I used to have a post here, but I’ve just deleted it in favor of this: Anyone who wants to use the comments to talk about this October 3 puzzle by Doug Peterson, please go ahead.
Thank you. I now return you to your regularly scheduled blog with Ryan.
Ryan is off on a top secret assignment in Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C. this weekend. He told me that it’s just a coincidence that the Dodgers are playing against the Pirates and Nationals, and that he’s actually travelling for BeMoreSmarter business, so I guess I’ll take his word for it. I don’t know. What do you think?
Today’s puzzle is from Robert Doll, and it surprised me by being a combination of easy-for-a-Friday (I got about 75% of the grid very quickly) and also at the same time, impossible. I stared at the southwest forever, having decided that if Ryan can no-Google all these Saturdays on which he doesn’t know anything, I can at least no-Google a Friday. I’m the reigning E Division champion, for crying out loud. What the hell is wrong with me?
But alas, it was not to be. For there was an impossible series of crossings. Two GCIs and one 50/50, and no matter what I did, the throughline made no sense to me. 34D. Gull’s cry is apparently I BEEN HAD. I assumed that “gull” meant something other than the bird, but I certainly have never heard the word used in any other way. And I had I—E-HA- going down, with some major question marks going across. To wit:
Well, the last one I knew was either RDS (roads) or RTS (routes). That was my 50/50. I thought of IBO for 38A, thinking that maybe I knew it from somewhere. Then I decided that I knew it because IBO was an abbreviation for something stock market-related. (I never got around to deciding that I was thinking of IPO [initial public offering] and that IBO isn’t a stock market acronym, but whatever.) So I abandoned IBO, and was still waffling on RDS/RTS. All this time, of course, I’m trying to figure out what a gull is when it’s not a bird.
In the meantime, I had E-NA for 51A, and deciding that Palermo and Catania were either Italian or Spanish, the only thing that seemed to make sense to me was ETNA. It’s a mountain, maybe it’s a province as well. Here’s what I know about provinces. If you tell me how many are in Canada, I can name all but one. If you tell me how many are in any European country, I can say, “I’m sorry – what do you take me for, some kind of person who knows anything?”
And as for 41A, I knew it was something in another language, and that it could be any letter at all, but that it was probably a consonant. Good thinking, moron.
So I was back to square one, with three foreign words crossing a kind of noise a bird makes, because in 30 minutes of staring, “gull” was still a bird. I decided on IBO (yes), ARREO (no), ETNA (no) and RDS (yes), leaving me with IBRETHAD. And so I decided that an ibrethad was the scientific name a seagull made when squawking on the beach. Voila, I’m done, hooray.
I’m looking back on when I get particularly stuck in crosswords, and without doing the specific math, it sure seems like most of the time, it’s with foreign words or names. In this puzzle, it was IBO, AEREO and ENNA. Joon Pahk, Squirrel of Discord, has reminded me on numerous occasions how much I don’t know about world capitals. My mother and I lamented the other day (while solving some old puzzles together) that neither of us know much about four-letter rivers of the world (now including the Nile, which I have come to learn I know nothing about).
So I need to learn more about the world. What should I do? Buy an atlas? Buy a globe? Take sporcle.com quizzes? I would love advice from the brilliant masses who read this blog on what might be the best way to educate myself in the ways of the world – or at least in the ways of words and names in other languages.
I learned two written languages as a kid – English and music. I’m now barely above average at both, and possess zero knowledge of anything else. Is this the end of the road for me, or is there hope?
Well, no matter what, it’s the end of the post for me. See you Saturday.
P.S. Are there any good collections of themeless puzzles out there, moderately challenging (Friday-ish) that are all in English?
P.P.S. I did a Google search for “i been had” +gull and discovered that there were 23 hits. Twenty-three. That’s how many kids were at recess in Maura Jacobson’s puzzle last week. And the first six hits were other people’s blogs for today’s puzzle. Yet this is still a well-known-enough concept for a crossword puzzle? Hm…
Before I get down to why I am the most loser person in the world, I’ve got a few commercial announcements.
