is it midnight yet? (solution No. 3,284)

If you want a puzzle typifying Hot and Trazom's cluing, as distinguished from Hex or Patrick Berry or some other constructor, this is the one.  Some misdirection, and rules bent gently but not unfairly.

Solution and annotation below the fold.

Anyone have an A string? (Sunday Brunch: May 19, 2013)

Yeah, I realize it’s Monday brunch.  I'm catching up.  Sometimes I even have a breakfast burrito for dinner (though that's not necessarily because I didn't have breakfast).

Here are the week’s new puzzles.

The Wall Street Journal have a moderately difficult variety cryptic by Hex called Pyramid Scheme.  Groaner warning for the solution phrase at the bottom of the puzzle, and props to Hex for the pyramid reference in the first clue. If time permits, I might post a hint.

For some reason, I didn’t really like the grid of that puzzle.  The concept was fine: acrosses are normal but downs either go diagonally left or diagonally right, in straight lines where some puzzles of this shape might veer back and forth.  But some of the acrosses were unchecked, so while the first row had six letters, there were only four downs starting in the row. Also, diagonals that didn’t spell out words didn’t have heavy bars.  I can see why, since adding the bars would have made the puzzle much easier as well as spoiling the symmetry of the blank grid.

It’s also the time of the month for a new Harpers (subscriber page): this one referencing (at least in the title) Rogers and Hammerstein instead of Stephen Sondheim).  It’s called “June is Busting Out All Over.”  The clues were not too difficult, but I’m still grappling with the unclued central letter.  For what it’s worth, Erica doesn’t have her commentary on the May Maltby posted yet at Tacky Harpers Cryptic Clues.  Post here or at her blog in in the meantime and I'll explain the solution.

The Hex straight cryptic in the National Post is themed on some of the longer place names in Canada.  I can rattle off names like Swift Current (Saskatchewan) and Chicoutimi (Quebec) since they’re home to teams in the major junior leagues of hockey.  Some of the nicknames are pretty good too, like the Brandon (Manitoba) Wheat Kings, the Windsor Spitfires, and the Shawninigan Cataractes.  The best hockey players in Canada (and increasingly from the USA) don’t play college hockey: they go to the Ontario League, the Quebec League, and the Western League, while the second-tier players go to the NCAA.   Players can be drafted by NHL teams once they turn 18, and some of them go to training camp and possibly play a few games for the NHL team before being returned to their junior team for the rest of the season.

The Times has an acrostic this week (behind the paywall).  Deb Amlen has some comments on the puzzle from Hex over at Wordplay. 

Nathan Curtis's weekly variety crossword is a Snake Charmer.

Naan (Puzzle No. 3,284)

I enjoy Indian food, and we have some pretty good places to get it in the Philadelphia area.  Note however that none of them are on the Penn campus where I work, and none of the trucks offering Indian food are particularly good.

It may not be how everyone else does it, but my first criterion for judging an Indian restaurant is the breads.  If you don't like the first curry you try, maybe another one will be better, but if the bread is dry or tough or burnt, there really isn't a substitute.  Onion kulchas are my favorite, but naan is essential.

Link to puzzle: http://www.thenation.com/article/174332/puzzle-no-3284

Hozom's comment: "Coming and Going" in which Hot and Trazom field the slings and arrows that came their way after this clue:

Bread, upon reflection, is bread (4)

I didn't like it either (and I love naan).  I got the reversal part, but I was trying to find something relating to money in the backward bread.  Maybe it's that I've done too many Hex cryptics: Hex are partial to those kind of second definitions.    But reading the column and thinking more carefully about the clue, I can't fault it, like I could with last week's 12d.  The indicator is just fine: it's on me to remember that a reversal with the same definition as the straight definition could be a palindrome, and a cigar is just a cigar.

Solution and annotation on Monday (I think).  I wasn't stuck this time.

Catching up (Solution No. 3,283)

I had my hands full this week, in more ways than one.  While I might not finish solving the The Nation cryptic on the first crack at it, I usually get the remaining bits by the weekend for the usual Monday solution post.  That didn't happen this week.  Not with 12d.  So it got tied up in the work week, and I went on to some less-frustrating solves before finally giving in and going to the computer to figure out 12d.

On the other hand, the theme was pretty easy to find, especially if you know someone who went to Iowa State, in Ames.

Solution and annotation below the fold.

Bach Sunday (Sunday brunch: May 12, 2013)

This weekend, TODM and the church choir sing Bach's Cantata #37: Wer da gläubet und getauft wird (He that believeth and is baptized...shall become blessed).  It's an Ascension Day cantata.  To get the full effect of Bach, I think one should be open to the spiritual as well as the architectural constructions. Much of his work was composed to illumine the church year or riff on the hymn of the day, and if you're aware of that influence, things make even more sense.  Kind of like recognizing the nods Hot and Trazom make to the political preferences of most The Nation readers.

From the sacred to the profane?  Not quite.  Patrick Berry has another of his Seven Sages puzzles: this one with a quote from George Carlin.  I tried the obvious quote, but it fell (appropriately) four letters short.  Next time they publish one of these, I do it in pencil.  By the time I finished, my grid was about as messy as Bangle's room, thanks to the two or three times I put answers in the wrong locations.  Just sloppy solving: when I had the common letters for 21 and 22, I would put them in the 20/21 spaces.

