Trivia (Puzzle No. 3,301)

Any resemblance
to my boss is
entirely
coincidental.

One of the little details that separate great constructors from the rest is the way they can keep clues fresh.  One way is to throw in a bit of trivia.  Patrick Berry did that with his Wall Street Journal puzzle last weekend.

The answer (third in Wave 2) was “IDENTIKIT”: the tool police departments use to help witnesses develop a composite drawing of a suspect or of a missing person.  Now it’s highly unlikely that anyone other than someone who makes or uses the product would know, so it was really of little or no solving value, but Berry threw us a little nugget of novelty, adding “developed by Smith and Wesson” at the end of the clue.

Now most of us know Smith and Wesson for making guns (a former work colleague liked to use “Smith and Wesson” as hypothetical authors when we were discussing how to search for, analyze, or cite medical literature), so it’s a bit amusing to see their name in connection with something else.  Kind of like how I felt when I saw a General Motors logo on our Frigidaire when I was a kid.

There are lots of such factoids out there, like all the actors who were born in Canada or what “meow” is in other languages.  It wouldn’t be hard to pick out a couple of such facts, or a set of them, and work them into your clues.    

It wasn’t trivia, but something did start to smell funny about a quarter of the way through this week’s The Nation cryptic crossword.  Sure enough, the last row confirms our suspicions.

Link to puzzle: http://www.thenation.com/article/176885/puzzle-no-3301

Degree of difficulty (by standards of this weekly puzzle): hard--some more complex wordplay than usual, an obscure word you can get if you think about it carefully, an author, and a famous scientist.

Hozom’s comment: One on One, Part 2, in which we learn that Hot grew up in Lebanon: the one not in Tennessee or Pennsylvania; and that his approach to British cryptics is the same as mine--the satisfaction of solving good clues is more important than the frustration at not finishing the puzzle.  Sounds like both our constructors have some more interesting personal stories to tell, so maybe we’ll get parts 3 and 4 at some later date.

New York Times cryptic crossword solution: October 27, 2013

Below the fold is the solution to this week’s variety puzzle from the New York Times: a straight cryptic by Richard Silvestri.

Handwriting, part 2 (solution no. 3,300)

Thursday I noted that I try to solve my puzzles neatly, even if nobody else is ever going to see them.

Part of it is that my handwriting was more than awful when I was in middle school, so I’m especially aware and maybe even defensive about it.  I worked like hell on it in seventh and eighth grades, made a few changes at the behest of the teacher who was working with me on it, and eventually came to using all caps for much of my writing, which in fact takes after my father, though not necessarily by intent.

The other reason for trying to make neat grids is the extra challenge.  As you may remember, when I work on sudokus, I try to avoid writing notes in the boxes, to make them a bit more challenging.  I know I could write down partials or leftover letters to make anagrams easier to solve, but I don’t feel a strong need to do so, and I’d rather have the satisfaction of doing it all in my head.  I won’t even make notes in the margins, except to call out clues and answers I want to comment on in the blog post.

But I am not such an ascetic when it comes to variety cryptics: there’s too much going on like extraneous words in the clues not to annotate liberally on the page (which is also why I prefer to work most of my puzzles on paper).  Below the solution to this week’s The Nation puzzle is my solved copy of Kevin Wald’s ACPT puzzle from earlier this year (and yes, it was a doozy: harder than usual and with four layers of theme metas.  Go try it.

Whistles, part 1 (Sunday brunch: October 27, 2013)

The Fox 40

Fencers aren’t used to whistles.  I learned that last weekend at the tournament where I was Bout Committee.  When I found out we didn’t have a PA system at the field house, I used one of my whistles to call the captains over and start a round of matches or make an announcement.

The first time I used it, I stepped away from the captains who were already over at my table before blowing it, and two of them looked over at me like their ears were bleeding.  I didn't blow it especially hard or long: just my usual whistle.

I guess they were used to hearing a cheap phys-ed class whistle and not a professional-grade model.  And like a lot of other tools of any trade, there really is a difference.

Acme Thunderer

Hockey referees might be more particular about their whistles than any other sports officials.  Why? Having a good sound matters for everyone, but because we move so much faster than anyone else, ergonomics are especially important in hockey.  We have to get the whistle to our lips safely and precisely, at the same time as we’re skating full-tilt after an icing, or making a hard stop on the blue line.

