Care for a quickie? (Puzzle No. 3,365)

Will Shortz has persuaded the editors of the New York Times to give him the rest of the magazine section page that houses the variety puzzle.  Where there used to be a jump from one of the articles, every week there are now three more puzzles.  The first is a letter bank puzzle (Willz loves these) by Frank Longo, the second is a mini variety crossword by Patrick Berry, and the third is a logic puzzle by Wei-Hua Huang.

Patrick’s recent creations have included a miniature Rows Garden he called Hex Nuts and a version of his snowflake puzzles.  The logic puzzles will appeal to sudoku fans, and give them a different challenge just like variety crosswords do for straight crossword solvers.  If you remember the old Windows game Minesweeper, you’ll be interested in these.

It’s good to have puzzles that can be solved in a few minutes, while you’re waiting for the train or to take a break from some mindless task.  These little puzzles also can serve as an invitation to try out puzzles one doesn’t normally do.  How many cryptic solvers were born of the little 8 by 10s in the New Yorker?  And support for small formats can provide an entry point for new constructors; it’s a much less daunting task than filling a full-size grid.

Link to puzzle:  http://www.thenation.com/article/208233/puzzle-no-3365

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

Agility factor:  low

This week’s cluing challenge (share your clues in the comments): TAPAS

Back with the solution and annotation on Monday: join us this weekend as usual for Sunday brunch.

Pretzels (Sunday brunch: April 26, 2015)

Today is National Pretzel Day.  Being from Philly, I've acquired a taste for soft pretzels.  In fact, I had a couple for breakfast this morning on my way to running a tournament.  Best pretzel?  Any one that's fresh, so the caustic outside has a bit of crust and the inside is nice and doughy.  Most memorable?  A pretzel and beer at intermission of the Berlin Philharmonic.  Plenty of orchestra patrons in their fine attire joined me in picking a mug of beer and a snack over a nice pastry and a glass of champagne.

Will the weekend’s puzzles tie you in knots?  For the first time I can recall, we have a Mike Shenk twin bill for starters.

The Wall Street Journal has a Spell Weaver.  I thought it was going to be easy at first but there was just enough ambiguity in some of the answers to force you to wait for intersecting letters.  It turned out to be a very smooth solve.

The second Shenk puzzle is called Opposable Sums (blogged at Wordplay).  It’s in the Times, and it sounds exactly like something Will Shortz would encourage.

Weekly cryptics
Stickler #80:  http://www.australiancrosswords.com.au/WPblog/the-stickler-weekly-80/
Hex in the National Post (blogged by Falcon)
Syndicated in the Globe and Mail

What are you waiting for? (Sunday brunch: March 16, 2014)

The calendar says spring is supposed to begin next weekend, but I’ve still got snow in the yard and there’s another four inches predicted for tomorrow. Normally I like winter, but I think we’ve had enough already.  Worse still, there’s all the cleanup to do from the ice storm to do before I can get on with starting the garden for spring.  Maybe time to go back in where it’s warm and there are puzzles waiting.

The new Harper’s is out, and the latest Richard Maltby variety cryptic is a “Twofers” with two grids and run-together double clues.  You may have seen this kind of puzzle before (the inaugural issue of Wordplay had a triple version), but it’s a good concept worth doing again.  Interestingly, the April issue went online Wednesday March 12, but the deadline for solvers to submit for the prize (and the coveted note from Maltby) was the 14th, so you could have gotten away with copying the answer from the magazine.  Stay tuned for the next edition of Tacky Harpers Cryptic Clues (or maybe not, if the army of Chicago bedbugs has carried off Erica).

Like Mark Halpin, Tom Toce doesn’t do anything twice, but he bowed to popular demand and made another cryptic acrostic.  Short and sweet, though the people who typeset it forgot to put in the letters that tell what answer the letter in each box is from, so you have to scan through the puzzle to find the number when you work back from the grid.  Fortunately, I got a lot of the clues right off the bat, so I didn’t need to work backwards much.

Also in twos, block cryptics in major Canadian newspapers: Hex in the National Post (blogged by Falcon) and Fraser Simpson in the Globe and Mail (blogger wanted)

The Wall Street Journal weekend puzzle is a Rows Garden by Patrick Berry.  For once I got this one in a single sitting.  It was very gratifying to have one answer lead to another that led to the next on up the grid until the puzzle was finished.  For those of you who couldn’t make that nice chain, I have some hints posted.  And if you love Rows Gardens, Andrew Ries has a bi-weekly series available by subscription.