Nathan Curtis offers a Snake Charmer this week.  I thought it was a breeze.  The first few letters of most of the answers were enough to clear up anything I was unsure about.

Behind the NYT paywall is a Mel Taub Puns and Anagrams puzzle.  I might have said this before, but Puns and Anagrams is good batting practice for cryptic solvers.  The key difference is that indicators are left out of many clues.  If at first you can't parse the clue, assume it's an anagram.  Anyone want to solve it for time?  Post your times in the comments.

UPDATE: The solution is below the fold.  Once you're done with that one, why not browse the rest of our Sunday brunch and pick out a few more puzzles to solve?  The Hex puzzle immediately below is a good intermediate-level cryptic that Puns and Anagrams solvers should be able to get through, while the Tom Toce variety puzzles I featured in a couple of recent posts are an easy introduction to variety cryptics.   

And of course there's the Hex cryptic in the National Post.  Of course it's themed.  Solve it and then call your mother.

Mark Halpin's Sondheim-inspired puzzle is a really polished work.  I don't know if he edits his own work or has someone else do it, but the grids are tight and symmetric, and the clues are well-written.  Halpin also manages to find the "difficult but not impossible" sweet spot a lot of constructors try for.  You think you'll never get the meta, but soon there's a toehold, and a couple more pieces, and then the "aha" moment where the whole theme comes together.  Like a Bach fugue.

And speaking of music, happy birthday to Raydoc, who's not a musician himself but has a good ear and particularly enjoys the work of Soviet era and post-Communist composers like Arvo Pärt and Henryk Górecki.

JS Bach: Cantata #37

New York Times Puns and Anagrams solution for May 12, 2013 is below the fold: keep scrolling!

When a cryptic is not a crossword (Puzzle No. 3,283)

Tom Toce's "Golf"

Continuing a week devoted to Tom Toce's puzzles, I solved the 2010s, and one of them was called "Golf."  Like the others, it was not too difficult, yet quite creative.  But it didn't have a grid: not a grid of squares, and not an arrangement of hexagons or triangles or a spiral either.  There were 18 sets of lines on a "scorecard" and a theme answer to be derived from one column, so at least there was something connecting the answers to each other.

I imagine this might bother some of the purists: those of you who find comfort and security in knowing the rules of cryptic crosswords.  Others get their kicks marveling at grids where words are knit together so as to be almost watertight (they worship Patrick Berry).

Is ignoring the "cross word" requirement of a crossword a constructor's copout or is it a fun change of pace?  Is a non-gridded a line you don't want constructors to cross, or would you rather let the standards be loose enough to make room for creative ideas?  Leave a comment so the constructors who read the blog will know what the sense of the solving community is.

This week we definitely have a theme to the The Nation puzzle, as 27a will tell you.  Work the other acrosses first though and see if you can figure out the theme without the hint.  If you can, go brag over at Word Salad.

Link to puzzle: http://www.thenation.com/article/174217/puzzle-no-3283

Degree of difficulty (by standards of this weekly puzzle): mostly easy, part of the SE is hard though

Hozom's comment: Mixing It Up Even More, in which Hot and Trazom explain what a compound anagram clue is.  It's a clue where there may be some extra words breaking up the anagram fodder.  We have one of those in this week's puzzle: to avoid a spoiler, the clue with the compound anagram is in white text: drag the cursor over this --->  (13d) <---  to see which one.

Solution and full annotation posted Monday.  Join us this weekend for Sunday Brunch: there's a new Mark Halpin to solve.

Editing (Solution No. 3,282)

Over the weekend I solved several more of Tom Toce's puzzles (see last weekend's Sunday brunch).  I'll share some observations from the experience this week.  First, there were sometimes errors in the grids like a number in the wrong place, or errors in the instructions, such as a count of the number of proper nouns or other non-standard entries.  There were also some clues which weren't quite right.

What I realized was that Toce is a pretty creative constructor (he admits he's partial to unusual grids): he  just needs a good editor.  He's got test solvers who catch the big errors and make suggestions for improvements, but that's not the same as editing.  A good puzzle editor picks at all the details and spruces up clues as necessary.  From what I've read, Will Shortz as an editor is more inclined to change constructors' clues, particularly when editing the New York Times crossword.  

As long as the editor respects the constructor's style, it doesn't matter to me whether an editor is heavy-handed or just makes gentle suggestions, but it can be jarring to read an article written in two distinct voices.  Maybe Toce can assemble a collection of puzzles to sell through Puzzazz.  If he does, he'd be wise to engage Hot and Trazom (who edited the NPL cryptic collection) or some other editor to go over his puzzles first.  

On to the solution of this week's The Nation cryptic.     

Themework:  I don't know if Hot and Trazom intended it this way, but they paid tribute to the solvers in 1a, 19a, 28a.

Difficulty (by standards of this weekly puzzle):  Moderate

Political content:  Not 18a! 

Musical content: 10a

Solution and annotation below the fold.