Ice-Proof Scotch

Double issue last week: no puzzle this week (no Word Salad either).  So today I'm tackling "Code Format," one of Stephen Sondheim's original puzzles for New York Magazine.

I noted this along the way, as I was looking through old magazines.  It's a 1975 ad for Famous Grouse scotch whisky, making the somewhat scientific case that since it was bottled at 90 proof instead of 86 or  80 proof, it wouldn't be diluted as much when you drank it on the rocks.  Looks like a fun experiment to replicate.

I enjoy a wee dram once in a while: Glenmorangie in particular (a wine-drinker's malt).  Since my grad school days, I've ordered my whisky with one ice cube.  Order your whisky neat, and it's served in a shot glass.  Order it on the rocks, and you get more ice than whisky.  Ordering it with one ice cube meant you got the most whisky for your money, a key concern when I was living on a grad student salary.

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Taps (Solution No. 3,285)

If you've solved these puzzles before, this one was easy.  If you only solve block puzzles Hex and other   "by the book" cryptics, you probably had trouble.  This one was full of rule-bending wordplay.

Themework: none that I noticed

Musical content: 1a

Political content: 8d

Solution and annotation below the fold.

Salt potatoes (Sunday brunch: May 26, 2013)

Most Memorial Day weekends will find me watching the Syracuse University lacrosse team in the NCAA final four, and this year is no exception.  Their former coach, Roy Simmons, is a friend of our family.  I was nowhere near good enough to play for SU, but I did have the honor of playing a little summer ball for him and I have one of his artworks in my home.  

I'll say I'm surprised that this year's team not only made it this far, but they're the number one seed.  When I saw them play at Villanova earlier this season, they were destroyed at the X, losing 23 of 25 face-offs.  Very few teams are able to survive giving their opponents twenty extra possessions, and sure enough, the Wildcats pulled off an 11-10 win.

The 'Cuse got their revenge in the Big East tournament, coming close to even in the face-off department and winning the game 13-9, but their Achilles heel is exposed.  In the first round of the NCAA tournament, they ran into the best face-off man in the nation, and Kevin Massa won 22 of 23 to allow a below-.500 team to hold a lead over the #1 team for most of the first half.  But SU played a ball control game the rest of the way, forced turnovers, tied it by halftime, and won 12-7.  Orange vs. Denver, today at 5:00, after the Cornell-Duke semifinal.

So in honor of the team, I made a batch of salt potatoes to go with dinner last night.  Syracuse is known as the Salt City for one of its early industries, and legend has it that workers who harvested salt from the briny springs surrounding the city used the salty water to cook potatoes for a cheap meal.  They eventually became a clambake and barbecue staple in Central New York, and a popular snack at the New York State Fair.  My adaptation of the recipe has the potatoes finished in the oven for a few minutes to highlight  the salty crust.

3 pounds small new potatoes, about 1 1/2 inches in diameter
1/2 pound salt
4 tbsp butter

Add salt to 2 quarts of water and bring to a rolling boil.  Scrub the potatoes and gently pierce the skin of each one with a fork.  Boil the potatoes for about 30 minutes.  Fish them out of the water and place them in a shallow baking dish.  Bake for 5 minutes in a 350° oven.  Serve with little dishes of melted butter and plenty of cans of beer.  Serves 6 to 8.

I've got a connection to the other traditional Memorial Day sporting event: the Indianapolis 500.  My mother is from Terre Haute, and went to school with Mari Hulman, matriarch of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.  I've been to the Speedway, but never watched a race there (nor have I played golf there: Brickyard Crossing is reputed to be an excellent course).  While I'll cook up a Syracuse-themed meal in honor of the lacrosse team this weekend, I don't really know what would qualify as Hoosier cooking.

Long weekend: after pausing to recognize fallen heroes, you'll still have time for some extra puzzles.

Trip Payne posted a 1995 variety cryptic of his called Indeed!, originally published in the magazine "Tough Cryptics."

The Wall Street Journal has a Boom Boxes by Patrick Berry this week.  If you have trouble with the issu content, go to blogs.wsj.com/puzzle and download the PDF.  If you have trouble with the puzzle, you can request a hint on the comment side of the wsj.com post or you can look at the hint file below the fold, which gives you the enumerations in each row.

Nathan Curtis has given us a Some Assembly Required.  In other news, his blog now has a feature where users can rate the difficulty of his puzzles, so if you want to bang your head against a wall, you can pick out one of the difficult ones.  [update: this one is easier than most Some Assembly Required, so if you haven't tried one before, this is the one to start with]

Puzzazz users: update your app: version 2.4 has some of the promised improvements, including a new virtual shelving system that labels the shelves and includes a separate shelf for your purchased puzzle books.  If you have purchased The Year of Puzzles ($19.99), they have added a Rows Garden by Patrick Berry.  It is appropriately dedicated to the Rose City: Portland.  

Falcon said the National Post puzzle this week was the easiest he's seen in a while.  Props to Hex for even putting their theme answers in order--just the kind of attention to detail you expect them to show.

The Times has a Split Decisions by Fred Piscop behind the paywall.  Deb Amlen reports that this is the first one Piscop has written since the death of his mentor, George Bredehorn, and shares some of Piscop's comments on picking up Bredehorn's pencil.  That said, Bredehorn's work will live on for a while, as he left behind a database of word pairs he liked and wanted to use sometime.

hints for Wall Street Journal puzzle below the fold

Congratulations, Erica! (Puzzle No. 3,285)

Well, now we know where Erica was last week when we were expecting her to post her solution and snark on this month's Harpers': she was off on a toot celebrating her being a winner of their monthly contest!    Maybe she'll tell us next month about all the barflies in all the gin mills of Chicago who toasted her success, or maybe put a reference to the victory in the next episode of Blogjob.

I never bothered to put a stamp on a solution and mail it in since I already have access to the magazine at Penn, but now we learn that not only do winners get a one-year subscription to Harpers', they also get a note from Richard Maltby himself!  Or at least I think that's Maltby's signature there... with that kind of penmanship, I can't really be sure.

It makes you wonder what the handwriting of other constructors is like.  Do any of them write one letter on top of another hoping for serendipitous acrostics?  Do they look for opportunities to write a whole note without the use of the letter 'a'?  Which leads to the more philosophical question: are constructors the same in person as they are in a grid, or is the grid their alter ego?

Muse more in the comments if you like: here's 3,285.  It's not the easiest puzzle The Nation has published recently, but I didn't find any stumpers here.  Started it on the El going off to lunch, and finished it just before going back to the office.  I hopped and skipped around rather than knocking out a whole quadrant at a time.

Link to puzzle: http://www.thenation.com/article/174465/puzzle-no-3285

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

Hozom's comment: "Definitely!" in which Hot and Trazom debate how specific the definition part of a clue ought to be, and share some of the things that go through their minds as they construct their clues.  Since they try to balance tricky definitions with easier wordplay and vice versa, I'd like to know how often they start with the definition and how often they start with the wordplay.  I think a memorable definition can redeem a mushy piece of fill.

Solution and annotation published Monday—join us this weekend for Sunday brunch!

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.