Holy Week (Sunday brunch: April 20, 2014)

Happy Easter to all, and a joyous Passover as well.  I think these holidays are best when you get a good story to tell out of them.  This year, one of Bangle’s classmates was scheduled to lead the Palm Sunday procession over to St. Luke’s, where we join with our neighbor churches for the blessing of the palms. But she got hit with a softball Saturday and was sporting a lovely black eye.  Of course she went ahead and led the procession, and her father made sure to get lots of pictures.

“Truly, I tell you: one of you will betray me tonight.”
da Vinci’s painting brought to life in Glenside.

Usually during Holy Week, we’ll have the Passion story read at least once, if not twice, but this year for Good Friday, we instead heard the Living Last Words, a companion work to the Living Last Supper that our church has put on the past several years.  Both pieces tell the narrative as seen through the eyes of the participants.

The teens were the performers in the Living Last Words, and Sabers (as the centurion) and Bangle (as the shepherd) gained much praise for their portrayals.

Meanwhile, my friend Burt scored the one-liner of the season: “I thought my wife and I would never hear those words from my daughter: ‘Let’s have the Seder at our house this year.’”

Got a story to share?  Comments are open.  On to the weekend’s puzzles.

The Wall Street Journal has a Hex variety cryptic: quite appropriately an Egg Hunt.  The solution is posted elsewhere on the blog.  Ask there if you need any of the clues explained; some of them are pretty clever.

Falcon found the Hex straight cryptic in the National Post to be harder than usual for the second week in a row.  I thought the same, and we probably both finished on the same answer.  And the Fraser Simpson puzzle from the Globe and Mail (printable, Java) was pretty hard too.

We learn this week from her latest Brit cryptic that LizR likes King Crimson.

The New York Times puzzle (behind the paywall) is a Hex acrostic.  Deb Amlen has comments and some answers at Wordplay.

If you didn’t see the update to Thursday’s post, Puzzazz released a new book of variety crosswords by Mike Shenk, and it shows off the advantages of the app really well.