Ryan and Brian Do Crosswords

This whole Kickstarter.com thing is really grabbing the puzzle world. Eric Berlin did a fantastic suite of puzzles last month, and funded the whole project through Kickstarter. Now Patrick Blindauer has put forth his game plan.

Patrick has been making some of the most fun and surprising puzzles in recent years, and I’m certainly eager to see this big project of his get underway. If that widget above doesn’t link you to Patrick’s project page, try this instead.

Here’s how Patrick’s got this set up, if I understand it correctly. Throughout October, he’s calling for pledges toward his ultimate financial goal of $2,000. Five bucks gets you a copy of the puzzles (PDF format). Thirty dollars gets that plus two of Patrick’s puzzlebooks. Pledge $200, and you get a customized puzzle by Patrick. And the grad prize, if you win, is either $290 or your entry fee to the 2010 ACPT (whichever you prefer).

I can’t recommend this highly enough. The puzzles are bound to be stellar, and I absolutely love these sorts of multi-puzzle, meta-puzzle sets. (As a matter of fact, I’m working on one of my own right now!)

Enjoy it, everyone… I know I will!

Maybe if I had looked at the byline before solving, I’d have seen Joe Krozel’s name, and been more prepared for the oddity of this puzzle. As it was, I was just baffled by too many things in the grid (no No-Google streak for me), and had no idea what the gimmick was until I had finished everything.

Of course, if I had understood the gimmick earlier, I could have done the puzzle in Dan Feyer time.

All standard crosswords have 180-degree rotational symmetry. That is — the entire grid can be rotated 180 degrees and all the black squares will appear in the same locations. Apparently, this sort of thing wasn’t enough for Joe Krozel who took on the daunting task of creating a fill for the puzzle that also satisfied 180-degree rotational symmetry.

So this puzzle breaks the mold by not having a standard theme, per se, but rather having a constructional gimmick that must have been quite difficult to create. Every entry in the grid has a mirror image on the other side — DIAPER/REPAID, MINED/DENIM, etc.

The result is a handful of words that are very awkward (and even though this is a Tuesday, the clues are a bit Wednesday/Thursday-ish at times), but ultimately forgivable — if you think this construction masterpiece is worth the trouble.

I applaud the concept, but I was left with a couple of squares that I had no clue about — and I hadn’t caught onto the gimmick. My trouble spots seem rather immaterial now — they would all have been completely gettable if I had noticed Mr. Krozel’s trick. But my two Trivia Boxes were the crossings of:

• 54D. Ancient Roman magistrate (EDILE) and 66A. Game with matchsticks (NIM) — the I could have been any vowel and made equal sense to me.
• 38A. Thin layer (LAMINA) and 38D. City in California or New Jersey (LODI) — The L was a mystery to me, but I also had an incorrect entry for 31D. Not final, at law (NISI), which I had as NOSI. That entry at 31D meant nothing to me, and -AMONA and -ODI were blobs of letters with absolutely no meaning either.

Joe Krozel has been breaking the mold a lot lately. His recent puzzles have all done things that no one else seems to be doing. It’s a refreshing change of pace, so I will vote in favor of more Joe Krozel puzzles in the future. Please, keep it up!

If you haven’t checked out Fill Me In (our crossword podcast), our latest episode features an interview with Onion crossword editor Ben Tausig. Check it out.

And… see you Wednesday!

New York Times
by Byron Walden; edited by Will Shortz

As usual with the Friday/Saturday family, I needed a lot of help. This one seemed a little more doable than yesterday’s puzzle (Manny Nosowsky might be my crosswording nemesis — I will never rest until I solve a Nosowsky alone!!!). I got a couple of the lengthy answers, but I was guessing at so many others that I never felt very secure on anything.

This fleet of answers seemed to suggest to me that part of the challenge with the harder puzzles is not that the answers are all going to be obscure — some are really quite natural. But the blend of natural and obscure and everything in between leaves me constantly questioning my instincts. My wife has been asking me to question some of my instincts — for example, it’s instinctual to ignore the location of the toilet seat upon, er, completion, but I now must pay attention to that.

I never like it when a music clue (it’s what I do for a living) or a sports clue (it’s what I watch when I’m not making a living) completely eludes me. In this case, 33A. Player coached by Hank Stram was a complete baffler. I didn’t know who Hank Stram was, so I figured that as I got the crossings, I’d eventually see the name of a recognizable athlete. Nope. Instead, the “player” coached by Mr. Stram is any old KANSAS CITY CHIEF. Here he is, celebrating what was no doubt a victory of some sort. Probably an important one.

And I also got stuck at 51A. A musician might pick it, because I was sure it was spelled UKELELE (and not UKULELE). And believe it or not, on July 27, 2002, it was spelled that way — although the clue suggested it was a “Var.” on the original.

I’ll go along with answer ideas if only one or two of the crossings seem to fit, especially on a difficult puzzle, because I don’t have a lot of answers that I actually know. 49A. Tub handle? seemed like it might be FAUCET — which fit for 50D. Word with flute or horn (ALTO) and for my wrong choice at 45D. Ventriloquist’s prop (DUMMY for this dummy, but TRUNK for everyone else). Unaware of anything else in the lower right, I left the faucet running there for about an hour, leaking crap all over the rest of the grid. The correct answer to 49A? PARKAY.

Other News, Puzzles, Etc.

I began work today on Frank Longo’s 25-Foot Crossword Puzzle. Just did the first page. It’s truly astounding. Mr. Longo — you are impressive. If you’re reading this: I am a fan.

The trick with this puzzle, of course, is that Hamlet’s famous soliloquy runs through it. The first few words are one short-ish clue, the last few words are a short clue near the end, and the rest of it is about twenty-five feet long. I may hang this on my wall when I’m finished, as something of a puzzling trophy. We’ll see. It gets more difficult from left to right, and I’m only on page one.

Also, I was pointed to a few puzzles created by the great composer Stephen Sondheim about forty years ago. They are a challenge and then some! I have completed the first one, but not even begun the other two. In time, perhaps… We’ll see.

And I’m a new member of the National Puzzler’s League, and received my first three copies of their puzzle magazine, The Enigma. I think the first enigma here is how to decipher one of the issues — one side of every page was printed upside-down, so the magazine reads: page 1, upside-down page 23, page 3, upside-down page 21, etc. I have to say, I’m intrigued by all these challenging puzzles, but I don’t know if I’m up to the task…

Our Tuesday-through-Friday podcast will be up later today. Monday night, we’ll do Episode 5, which will cover Saturday, Sunday and next Monday.