DASH (Different Area, Same Hunt) is a puzzle hunt event taking place in eight cities (Boston, Portland, Houston, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Palo Alto, and San Francisco). Every city contributed one clue to the event, and each city will use all the clues from the contributing cities. The hunt will take place entirely on foot and should last somewhere between 5 to 7 hours. We expect the puzzles to be moderately challenging for most teams, taking between 10 – 30 minutes to solve. These puzzles incorporate wordplay, logic, code deciphering, general knowledge, and lots of creativity. For more information, visit: http://www.playdash.org/ Also, you may follow us at the national level on Twitter at @playdash.
Also – the Bay Area Crossword Tournament is coming up on September 12. $25 registration if you do it now, $30 at the door. Four puzzles, three of which are coming from the New York Times and one from a little-known crossword personality by the name of Tyler Hinman.
And now, onto our main event, the Friday puzzle by David Quarfoot. My memory of David Quarfoot is that his puzzles are a) impossible and 2) contain lots of crunchy letters.
And… my memory is accurate, thank you very much. Being the hack solver I am, I spent a good 40 minutes on about 90% of this before I finally had to turn to XWordInfo.com to check up on an answer. No no-Google streak for this wannabe crossword guru.
The puzzle was full of things I just didn’t know at all – or at least, things that were familiar, but never came into focus from the clues. Is this an instance of clues not pointing to answers? No, just a solver who is a moron. Let’s see:
1A. Rallying cry supported by some monks : FREE TIBET. Seriously. Give me something I can grab onto for the first clue. Free Tibet? Good lord, let’s just start off the puzzle experience by pointing out how non-political and non-aware of everything Brian Cimmet can be.
10A. When Antony says, “I am dying, Egypt, dying” : ACT IV. I actually just guessed this. I assume it’s from “Antony and Cleopatra,” but who can say.
12D. Right in every detail : TO A HAIR. This is a phrase? It took some very clever Googling to even find one site that explained this term.
13D. Two-time president of Romania : ILIESCU. I saw “two-time” and entered HORWITZ.
14D. Facial feature with a point : VAN DYKE. Apparently there’s no such thing as a VEE NOSE.
15A. Company with a maple leaf logo : AIR CANADA. Yeah, I was way off on this because I thought that 2D. One-named Grammy winner of 2007 was RHIANNA, not RIHANNA. Oops. For that matter, I also had AIRHEAD instead of FATHEAD, EEG instead of ECG, TORT instead of TART, ALEUT instead of INUIT and a bunch of blank squares. With all that, IHREOL— doesn’t look like much.
16A. Part of a college cheer : BOOLA. I swear, I never once said this, and I completed four years of college. Did I miss something?
17A. 2004 horror film about a passed-on curse : THE GRUDGE. I remember the poster looked awfully creepy. I never saw the movie.
18A. Major processing center : BRAIN, or what Brian doesn’t have today. I was certain that this was going to have something to do with the military, and Major didn’t mean “primary,” but rather a rank. So much for me outthinking the puzzle.
51D. Get close, maybe : ZOOM IN. It’s not ZONE IN, which is what I first tried. It’s also not ZERO IN, which is what I tried next. This was the entry I had to look up, since I very confidently assumed that if it began with a Z (which I knew from 50A. Princess Fiona’s voicer in “Shrek” for DIAZ), it had to be one of my first two ideas. There couldn’t possibly be three phrases that start with Z and mean “get close,” could there? Yes, there could.
55D. Soften, often : RIPEN. I don’t get this one. How many things ripen more than once? Or does it just mean that lots of things get soft when they get ripe, therefore it happens often, just not to the same thing…? I tried RINSE here, which also doesn’t make sense, but seemed logical. I kept thinking about washing my hands with Palmolive.
The whole area down here was a disaster for me. I didn’t know five of the six long entries that made up the southeast. Aside from VATICAN, I was lost on ADELINA (45D. Legendary soprano ___ Patti), USS COLE (47D. Destroyer in 2000 headlines – do they mean the year 2000, or that there were two thousand newspapers that ran stories?), SIMPATICO (62A. Congenial – I never saw the movie), ERIE CANAL (65A. Construction with many locks – I knew it wasn’t about locks and keys, but I assumed it was about hair) and PENNY LANE (67A. Where “all the people that come and go stop and say hello” – why, why, why could I not get the damn score to “Light in the Piazza” out of my head while reading this clue?”)… All in all, that corner killed me. I needed Google Tickets.