So our whistles have a fingerclamp which keeps the whistle on the back of our hand while we’re skating.  And when I need to blow the whistle, I make a fist and bring the whistle up.  It’s a great feature. When I was in grad school and rode my bike to campus, I’d wear my ref whistle, so if someone in a car wasn’t paying attention or got too close, I could blow the whistle.  Thankfully, I didn’t need it much, but it worked really well.  Those of you who are urban cyclists might want to visit a hockey pro shop to get a fingerclamp whistle.

Hear that whistle sounding?  It’s your signal to start solving.  How about we warm up with the weekly Hex cryptic in the National Post?  Falcon says it’s a hodgepodge.

There’s another cryptic for us in the New York Times this weekend (behind the paywall).  This one is by Richard Silvestri.  I’ll post the solution Sunday afternoon or evening.

It’s not easy to keep up with Ucaoimhu, since the puzzles on his pages are listed by theme category instead of by date.  So I’m catching up with a few, starting this week with “Baccarat, Etc.” which actually was a September puzzle.  Even though it’s only nine by nine (that’s part of the theme), it’s still got the incredible depth of Kevin’s full-sized variety cryptics.  Smaller puzzles are a great idea: they’re faster to construct and to solve, and they give new solvers a better chance at getting all the way through to the puzzles you solve after the grid part is done.

Once you’ve finished the mental workout of those cryptics, BEQ informs us that our friend from Down Under, Denise Sutherland, has a clue-writing contest up: entries being taken until next weekend.  She’s offering copies of her books as prizes--sorry, the cute fluffy dog is not on the prize list.  So sip your coffee (or that Bloody Mary) and think about the word “INTERCHANGE”

In the regular crossword department, the Wall Street Journal offers a “Riding the Waves” by Patrick Berry.  It’s an easy variety crossword with another nice bonus at the end.

And Nathan Curtis ought to be around shortly with his regular weekend variety puzzle.  I’ll link it here once it’s up.

Handwriting, part 1 (Puzzle No. 3,300)

Is that a 2 or a 3?

While Sabers was refereeing at the Swarthmore Invitational Sunday, I was working the Bout Committee desk: setting the schedule, checking in fencers, sending referees out to their matches, and compiling the results.

It was a huge event: 8 schools, 9 rounds, 20 strips, 23 referees, 207 athletes, 216 scoresheets, 1813 bouts, and 11,576 touches all had to be accounted for.

Now I thought Sabers had bad handwriting (he probably inherited it from his father...).  But it wasn’t nearly the worst I encountered, either from the referees or from the fencers.  Take a look at that example on the right.  Next year I’m giving a prize to the ref with the neatest scoresheets.

As I said, I’m not the neatest writer.  But I’m pretty careful when filling in scoresheets, so the commissioner and statistician will not have to puzzle out what penalties were given.  And even though nobody ever looks at them but me, I’m equally careful when filling in crossword grids.

Part of it is because I usually work in ink rather than pencil (I’m a lefty, so pencils and bad pens smudge my knuckles).  But I guess that if crosswords are about being precise, my writing ought to be too.

Link to puzzle:  http://www.thenation.com/article/176777/puzzle-no-3300

Degree of difficulty (by standards of this weekly puzzle): moderate to hard

Hozom’s comment: One on One, Part 1 in which Hot introduces us to Trazom and we learn that Trazom likens the conventions of cryptic construction to the conventions of baroque counterpoint.  I can certainly see that.

Dido vs. Dido (Solution No. 3,299)

Sabers (who is 15) refereed a college fencing tournament Sunday.
Competitors from (l to r: you can tell them by their socks) Navy,
William and Mary, Rutgers, Lehigh, and Virginia. 

“British pop singer’?  Don‘t ask me.  Despite having a teenager and a near-teen in the house, I remain blissfully ignorant of the latest boy bands and singer-songwriters.

I’m usually more in sync with Trazom, who in his day job is a classical music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.  So it surprised me to see the definition part of 5d when Dido was also the queen of ancient Carthage and a character in Virgil’s Aeneid.

Purcell wrote an opera based on the legend of Dido and Aeneas, which I saw in concert performance at the Curtis Institute a few years ago, so that’s where I recognize the name.

