Testing, 1, 2, 3 (Sunday brunch: July 12, 2015)

[Apologies for the late post: I got called for a fill-in referee job.]

The codes for each step of this ice dance
tell you what edge to be skating on:
LFO is left skate, forwards, outside edge

Congratulations to Bangle, who passed two figure skating tests yesterday.  When she resumed skating after her concussion last winter, she wasn’t cleared to do jumps and spins until well after she was fully recovered.  So instead, she worked on ice dance, which requires precise and strong skating skills more than the speed and power for jumps and spins.

Competition is one way of proving your skills, but skating also has a series of tests, where you aren’t competing against other skaters: you’re trying to skate well enough to earn a passing score from the judges.  The tests come in a series of levels: from pre-preliminary to senior for freestyle, and from pre-bronze to gold for ice dance (which for testing purposes does not have to be skated with a partner).  Each successive level has harder and harder required elements, and a higher standard of skating needed to pass.  In order to skate in competition at a particular level, you have to pass the corresponding test.

Since Bangle hadn’t done much dance before this season, she started with the beginning-level tests a couple of months ago, and has been racking up nice comments from the judges along the way.  On the right is the pattern for one of the bronze-level dances: the Fiesta Tango.  The lines show the pattern that should be traced on the ice, and numbered steps detail how each step should be skated.  Skate the pattern twice, and would be right back where you started: two times around and the dance is finished.  

Now test your mind against the weekend’s new puzzles.

Stickler is back from his winter R&R (it’s midwinter Down Under) and has two new puzzles: numbers 85 and 86.  Glad to see them!

Other weekly block cryptics are in the National Post and the Globe and Mail, as usual.  Falcon is getting his R&R (I think he’s in the lake country of Ontario, but he’s blogged the National Post for us.

Meanwhile, it’s time for a couple of periodic variety cryptics by Sondheim-inspired constructors: the Tom Toce puzzle in Contingencies and the Mark Halpin puzzle unveiled at a special event at the Arden Theater Company here in Philadelphia recognizing Sondheim.

The Wall Street Journal variety puzzle is Changing Directions by Patrick Berry.  Another one of those ones where getting a toehold is the hardest part, so I have a hint grid up for you as well as the solution.

The New York Times variety puzzle is a Hex acrostic, blogged (with spoilers) by Deb at Wordplay.

Ice show (Solution No. 3,365)

The solution and annotation to The Nation puzzle no. 3,365 is below the fold.

Are you in the Philadelphia area?
A little put off by the sudden onset of warm weather?
Looking for something fun on a Saturday night?

Come see Bangle and her friends perform in the annual skating show at the Philadelphia Skating Club and Humane Society(*), titled Fairy Tales and Fables. Along with Bangle, the cast includes some national medalist ice dance couples and the junior national champion of India. Perhaps some of them might be skating in the Olympics in 2018 or 2022.

The show will be this Saturday, June 6, at the Skating Club in Ardmore, on the Main Line.  E-mail me at thenationcryptic@gmail.com for ticket information

*--yes, that’s their real name: going back to when the club was located on the Schuylkill River and part of the club’s mission was to rescue people who fell through the ice.

Personal best (Sunday brunch: October 5, 2014)

This morning, Bangle skated at the USFSA South Atlantic Regional: the first step on the road to nationals and her first competition far enough away to have to go by plane.  Seeing as how it was only her third competition at this level (Intermediate: step 6 out of 9 from beginning official competition to the senior (Olympic) level and she’d jumped two levels in less than a year, expectations were modest. (It also helps that we try not to be parents from hell).  The main goal of the trip was for Bangle to get experience at a big-time event like this and to gain confidence that she belonged at this level.

With that in mind, she got the job done.  She didn’t get enough points to move on (she was 13th out of 18 with the top four advancing), but she beat her personal best by more than 4 points.  She landed five double jumps and had no falls.  And with the Olympic judging system, she has a detailed readout of each element in the program and how the judges saw it.  That will help shape the plan for the next year’s training, so next year she can have a shot at advancing.

Falcon reports that he’s had to step up his game to solve the National Post cryptic (it’s been a bit harder than usual the last few weeks), but he’s up to it.  Are you?

Hex also have a variety cryptic in the Wall Street Journal.  It too was a little harder than most WSJ variety puzzles, but you can solve it if you have a little persistence.

The New York Times variety puzzle is a Hex cryptic.  Deb Amlen blogs it at Wordplay, reporting that it didn’t quite mesh with her knowledge.