Also in the variety crossword department, BEQ’s puzzle no. 622 is a Marching Bands.  It was not easy, and it’s intended to whet your appetite for his upcoming book of Marching Bands.  Brendan’s post also includes a recap from the ACPT.

In the Times (behind the paywall) is a Will Shortz word puzzle called Two For One.

Finally, Foggy Brume has posted issue 48 of PandA magazine as a free sampler.  Register to see and download the issue.  PandA is a subscription e-mag that contains a new extravaganza each issue (six times a year).  Not for the faint of heart or mind, but if you think you’re up for the challenge, give it a try.

Broadcast Network (Puzzle No. 3,317)

A little while ago, we learned that Nathan Curtis and some of our other favorite constructors were involved in a new project, which turned out to be a quarterly puzzle magazine edited by Will Shortz.  Now the first issue of Will Shortz’s Wordplay is now out. What’s it like?  Find out after the break.

Link to puzzle: http://www.thenation.com/article/178790/puzzle-no-3317

Degree of difficulty (by standards of this weekly puzzle): easy to moderate, and very consistent.

Hozom’s comment: “Chez Henri,” in which Hot realizes his dream of opening a Bay Area cryptic restaurant.  Reviewer’s note: the groaning you hear isn’t just from the large portions!

I think the best way to describe the new Wordplay puzzle magazine from Penny Press is to compare it to a television channel.  In the 1960s, TV for most people was the three major networks.  Cable TV was mainly for people who wanted better reception or not to have to fuss with an antenna.  The networks showed a little bit of everything: Laugh-in, a college football game on Saturday afternoon, soap operas mid-day, and the evening news.  Then we started seeing new and more focused channels: ESPN, HBO, MTV.  Today there are channels for everything from home remodeling to Tejano music to game show reruns.

So it is with puzzles.  Thirty years ago, we had the newspaper crossword plus some syndicated variety puzzle like Jumble or a cryptogram.  If you wanted variety, there were print magazines at the supermarket checkout lane.  For harder puzzles, there were magazines and books at bookstores. 

Then came the internet, which has been fabulous for us solvers.  We can congregate at sites for our favorite types of puzzles, and constructors have a place to go to seek out an audience.  Now we’re getting into app world and push content; we don’t ever have to go without our preferred puzzles. 

Penny Press is the broadcast company that’s trying to thrive in the 500 channel age.  Checkout lane magazines of easy crosswords and word searches are their bread and butter, and they’re the dominant player in that market.  But they also do specialty puzzles: The Other Doctor Mitchell is an avid consumer of their logic puzzles. 

Wordplay fits the Penny Press model to a T.  They understand solvers, and that they derive satisfaction from finishing puzzles and feeling they’re smarter because they’re able to get the right answers.  So they tend to stay away from difficult puzzles or ones that are intimidating at the beginning, just like the other editors who have to publish for a broader market, like Mike Shenk with the WSJ weekend puzzles. 

What that means is that the variety and cryptic crosswords in Wordplay are interspersed among other quick word games of the type Willz is good at coming up with.  Those are good for a quick two or three-minute break from whatever else you’re doing, or to pick up and solve while you’re waiting in line for something.  Nathan’s Pathfinder is probably the hardest puzzle in the magazine.  

Another benchmark: the Fraser Simpson cryptic is easier than his Globe and Mail puzzles, and is in pure US cluing form rather than the part-British approach of his weekly puzzles.  (The other cryptic in the magazine is by Jeffrey Harris.) 

Other names you’ll recognize (most but not all the puzzles are credited) include Patrick Berry, Brendan Emmett Quigley, Foggy Brume, and Mark Halpin.  There are also some new constructors working in forms you’ll recognize, like a Rows Garden by Joon Pahk.  Anthologies like this one are valuable for giving these people some cash and a wider audience for their puzzles.  Kudos to Will Shortz for convincing the big names to join the cast and for recognizing some emerging talent. 

The presentation is like other Penny Press magazines: comfortably-sized grids on good quality newsprint paper.  Since it’s newsprint, you will have to choose pen or pencil carefully, and it won’t take too much erasing. Games Magazine is better in this department.  There are about 60 puzzles in a 64-page magazine for $3.99 ($18.97 for an annual subscription: 6 issues per year).  For the whole thing, that’s a good value, but if you see the word games and logic art pages as filler, less so.

So like the people who watch military history 24/7, solvers who want just variety crosswords will change the channel.  Those whose idea of variety extends more broadly will be satisfied but not thrilled with this magazine.  But that’s OK since those are fairly small slivers of the population.  Like the big TV networks, Penny Press is trying to build an audience out of people who are just tuning in to whatever is on now plus those who are looking for a particular show to meet their interest. 