Perhaps Trazom couldn’t bring himself to link “accomplished nothing” to that Dido and found an opportunity to editorialize on the state of pop culture.  If that’s the case, I agree.  On to the rest of this week’s puzzle.

Themework: As 31a says, the names of 11 well-known magazines are found in the acrosses of this puzzle.  

I looked, and I didn’t see a magazine named “Update” though there are plenty of periodicals named “___ Update.”  And the magazine for breeders of pigeons is called “Pigeon Fancy,” not “Pigeon.”

Difficulty (by standards of this weekly puzzle): easy

Political content: 29a

Solution and annotation to The Nation Puzzle No. 3,299 below the fold.

Left-handed cronuts (Sunday brunch: October 20, 2013)

I had a split doubleheader last Sunday: you heard about the morning game, and the afternoon game was better in several ways.  Next age group up, the ice felt a little less dead, the coaches had a better grasp of things, and a decent partner: not only is he pretty focused and conscientious for a high school kid, he’s also left-handed, which is rare among referees.

Because of my bad shoulder (the injury that got me into refereeing), I keep my whistle on my right hand and signal with my left.  When you’re signaling a delayed penalty, your arm should be right against the earhole of your helmet, and I can’t raise my right arm that high.  In other sports, this doesn't matter too much, but in hockey, you have to pass the puck to your partner after you pick it up and he establishes the face-off location.

Now stop and think of what would happen if I skated up to my partner holding the puck in my left (non-whistle) hand while he was holding his right (non-whistle) hand out to receive it.  We’d crash into each other, one of us would probably end up on our butt, and everyone in the rink would have a laugh at our expense.  So in most cases, before I pick up the puck for my partner, my whistle goes into my pocket, and I hold the puck in my right hand so we can pass right to right.  When I work with Joe, we get to pass left to left, and I appreciate every one of those passes.

So even though it was just another day at the rink, gamewise, I was feeling pretty good after the second game: a blend of tired and satisfied.  This is the rink on the way down to the city, and just down the road is a gigantic Korean supermarket.  We needed more chopsticks (Bangle likes to use them for rice, and I find them very convenient for cheese curls (no orange powder clinging to my fingers) and I felt like getting some noodles and dumplings, so I went down there after the game.

In the mini-mall there is a pastry shop, of French and Indochinese influence.  The perfect place for a light post-game snack, and they had a batch of cronuts there.  Now I’d heard of cronuts and how they were the big thing in New York; now I could see what all the hype was about.

A cronut is a pastry made out of croissant pastry, cut and fried like a donut.  That would be pretty good for starters, but a cronut needs more: specifically some kind of cream filling (in this case lemon) and a bit of compllentary flavoring on the outside.

Verdict?  Darned good.  Decadent but not deadly.  Over the top, but not overpowering.  A fine reward for two hours plus of skating.

Puzzles?  Yes.  This week they were just as tasty.

It’s a two-acrostic weekend.  Mike Shenk has a seasonally-appropriate puzzle in the Wall Street Journal: pretty easy, especially if you know it’s themed and Shenk is a good constructor.  Hex have their regular acrostic in the New York Times (paywall) and commentary on Deb Amlen’s blog (spoiler warning)

Want cryptics?  There’s Hex in the National Post with a puzzle less easy than usual; and Xanthippe with her brit-cryptic with a nice central answer.  And we learn that Nathan Curtis 1--merits having Kevin Wald construct a birthday puzzle in his honor and 2--is remarkably humble about the honor.  You know you’re someone in puzzledom if you can get such a fine constructor to come to your potluck.  Hooray for both of you.

Nathan didn’t let the honor go to his head: he kept up with his commitment (hint: someone give him a regular gig) and provides us with a Snake Charmer this weekend (very easy, I thought).

We should also note that Puzzazz has updated their app for iOS 7.  I had a long wait for the train this week during which it was a real pleasure to have cryptics I could pull up and solve on my Pod.  The latest edition of Puzzazz is a significant improvement: saving you taps and time by bringing you back to where you left off instead of making you find and open the virtual book.  And the Touchwrite feature is feeling more and more natural: to the point where this Luddite is ready to dispense with a keyboard.