Wall Street Journal hint grid: March 1, 2014

Having trouble with the variety puzzle in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal?  A lot of solvers have some trepidation when faced with a puzzle where you have to figure out where the answers go.  To help you get over the initial hurdle, I’ve got some hints for you.

First is the enumerations of the words in each “belt” in the order they’re clued.  They’re in white font so click and drag to see the contents of the table.  The vertical table also has starting location (in terms of the crossing horizontal) and direction of the first word in each belt.

Then below the fold is a full hint grid (printable) with the start and end of words marked.  Have at it!

Horizontal	Enumeration
1	4, 4	5	8	5	4
2	6	5	8	6	5
3	7	7	4	7	5
4	2, 4	4,5	4	11	–
5	4	8	4-5	4	5
6	4	10	7	5	4
7	7	10	5, 3	5	–

Vertical	Enumeration					Start	Dir.
A	4	6	7	6	7	6 (lower)	up
B	5	6	4	6	9	6 (lower)	down
C	4	10	4	8	4	2 (lower)	up
D	5	6	6	6	7	5 (upper)	up
E	5	5-5	9	6	–	2 (upper)	down
F	8	4, 7	6	5	–	2 (lower)	down
G	6	7	7	6	4	4 (lower)	up

Wall Street Journal solution: March 1, 2014

Below the fold is the solution to this weekend’s Wall Street Journal variety puzzle: “Belt Line” by Patrick Berry.

When you’re through with this one, join us for Sunday brunch, won’t you?

Solve like Sondheim

Double issue last week, no new puzzle this week, so let’s go to the archives.

Last Friday’s Wall Street Journal included a feature on Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist for “Fiddler on the Roof.”  While showing the reporter around his New York apartment and talking about where and how he writes, he mentioned that the Blackwing pencils he used to use came on the recommendation of Stephen Sondheim.

I wonder how many Blackwings Sondheim went through creating his cryptics.  Do any of you use them for solving?

Fumble!!! (Solution No. 3,315)

The solution and annotation to The Nation puzzle No. 3,315 is below the fold.  

I told my partner about five minutes into yesterday’s game that I couldn’t tell whether it was a good game or a bad one.  Turned out I was right on the money.  Now that it’s getting late in the season, the players have gotten better.  But they’re still pee-wees.  Every time something happened to get me thinking they were playing well, something else happened to make me think it was a bad game.  The kids are skating better than they did in November.  They’d set up in the zone and start looking like a hockey team, but then there’d be a turnover and an odd-man rush the other way.

I wasn’t immune either.  I skated well, made some good calls, and was on top of stuff like the directive from the league that teams have a coach or other official in the penalty box when one of their players is there.  But I had a few flubs too. 

My right hand is my whistle hand because of my bad shoulder (can’t raise that arm above my head for signals), but I also need to use that hand to hand off the puck to my partner when he’s facing off, or to receive it when I’m facing off.  But having a puck slapped into your hand and onto the fingerclamp of your whistle hurts, so I take off my whistle and put it in my pocket before the pass, them put it back on for the draw.

In the second period, I had to switch whistles because the one I started with froze up.  I switched to my Acme, which I hadn’t used in a few months.  The fingerclamp of that one is a little tight, and when there was an offside and I retrieved the puck for my partner, the whistle popped out of my hand and skittered along the ice towards the bench.  So everyone else had a good laugh at my expense.

Closing ceremonies (Sunday brunch: February 23, 2014)

With the Olympics winding down, it’s time to look back on the past two weeks’ action.  The hockey was fabulous (aside from the USA letdown in the bronze medal game), but at times the officiating didn’t match it, particularly in the women’s games.  I agreed with the penalty shot no-call that Canada fans complained about, but there were several other plays that got me yelling at the TV.

There’s a linesman who’s probably pretty glad that shot at the end of the game went off the post of the empty Canadian net, since if it went in, it could have been argued that her elementary positioning mistake ended up deciding the game.  The correct position for the linesman is on the determining edge of the blue line: that’s the edge away from the puck.  Reason one is that the rules say that the blue line, which is a foot wide, is considered part of the zone the puck is in.  So if the play is in the neutral zone, the puck is in the neutral zone and offsides isn’t determined until the entire puck crosses the entire line.  And if the puck is in the attacking zone, the play stays on-side until the entire puck goes outside the line.  Reason two for being on the opposite side of the line from the puck is to make sure you don’t interfere with play by stopping the puck from going in or out of the zone.

But at the end of the game, the USA winger brought the puck up along the boards to where the Canadian defender was pinching in on the blue line.  As she backed up towards the line, she backed into the linesman, who was still inside the zone instead of outside.  As she stumbled from the unexpected collision, the American was freed up enough to get a shot on goal, which as we know slid tantalizingly close to sealing a gold medal, and then bounced off the goalpost.