Richard Maltby offers a Playfair Square in Harper’s.  The cryptic part is easy (compared to other Maltby puzzles): now I have to figure out the code.

Junior high (puzzle no. 3,339)

Let’s try and get back towards something resembling a normal schedule.  Hot and Trazom are up to puzzle no. 3,339.  I liked this one: a couple of twists made it harder than usual, but nothing unfair.  If you’ve been doing these for a while, you won’t be too surprised.

Meanwhile, Bangle’s junior high open house was Monday  I had not met her English teacher before, though he taught Sabers when Sabers was in eighth grade.  This particular teacher likes to teach vocabulary by playing with words, especially their roots, so of course I passed along a link to Kegler’s page and the puzzles there that were constructed by and/or for middle-schoolers.

One unexpected way that I think cryptics benefit your brain (and your writing) is the variety of indicators you’ll see.  Constructors love to hide the ball, so variety in indicators is a must.  Seeing more of them will expand your options, particularly for action words, when writing.

Link to puzzle: http://www.thenation.com/article/181805/puzzle-no-3339

Difficulty (by standards of this weekly puzzle):  Hard.  I got off to a good start top left, but hit a bit of a roadblock, exacerbated by the relatively low interconnectedness of the grid this week.  But on my second pass through, I got a couple of the answers that had been vexing me

Hozom’s comment: “A League of Our Own,” in which Hot and Trazom introduce us to the National Puzzlers’ League, and to The Enigma, their magazine, which includes cryptics from a variety of interesting constructors as well as other puzzles that may catch your interest.  One more thing about the NPL site, is that it includes a comprehensive list of members and their noms, frequently with explanations of their derivation.  So you can see what makes Hot Hot and makes Trazom Trazom (the Word Salad post tells you the noms of a few other prominent constructors).  

Weekly cluing challenge:  ENGIMA

Back with the solution Monday, and yes, there will be Sunday brunch this weekend!   

Planes, trains, automobiles, and boats (Sunday brunch: June 29, 2014)

Rounding Brant Point in Nantucket Harbor

Four trips, nine states, three hotels, and just about every mode of transportation short of a horse.  Business, family, and sports.  One drive that started before 6:00 am and another that ended after 4:00 am.  Can’t call it a vacation since I read only one book and I didn’t get to solve as many puzzles as I would have liked.  But I’m home and regular service resumes.

We have acrostics in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal this weekend.  As always, both Hex and Mike Shenk craft them well.  One of the hallmarks of a well-crafted acrostic is clues that hint at the quote or its source, and both constructors hit the mark.  

Cryptics?  The National Post (Hex: easy, comment and spoilers at Wordplay) and the Globe and Mail (Fraser Simpson: hard).  But the highlight of the weekend is the gigantic (25 x 25) puzzle LizR posted this week in honor of Matariki, the Maori new year.  Maybe I can convince Bangle to make another pavlova to celebrate.

Sure enough, Erica did blog the June Harper’s cryptic last weekend.  She’s trolling for comments so stop by and say congratulations to Sweet Vlad, who successfully defended his dissertation.

Avalanche (Puzzle No. 3,325)

Bangle singing with glee club

Some puzzles give you breakthroughs rather than the smooth solving experience of a good block cryptic.  If you remember Chem. 101, it’s the concept of activation energy.

This week I worked on solving several of the Cryptic All-Stars puzzles.  One of them was a John Forbes puzzle called “Wrap Sheet.”  Its answers are entered in the grid starting at the corresponding numbered square and then going in any direction: right, left, up, or down. 

The trick in this particular kind of puzzle is to fill in all the first letters you can get, and then use a process of elimination to get down to the only possible orientation for an answer.  You might have to work out 20 or 30 of the 50 or so clues before you can fill in even one word.  But once you have that first one, it can lead you to another one, and that one leads to a third, and pretty soon you have enough intersecting letters to start working out the remaining clues and finish the puzzle.  It can feel like an avalanche once it gets rolling. 

This is one of the reasons I post hints for some of the variety puzzles that come up in Sunday Brunch.  In the comments on those puzzles, you often see solvers asking for help because they don’t know where to start.  Once they get that toehold, they get the reward of seeing the pieces fall into place, and maybe they’ll be hooked. 

Link to puzzle: http://www.thenation.com/article/179705/puzzle-no-3325

Degree of difficulty (by standards of this weekly puzzle): Hard, especially if you aren’t familiar with some of the uncommon types of wordplay Hot and Trazom like. 