Well, that’s that. I give Mr. Quarfoot’s puzzle an A for being fantastic, and I give this solver an F for failing to know half the stuff.
Ryan, if you want to delete this post and write something more interesting so our readers will be glad they came here, please go right ahead.
I’ve been doing a ton of late-week puzzles lately, mostly themeless, and I feel like I’m getting better. Then this Lynn Lempel puzzle shows up on my desk, and I go back to being the idiot I’m known to be. I didn’t just have to Google an answer on this, I had to give up and search out two full sections that I found utterly confusing.
Before I get to those, let’s discuss some of the awesome answers from this puzzle:
11D. Techies affiliated with a major electronics chain : GEEK SQUAD. I warch “Chuck” on television, so NERD HERD popped into my head. Of course, that’s fictional. But I know the Geek Squad because one of their cars lives in my neighborhood. I see it from time to time, and I want to take my laptop to them and say “why does this shut down after about 20 minutes of use no matter what?” Sadly, the times that I have my broken laptop with me and the times that there are geeks in the Geek Squad car don’t ever seem to coincide.
Clooney/Pitt/Damon ones. I never saw the real original one. But I like buddy movies and I like heist movies. Maybe it’s because my life lacks both buddies and heists. I don’t know. Ms. Barkin is the one in the pink dress. Lynn Lempel is the one in the blue dress on the other side of Al Pacino. The guy peeking between Al and Lynn is allegedly Crosscan.So here’s my first Area of Doom:
41D, 33D, 43D, 46A and 50A — these five answers mean nothing to me. They are, respectively, GOREN, BENGHAZI, AMENS, FOR SHAME and GREEN ZONE.
I never learned it. I don’t know a single thing about it. I used to read the section of the newspaper where they proposed a bridge hand and challenged the reader to come up with the best plays (or something along those lines). I would read the answers and think they were simply making stuff up to sound important. Bid one no trump, three no spades, pass to the east, blah blah blah. Maybe if I understood the ultimate goal, the game would make more sense. This photo represents the only kind of bridge and card combination I can figure out.Let’s now explore the other section that I couldn’t get without help, and that was the middle:
Okay, on second thought — I looked for a picture to put here, and came across Tim Curry from “Rocky Horror Picture Show.” That’s campy and drag and I enjoyed it. So I’m proven wrong. Voila.
Bottom line, this was a frustrating puzzle. Couldn’t solve it Google-free, which was a disappointment, and even when I learned the answers, I realized I wouldn’t have been able to solve it anyway (which was another disappointment).
In other news, come to Lollapuzzoola 2. It’s going to be legendary.
See you Saturday!
May apparently is going to be one of those months where the Fridays are harder than the Saturdays. At least, it better be, because this puzzle was a monster. Joon Pahk, you’re my new nemesis. I did not no-Google it, for those few of you who think I even have such a skill. No, I needed help with one section in the southeast. Otherwise, the puzzle was… insane. Usually I list the things I didn’t know. I’m including here some words I apparently do know, but I don’t understand what they mean, even with the clue nearby. First of all, the two long entries:
In addition to these entries, which spent most of the puzzle-solving time mocking me from the page, there were these that baffled me as well:
This was quite a puzzle, Mr. Squirrel of Discord. I applaud your work, but please go back to teaching or something because I am not smarter enough to handle this sort of thing too often. You’re getting prolific and popular, and your puzzles are appearing more and more. I know that’s a good thing, so cheers to you. (And if you have a chance to swing by this site to explain yourself on a few points, that would be swell, too.)
Thanks, Joon. In all honesty, I’m excited to see what’s next.
See you Saturday!
What does it count for if I no-Google about 75% of the puzzle (with one error)? Anything? Do I fail? Ryan is out of town and my wife is asleep, so here I am in the wee hours with an unfinished grid.
