Ryan and Brian Do Crosswords

Here it is.  The last post before ACPT 2009.  Even though we began this blog on March 5th, 2008 I’m treating this weekend as the end of the first year of Ryan and Brian do Crosswords.  It’s been a great, fun and very interesting year at the RBX offices.  We started a blog, recorded 42 podcast episodes, put on a crossword tournament and got know many great crossword people.  Oh, and I went snorkeling but that didn’t have much to do with the blog.

As I look ahead to the upcoming tournament I can honestly say I’m better at crosswords now than I was a year ago.  Does that mean I’ll finish higher up in the standings?  Not necessarily.  Maybe everybody else has improved as well.  But it would be very satisfying if I do a little better this year.  So, whoever finished in 609th place better watch out.  Those footsteps you hear are mine.

On to today’s Joe DiPietro puzzle.  Great puzzle which provided me with my favorite type of puzzle experience: very little entered after my first pass through the clues, extreme doubt that I’ll ever get more than 4 answers, a foothold here, a foothold there and about an hour later a finished, no-googled puzzle.

After my first pass I had exactly two answers written in:

39D. 1997 Demi Moore flick (GI JANE).  This is not a good movie.  This was made during her prime years of popularity which she completely wasted by making crappy films.

48A. Actress Mazar (DEBI).  All I know is she was in Married to the Mob, a movie I’ve never seen.

The puzzle was made up of a triple stack on the top, a triple stack on the bottom and a canal of incoherence through the middle.

The canal of incoherence gave me the most trouble.

24D. Emulates Eve (RAPS).  I’m old and out of it.  I have no clue who this is.  I thought the answer was EATS as in EATS the forbidden apple.

23A. Before the races (PREMEET).  Is PREMEET actually something in real life?

34D. Things that open and close yearly? (WYES).  I was on to this pretty quickly but wasn’t sure how to spell the letter Y.  Who comes up with the spellings of letters?  Outside of crosswords is there any practical application of spelled out letters?

There are actually quite a few entries throughout the puzzle that I’d never heard of before.  The Insect Play was written by Karel and Josef CAPEK, a first name in conducting is SEIJI (that would be SEIJI Ozawa), chambermaid’s are in charge of LINEN (what does that mean?), LEM was a touchdown maker (this, not surprisingly, has nothing to do with football and stands for Lunar Excursion Module), you can get a bunch of LEPTAs together to make up a drachma, REBURN is clued in a complete incomprehensible manner and Walvis Bay is in NAMIBIA.  And the list goes on.  The fact that I was still able to solve the puzzle tells me it’s very well constructed.

Well, unless they’ve added a category of “Longest time it takes to successfully solve a puzzle” it looks like I’m going to walk away empty handed again.  But that’s ok, it still should be a lot of fun.  I hope you all can be there and I look forward to meeting everybody.  I’m not sure what the blogging situation will be like.  I think Brian is bringing his laptop but who knows what the internet will be like.  I do know we’ll be doing some recording for a special on site podcast.

Good luck to everybody in Brooklyn.  Have fun.  Come up and say hi.

Next stop, Saturday.