Hozom’s comment: “How Hard Can It Be?” in which Hot and Trazom ask a crossword blogger to explain how he rates each puzzle as hard or easy.

  

Themework: see 29d.  I actually forgot about the theme until after I had finished all the theme entries.  

Back with the solution and annotation Monday.  Make sure you try and work out all the wordplay in this one in the meantime.   

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.

Resiliency (Solution No. 3,320)

The solution to The Nation puzzle No. 3,320 is below the fold.

One of the reasons I like kid sports is the lessons you see kids learning.  Last weekend, Bangle was skating at the Morris Open, a big competition in North Jersey and the last event she’s going to do before moving up to the Juvenile level (which is the first level where they use the IJS [Olympic] scoring system.

She landed her initial jump combination cleanly, but then wobbled out of her camel spin and wound up going the wrong way.  Fortunately, she had the resiliency to figure out what happened and change part of her program on the fly.  After the skate, she felt awful about the mistake and was convinced that it wrecked her performance.  But it turned out that the other skaters fell on their combinations or had some weaknesses in their fundamental skating skills.  She wound up finishing second and qualifying for the trophy round of the competition, where she finished second again, this time getting the program right.

So we made the point to her that she won that medal by not dwelling on the mistake: by continuing on, doing the best she could, and presenting a positive image to the judges.  So in the Godspell performance yesterday, when her headset mike started sounding scratchy, she had the presence of mind to keep singing and then at the end of the number, go grab a hand mike to finish the show with.  

Great job, Bangle!

Godspell (Solution No. 3,319)

Light of the World

Scroll down for the solution to puzzle no. 3,319

A little theater for you in honor of this week’s theme: Bangle and Sabers in the church’s production of Godspell.  More pictures here.

Catchy music, colorful costumes, and a cast made up of kids from 3 to 18. That’s a sure-fire recipe for a real crowd-pleaser.  Kudos to music director Rae Ann Anderson for all her work on the production, and for having such confidence in the kids.

[ed. note: this post was back-dated to keep the solutions in order]

Showtime (Puzzle No. 3,319)

The theme answers in puzzle 3,319 are Broadway musicals, which was a perfectly timed theme.  Sabers and Bangle are performing in a church production of Godspell this weekend; it’s been one of my favorite shows ever since I saw the original cast off-Broadway in the 70s.

When the choir director announced the production, I did a little research and discovered that John-Michael Tebelak wrote Godspell as a senior project while he was in college (at Carnegie Mellon).  At that point, it was a straight play.  A few months later, Tebelak and the producers decided the show needed music, and reached out to another recent CMU alum, Stephen Schwartz, who composed the memorable songs.  

The show is notable for the number of now-famous performers who made their main-stage debuts in it (particularly in the 1972 Toronto prodution), including Gilda Radner, Martin Short, Sonia Manzano, Jeremy Irons, and Paul Schaffer. 

In our production, Sabers has the John the Baptist role.  Fellow high school students Jake (as Jesus) and Blair (Judas) are the other leads; and Bangle and her two junior high classmates round out the main cast.  Nearly twenty elementary-age kids have smaller singing and speaking parts, and the cherubs provide the cute and adorable element.   

Link to puzzle:  

[ed. note: this post was back-dated to keep the puzzle links in order]

Long words (Sunday brunch: March 30, 2014)

Apologies for the late post, I was down in Maryland most of the day yesterday and am running a tournament today.  —Braze

Congratulations to Bangle, who finished second in the Morris Open skating competition yesterday: second in her preliminary flight even though she went the wrong direction after a spin and had to adjust on the fly, and then second in the championship round.  Kid sports are a good place to learn resiliency.

The week’s puzzles include a diagramless from Ed Stein and Paula Gamache (fun--a double byline) in the New York Times (behind the paywall, comments [and spoilers] from Deb Amlen).

It’s a weekend for long words in puzzle grids.  Hex’s block cryptic in the National Post is a picture frame of 15s, and the rest of the grid is nicely interlocked.  Falcon was impressed.

See the reflection of the skate way down there?

The Wall Street Journal has a Spell Weaving by Mike Shenk.  He must have had fun with this one: there’s a 19-letter answer, a 16, and some other long ones too.

From large to small.  Nathan Curtis’s weekly puzzle is a Mini Rows Garden.  Go over and read the whole post for more news about what Nathan is up to.