This puzzle by Barry C. Silk had me pulling my hair out with the entire northwest territory. He gets off to a very selfish start, offering 1A. Park near Philly’s City Hall, site of the LOVE statue. This is not just one of those run-of-the-mill Stick It To You clues (where the clue makes a very casual reference to something completely unknown, leaving me to feel doubly stupid for knowing neither the clue nor the answer), but a Double Stick It To You clue, what with both the City Hall and the LOVE statue. And I still have no clue. I’ve been to Philadelphia twice. I don’t know anything there. Maybe the Eagles?
So forget the northwest for now. It’s still empty. The rest of the puzzle is full of JBGs — Just Barely Gettables. Things that are like 0.01% over the line of gettable. In fact, one was a complete guess and one I got wrong. So actually not so gettable for me. The total guess was 65A. 1966 hit for the Capitols. The answer is COOL JERK, which I don’t know. The reason it was a guess was the J and the K. 61D. Period in Indian history is RAJ, which only makes sense to me because it’s sort of like RAJA or TAJ or other Indian words like that. The K is my problem. Isn’t the 36D. Passe video store offering a LASERDISC? With a C? The internet shows me over six million Google hits for LASERDISC (with a C), including the Wikipedia entry. With a K at the end (LASERDISK, like in the puzzle), Google shows me 206,000 hits. Barry C. Silk, where’s the proper loyalty to your middle initial? From now on, you are Barry K. Silk to me.
Southwest area, somewhere around El Paso, TX (not to be confused with south-central, where 46D. Texas’s westernmost county [EL PASO] is in the grid), I have never heard of AXILLA (58A. Secret area of the anatomy?). I looked this up, and it’s the armpit. Why is this a secret? I’m confused by the so-called “clever” clue. Is it secret because we don’t talk about them much, the armpits? Let’s do the armpits of the world a service — tomorrow, at some point during the day, please hold a sincere discussion with a friend or co-worker about your armpits. And use the word AXILLA in it.
Oh, which part of AXILLA was your error, Brian? It was the second L. I know nothing about Valentino movies, and 5D/59D. is Rudolph Valentino’s “Blood and Sand” co-star. With blank-E-E (and 5D being four letters), I couldn’t stop thinking about Ruby Dee, and figured that maybe she was in this movie. (HINT: She wasn’t.) Playing the Kevin Bacon game, I can get from Rudolph Valentino to Ruby Dee in two steps — Adolphe Menjou was in “The Sheik” with Valentino and in “The Tall Target” with Dee (picture at left). Who can name another Adolphe Menjou film? Quick, you have until I solve the northwest, or until July (whichever comes first).
At this point, I have no choice but to give you a play-by-play of my inability to completely solve this puzzle. So, at 1:44 a.m., here I go.
1:44 a.m.: Apparently, 28D. They’re the fault of faults isn’t CHASMS or SPASMS, but rather SEISMS, which I certainly would never have gotten since it’s totally made up. Other than LEE in place of DEE, this was the first answer I had to look up. It has not broken open the northwest, though. I’m still looking for that breakthrough. I’ll keep you updated as I work.
1:47 a.m.: POEMs don’t follow convention (although of course, some do). There’s nothing called MUHR, but rather RUHR (53A. Arnsberg is on it). So it’s convention-GOERs. That it’s not MUHR is good, since I have MUIR for 22A. Sierra Club founder, and those two would be awfully similar to appear in the same puzzle.
1:49 a.m.: Along those lines, what’s I’M GONE and I’M DONE doing here in one grid? The first is 16A. “Ciao!”; the second is 45A. Confirmation to a busboy. But wow, those are awfully alike.
1:53 a.m.: Can you have a single SCAD of something? 32D. Lot suggests that yes, you can.
1:59 a.m.: I have it in my head that 2D. Result of a combustion explosion is going to be some kind of —–BURN. This is left over from when I thought SEISMS was CHASMS, and I thought 27A. Picked styles was A, B OR C. Now that all looks ridiculous, but I’m stuck on STEAM BURN. I don’t even know what a combustion engine is. Can you get a steam burn from it?