I think what happened there was the linesman was too wrapped up in the tension and excitement of the biggest moment of the biggest game she ever worked in her career, and she became a spectator rather than maintaining concentration on the job.  It happens to me too a couple of times a season, but the stakes are a lot lower.  The root cause is that the women’s officials don’t have enough experience with games like this.  While the number of good female officials is growing and they keep getting better and better, the guys working professional hockey get 60 or 70 big games a year plus playoffs: for every one of them almost twenty thousand in the stands and many thousands more watching on TV.  The Olympics are a novelty to them like State Games was to me, but once the puck is dropped, it’s another game with the same NHL players they see all season.  The top women might get one or two of those international games or an international tournament, but that’s it for their big games in a season.  Maybe the answer is to give the top women officials some AHL or NHL pre-season games or European league games, or perhaps bring in the best officials regardless of sex until we have some women with that much experience.

Meanwhile the ISU and the figure skating judges deserve all the grief they got over the judging in the women’s competition.  I don’t think they blew the call--as some of the commentators said, the Russian skater took better advantage of the IJS point system and won the event with what The Other Doctor Mitchell and I thought was a less impressive program.  But when the ISU not only reinstates one of the judges involved in the 2002 scandal but also lets her judge the most important competition in the sport, it makes clear that their leadership puts taking care of their friends ahead of the integrity of the sport. That is my pick for the worst officiating call of these Olympics.

This weekend also brings the end of Olympic-theme puzzles for another two years, but the Wall Street Journal has an appropriately themed cryptic by Hex (printable version).  It has ten unclued answers and no numbers in the grid, so some of you may find it hard to get a toehold on.  If you are one of those people, I have hints posted.  Then when you’re done, you can check against the solution post.

Hex also have their straight cryptic in the National Post, blogged by Falcon.   I don’t see a theme in it even though it’s been an excellent Olympics for Canada: winning both men’s and women’s curling and women’s hockey, and facing off with Sweden for the men’s hockey gold.  Fraser Simpson’s weekly Brit-style cryptic is in the Globe and Mail (Java, printable).  I haven’t solved it yet, but I don’t think he does themed puzzles

The New York Times puzzle (behind the paywall) is an acrostic.

Kevin Wald has a new (and difficult) variety cryptic up, and LizR has a new Brit cryptic too.  She thinks Araucaria would have liked it.  I think Araucaria would be happy just to know that there are plenty of constructors still taking inspiration from him.

News from the Cryptic All-Stars project is that their print books have shipped, and those of us who contributed to the Kickstarter have also received a PDF of the puzzles.  I think some of the grids are too small, but with the PDF, it’s easy to clip out the grid and print an enlarged copy.

Wall Street Journal hint grid: February 22, 2014

This weekend’s Wall Street Journal variety puzzle is a cryptic by Hex.  Some solvers might find it a little intimidating because the grid is unnumbered and you have to figure out where all the answers go. For those of you who fall into the “how do I start this” category, I’ve given you the locations of all the answers below the fold.

But before you click down there (actually it won’t be a spoiler since the key stuff is in white text and you have to drag over it to read it), here’s a tactical hint to solving that first problem yourself.

Step 1: write down the enumerations of the across answers in each row (how many letters are between the heavy lines).  Put that information on the left side of the respective row.  So for the first row, you would write “6, 6” since there are two six-letter spaces.

Step 2: write down the enumerations of the down answers that start in each row, starting with the top row.  That row will be “6, 5, 7, 5, 7, 6, 4, 7.”  Write that information to the right of the row.

Step 3: look at the sequence of enumerations on the acrosses you just wrote down and the enumerations of the across clues.  The clues start “4, 2 (total 6), 6, 6, 4, 5.”  Since there are three 6s to start this list, and four 6s in the first two rows of the grid, you know one of those four must be one of the unclued theme answers.

Step 4: Now after those 6s comes a 4 (clue d).  Where’s the first 4 in the grid enumeration?  That’s where answer d goes.  And conveniently d is not a real hard clue.

So now you’ve got your first answer in the grid.  Now keep looking for unique patterns in the enumerations and match the clues to the list you wrote down.  OK?  Now if you still can’t figure it out or you want to check your guess, look below the fold and drag over the letter of each clue to see where it goes in the grid.  

Wall Street Journal solution: February 22, 2014

Below the fold is the solution to this weekend’s Wall Street Journal variety puzzle: a cryptic by Cox and Rathon called Feature Event.

Once you’re done with that puzzle, join us for lots more served up at Sunday brunch.