maybe a certain Orchestra of the 1970s), but in this particular theme I’m willing to roll with it.  Color me impressed!

Hmm, if I’m going to fit in all of these blue shades, I need to add some comments on the fill and clues:

• [Stately splendor] is POMP. *Sigh* Another William and Kate reference in our crosswords.
• The [Presidential daughter or New York neighborhood] is CHELSEA.  And at the Chelsea Market in Chelsea, there’s a wonderful little cheese shop called “Lucy’s Whey.”  The next time you’re there, be sure to order some Manchester cheese from Vermont’s Consider Bardwell Farm. Best. Cheese. Ever.  Get a half pound and ask them to break it down into two quarter-pound packages.  Keep one package for your own consumption and send the other one to me.



• I hit the southeast corner early, so I was sure that the [Civil War side] would be BLUE.  I was getting ready to write a long complaint about repeating a title word in the grid. Then, to my delight, I found the answer to be GRAY. I like that the Blue’s nemesis sneaks into the grid.
• Anyone else notice how PLAYBOY, the [Magazine with a centerfold] sits next to the AARP, the [Org. for seniors]? Anyone else like that a lot?
• The [Start of a valentine] is I LOVE. The end of the valentine is CHOCOLATE, SO I HOPE YOU GOT ME SOME.

Okay, that’s enough. Look for the answers to Name That Blue Shade (plus a review of May’s first puzzle) in tomorrow’s post!

Stan Newman’s Newsday crossword, “Saturday Stumper” (pen name “Anna Stiga”)

4/30/11 Newsday crossword answers "Saturday Stumper"

I’ve got to DASH this morning, so a quick write-up.

Four weirdest answers:

• 60a. PLUMING, clued as [Priding (oneself)]. Have never seen this usage before. Dictionary example: “She plumed herself on being cosmopolitan.” Related to archaic bird-related term, “plume oneself” for “preen.”
• 8d. [Delete] clues BLANK OUT, as in to delete what you’ve got and replace it with blanks. I prefer the “forget” meaning of the phrase.
• 33a. MUCH LESS looks so weird by itself in the grid, doesn’t it? One word, “muchless.” “I’m flat broke this week, totally muchless.” [Not to mention] captures it well enough, and I don’t consider the answer at all bothersome, MUCH LESS inappropriate for a crossword. It just looks funny to me smashed together.
• 1a. SAGINAW is a [Bay City neighbor] in Michigan. Bay City population, 39,000. Wha…? If you’re like me, the clue put you in mind of the Bay City Rollers’ “S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y Night” from the ’70s. Holy schnikes, did you know where they got their name? Wikipedia says: “Bassist Alan Longmuir, his younger brother Derek Longmuir, a drummer, along with schoolfriend, lead singer Gordon “Nobby” Clarkfounded the group in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1966, as The Saxons. Shortly afterwards, they chose a new name found at random by throwing a dart at a map of the United States. It landed near the community of Bay City, Michigan.” If only they had gone with the Saginaw Rollers.

Five highlights:

• 8d. [New grandparents, probably] are baby BOOMERS. Well, except for the ones who were teen parents themselves and whose offspring are reproducing young. Gen-Xers can be grandparents too.
• 50d. [Hail of a sort] clues “AHOY!”—which a sailor may shout to hail you. Byron Walden once clued AHOY as [Salty hail?]. When you see “hail” in a clue, think AHOY rather than ICE PELLETS FALLING FROM THE SKY.
• 62a. EL NORTE, “the North,” is clued as [USA, to Salvadorans]. I recommend the ’80s film by that name, El Norte.
• 36d. TRAIPSED is a lovely word. It’s got a certain panache to it. [Wandered] doesn’t exactly capture my usual sense of the word, but it works.
• 44d. Another lovely word is MELANGE, or [Mixed bag].

Four stars.