For the typical reader of this blog, it’s worth having a copy of Wordplay.  It’ll be ideal for airplane trips or on the nightstand for when you want a light and fairly easy diversion.  If you discover some new favorites, and constructors get a breakout from it, even better. 

Penny Press says the best place to find Wordplay will be at larger bookstores, but to make sure you get your copy, subscribe.

Cold! (Sunday brunch: January 26, 2014)

Definitely not like this.

The word of the day is “unremitting.”  No, I’m not talking about the University of Pennsylvania and referee checks (but I could).  It’s been really [stinking] cold the entire week.  And I’ve got games at an outdoor rink this weekend.  Somehow though, I usually don’t get too cold on the ice.  I might wear an extra t-shirt under my striped sweater, and my face feels it more than it used to, but it’s not uncomfortable.  Besides, there are some indoor rinks that are unusually cold.  After a season or two, you get to know the different facilities and prepare accordingly.

Most importantly, if you’re moving enough, you can get an equilibrium between sweat and chill, so as long as I stay dry, I’m fine with the cold.  I’ve always been that way.  In my playing days, I didn’t wear long johns, and sometimes I’d have just a cut-off t-shirt under my shoulder pads.

Here are the weekend’s puzzles to curl up in front of the fireplace with.

The Wall Street Journal puzzle is a variety cryptic by Hex called “For Starters.”  The solution has been posted elsewhere on the blog.  Hex also have their regular cryptic in the National Post, solved and blogged by Falcon.  He says you should use your imagination with it.

Your other weekend cryptic is from the Globe and Mail: in a Java version or a print version (try it at 90% scaling to make it all fit a single page).  It’s harder than the National Post puzzle, and closer to a British style.  We still need a blogger for this puzzle: want to do it?  I’ll be glad to help you get started.

The New York Times puzzle (behind the paywall) is a Hex acrostic.  Deb Amlen thinks it’s somewhat harder than usual.  Speaking of the Times, they have a couple of notes in the blog that you should pay attention to.  They say the Thursday puzzle is better in PDF or print form than the Java version, and there was a sequencing error in the print paper.

That sequencing error involved a very special collaboration: the organizers of the MIT Mystery Hunt enlisted Will Shortz as a confederate, and Hunt participants had to figure out that one of their puzzles would be founs in the Times.  Much of the Hunt (which did not include any cryptics) is now online: see http://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/heuristic/ for the announcement, and http://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/2014/ for the puzzles themselves.  Congratulations to the winners: a team called “One Fish Two Fish Random Fish Blue Fish” won in a time of 38.5 hours.

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.

Bob Machler, RIP (Sunday brunch: April 14, 2013)

Just the puzzles this weekend: I have an obituary to write instead of a blog post. 

A good weekend for variety puzzle lovers.

Nathan Curtis offers us a Spiral, and some comments on how he gets the inspiration for them.  Sometimes you encounter words that fit together particularly well, and you think that would be a neat starting point for a puzzle.  Then you just keep building out from there, hoping not to fall into a rut along the way.

The Wall Street Journal has a Rows Garden by Patrick Berry.  Earlier in the week I got through a variant Rows Garden that was a bonus puzzle from The Crypt

The New York Times puzzle (behind the paywall) is a "Getting to the Point" variety crossword by Will Shortz.  Deb Amlen blogs it at Wordplay.  Willz says it's a one-of-a-kind

Cryptic fans are not forgotten.  Hex have one for us in the National Post, but you may need to wait for the solution and annotation, since Falcon is on vacation.  He does have the puzzle itself posted though.

Drop the puck! (Sunday brunch: January 20, 2013)

After a three month lockout, it's finally time to drop the puck on the NHL season.  But we officials don't really drop the puck: we snap it down, kind of a half-throw.  The training manuals talk about presenting the puck and some other niceties like that, but if you try them in anything higher than a pee-wee game, it's like sticking your hand in a blender.

If you drop the puck instead of putting it down with some force, a center can bat the puck before it hits the ice, which isn't a fair draw.  Another thing is the puck is more likely to come down crooked and bounce.  The lightweight blue pucks we use for mites are even easier to bounce, so even with the littlest players, you have to focus and use good technique to have a good face-off.

But sometimes, getting the puck down flat is only a secondary consideration.  Protecting yourself is job one.  So as soon as my puck hand goes down, it goes back up and in front of my face, to ward off any stray sticks.  There are a couple of players in the adult league at Penn who are pretty dangerous that way.  The Purple Cobras have a center who chokes way down on his stick, so I have to watch out for the butt end of it.  And one of Kate Connolly's teammates tends to slash around at the puck with no regard for the referee's shins.