Master Rows Gardner Andrew Ries has announced a weekly straight crossword to go with his Rows Garden series.

And the regular weekly Brit-style cryptic from Fraser Simpson can be found at the Globe and Mail in Java and print formats.

High definition (Sunday brunch: January 5, 2014)

A double Salchow by Bangle

Santa Claus brought a high-definition TV this year (we’re kind of slow on the uptake that way; I had a black and white set through most of grad school).  I’ve said that one of the great things of watching a hockey game in person is how much more detail of sound you hear: like players slapping a stick on the ice to get a teammate’s attention.

This is the visual equivalent.  You can see that the linesman in a World Junior Championship game is using an Acme whistle. Are you ready for your close-up?  Get out a nice sharp pencil and solve these:

I think the week’s highlight is the Marching Bands with cryptic clues that Tom Toce created for the accounting journal Contingencies, with a little help from his friends.

The Wall Street Journal has a Patrick Berry puzzle called “Jury Boxes.”  It’s one of the ones where a jigsaw of rectangles is intersected by clued rows.  I’ve posted the solution as well as the row enumerations as a hint (they can help you place those middle answers) elsewhere on the blog.

Hex are continuing to ring in the new year, with this week’s puzzle in the National Post, and Falcon is back for another year of blogging it.

The New York Times variety puzzle is a diagramless by Fred Piscop (behind the paywall).  Look for the solution here on Sunday afternoon, connectivity permitting (Sabers is going to be at his twice-postponed District 11 orchestra audition today).

A bouquet of roses for the gold medalist in your life?  Certainly—especially if she likes puzzles!  Aries has great news for us; he is bringing back his Rows Gardens, bi-weekly, on a subscription basis.  Sign up now: the sooner you do, the more puzzles you get.

BEQ used Boxing Day as a time to offer a year in review post.  Worth reading, and maybe solving some of the linked puzzles.

Puzzazz has an update out this week, and it’s a significant one.  They’ve set up a way to offer free puzzles like the ones you often see in .puz format.  It’s not discussed on their blog, but the info is at the app store for your particular device.   On top of that, they had an all-day improvisational construction festival, the results of which are posted for everyone to solve.

Open hockey (Sunday brunch: July 28, 2013)

I don’t have to compete at State Games like The Other Doctor Mitchell, Sabers, and Bangle, but I need to be in mid-season shape too: this is an important event for the players and they deserve our best.  Official USA Hockey training camps aren’t going to start until next month, so I set up my own program: going around to some of the area rinks for their open hockey sessions.  It’s a whole lot more productive practice than going to a public skate and just skating around in circles, even skating fast and weaving around other skaters to work on agility like I usually do to get ready for the season.  And I need it because I've been refereeing more fencing than hockey the past few months.

The players found it novel to have a ref join them, but for the most part they played like the usual open hockey: hacking around, floating in the neutral zone, and showing off individual skills.  Friday night was a really good bunch of players: a couple of guys who looked like college players or maybe senior A, some decent senior Bs, and some good midget/high school age players including a very solid defenseman.

With no goalies, no line changes, and very light enforcement of the rules, it was like pond hockey.  For the ref working solo, it was like D-league, only at twice the speed.  There’s no better workout for a ref: a solid hour of 150 percent speed and endurance.  Bantams will seem slow after this, which is just what I needed.

Need some puzzles to keep your brain just as fit?  Here we go...

The Wall Street Journal has an acrostic by Mike Shenk and the New York Times has a Hex acrostic (behind the paywall).

Hope you’re not afraid of snakes!  This week’s Hex cryptic in the National Post has a serpentine theme, while the Nathan Curtis puzzle of the week is a Snake Charmer.

And if you didn’t see it earlier this week, give Roger Wolff's “X Games” a try, and if you like it, join the Kickstarter for his Cryptic All Stars book.  I finished it this morning, after nailing the 12 letter entry on the left.  It’s one of those puzzles where the lights are unnumbered and the answers given in alphabetical order.  I had about two thirds of them figured out, but only three in the grid.  I had to take a leap of faith, and ended up rolling right through as soon as I did.  Let that be a lesson.

Pavlova (Solution No. 3,279)

Bangle likes meringues (see 2d), so for Easter dessert last year she made a Pavlova, the national dessert of New Zealand and Australia.  It’s a soft meringue shell filled with vanilla ice cream and kiwifruit and other fresh berries.

Solution and annotation for Puzzle No. 3,279 below the fold.