So when you're watching the NHL start play this weekend, pay attention to the linesmen when they conduct a face-off: the little drama of keeping the centers from getting an unfair advantage, the differences in each official's motion, and the defensive measures they have to take since they're only armed with whistles.

And we have cryptic crosswords for your between-periods entertainment!

Harper's is out for February.  The Richard Maltby puzzle is called "Sentences."  Hot and Trazom ought to like this one.  Its theme entries are all in the form of single words that could be sliced up to form a multi-word sentence.  The grid is hexagonal, with a 19(!) letter word in the center.  The format does lead to a lot of three- and four-letter fill, which is part of why I found this one pretty easy.  Usually Harper's is the hardest of the regularly-scheduled American cryptic puzzles.

Speaking of hexagons, we have a Patrick Berry Rows Garden in the Wall Street Journal this weekend. So far, I see few comments from solvers, suggesting this is a tough one.  I got off to a roaring start, especially since a legendary hockey arena was right across the top, but I haven't had time to finish it yet.     (Update: the end didn't go as easily as the beginning, but I got through it in less than a day with no recourse to the computer.  I was definitely in the minority, as most solvers did think it was harder than Berry's earlier puzzles.)

Don't know whether Hex are hockey fans, though I'm sure there are lots of fans among their National Post readers.  If you didn't know it, the NP is a Canadian newspaper.  "Drop the puck" would be a good theme for one of their puzzles, but this week they give us a little magic.  Falcon will have the puzzle and analysis for you.

Finally, the New York Times says good-bye to George Bredehorn this weekend.  Bredehorn invented many different word puzzles, and authored the infamous "Sit and Solve" word puzzle book, but "Split Decisions" is the one that caught on.  Willz tells us that many NYT readers looked forward to those puzzles, though I can't count myself among that number.  Bredehorn died last month, and his final puzzle appears (behind the paywall) in this week's Times.  Deb Amlen will probably have a few more words in his memory over at Wordplay.

Bredehorn also deserves our thanks for mentoring other constructors, most notably Fred Piscop, who sets Puns and Anagrams for the Times, and has promised to keep creating Split Decisions.  Their relationship went back more than fifty years: Bredehorn was an elementary school teacher in East Meadow, Long Island, where Piscop was one of his students.  Well played, sir....

Aunt Minnie (Sunday brunch: December 9, 2012)

Did you ever have the experience of taking a glance at a clue or a partial answer, and almost instantly some remarkably obscure word comes to mind--and it's right!?!  I had a couple of those with last week's puzzle by Hot and Trazom.  Radiologists like our solver Raydoc (Sabers and Bangle's grandfather) have a wonderful term for a recognition like this: "Aunt Minnie." Raydoc studied under Ben Felson, a legendary teacher and one of the doctors who popularized Aunt Minnie.

An Aunt Minnie is a kind of rare case you haven't seen or thought of since you were in school, but snaps into your mind when you see it.  It's like recognizing the face or voice of your Aunt Minnie even if you haven't seen her for twenty years.  Maybe our friends at the NPL could add that to their glossary.  Aunt Minnie can live over there next to the Icelandic Zoo.

While I'm not a clinical radiologist (though my degree is in MRI and I taught x-ray and MRI physics), I've had a few Aunt Minnie moments in my time.  The one I remember most vividly is the structure of diborane. I saw it once in a chemistry textbook when I was a freshman, never paid much attention to it, but I recognized it and its unusual "bridge bonds" when it showed up on my GRE exam.

So now you know what to say the next time you get amazed by your unexpected powers of recollection.

It's a weekend for variety crosswords today.  Variety crosswords (not to be confused with themed crosswords) are the puzzles with straight cluing, but unusual grids.  The Wall Street Journal offers us a "Double or Nothing" by Patrick Berry.  In this puzzle, logically enough, each space will contain two letters or no letters.  Enumerations of the solutions are not given, but you know they all have to have an even number of letters.  Another nice feature of these puzzles is that they end up with few black spaces (28 out of 225 in this case) and an impressive looking grid (at least before you start solving and penciling in and erasing...)

The New York Times has (behind the paywall or in your print copy) a spiral variety crossword by Will Shortz.  They're pretty easy: finding the puzzle is going to be harder than solving it.  There's also a Fred Piscop puzzle, which I assume is a diagramless, sitting there behind the paywall with no date other than "December."  I wonder if that will ever actually appear in the print edition.

The regular cryptic crossword by Hex is in the weekend's National Post.  Falcon will have solution and commentary for you.