2:07 a.m.: RYANNNNNN! Come home, and solve the rest of this.
2:08 a.m.: Stupid Ryan.
2:09 a.m.: I have to be up in seven hours and go to work. This is going to end quite badly for me.
2:14 a.m.: A few guesses are confirmed by XWordInfo.com. 25A. Prefix with facsimile (TELE) and 21D. Dartmoor setting (DEVON) (No, I’ve never heard of this at all) suggest that 29A. Prepares with hot seasoning is either ANVILS or CAVILS or DEVILS. None of these things involve spice. Or heat. Except anvils, which are used for pounding hot metal. I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. I think DEVILS, although the two foods I know that have the devil in them (Devil’s food cake and deviled eggs) do not contain hot spices.
2:18 a.m.: 8D. Pair of diamonds? is ARGYLES. Dear lord.
2:23 a.m.: More guessing, confirming, realizing I’m an idiot.
2:25 a.m.: 7D. Totally beat. ME ON THIS PUZZLE.
2:26 a.m.: And appropriately, at this hour, ZONKED.
2:31 a.m.: This is nonsense. I am giving up. Here are the answers I didn’t know, even after Googling:
3D. Eponym of a national forest in New Mexico : KIT CARLSON. This seems ridiculous. There’s a forest in New Mexico called Kit Carlson Forest?Well, there it is. Current no-Google streak is zero for the second day in a row. Sad to be me. I will be back, blogging for your enjoyment tomorrow and Monday. So until then, just hang onto your hats, ’cause Ryan will return soon.
See you Sunday.
I’m annoyed at the fact that my brand new dishwasher came out of the box not working. What is the point of buying something new if I have to pay the same amount over again to get it fixed before it’s even been used?
In the meantime, I was unable to solve this puzzle. What a surprise. Here is a lengthy list of things that either I don’t know or don’t actually exist.
So the difference between Thursday and Friday is that Thursday had one square I didn’t know (which, to be fair, was pointed out on all of the other blogs as a trouble square), and Friday had 1,762,991 squares I didn’t know. Thanks for playing. I’ll see you in last place at the ACPT.
Current no-Google streak: DEAD.
A few weeks ago, I completed a Saturday puzzle. I was very pleased with myself. And it seems that ever since then, I have been nothing but a complete failure at this end of the week. And after cheating heartily, I still couldn’t complete it (and get “accepted” by the New York Times applet) — until I discovered that my cheating source had a mistake of its own. Whoops! See what Googling gets you?
This puzzle was pretty much a grid full of Things I Will Never Know, most of which crossed Other Things I Will Never Know (The Sequel). Some examples:
getting regularly beaten on the “Easy” level against my Palm Pilot years ago, until my inner rage against that particular machine was such that I had to either delete the game from the PDA’s memory, or delete the PDA from my own existence. And to just make me feel really good about myself, here’s a picture of some extremely young children obviously mastering this game that far exceeds my own mental agility.
31A. Able to stand the heat? : OVEN-PROOF. There’s a term for this?
I have about two months before I have to be able to do Saturday-level puzzles at the ACPT. I will make an extremely poor showing, there is no doubt. Maybe the Great Howard Barkin, Knower of All Things, will let me cheat off his paper…
I’ll admit it — I cheated at about half of this puzzle. It would have been left almost entirely empty, if I hadn’t bothered to look at someone else’s solution and copy about ten entries.
Oh my god, Frank Longo, why are you torturing me? You alone scare the living something out of me when I see your name in a byline. This has been the case in Games Magazine, this has been the case with your 25-foot-long puzzle (that still remains about 53% finished in a box on a shelf in my office).
And I got mad mad mad when I saw that Dan Feyer (who I know is a million times smarter than I’ll ever be) did it in 3:41. THREE FORTY-ONE? I had about six answers in place at 6:41, and after looking some up, realized that four of them were wrong. How on earth do you know everything?
I knew 62A. Killer of Greedo in a sci-fi film (HAN SOLO). And yes, he shot first.
So here’s my list of things I don’t understand:
17A. Payback factor : ACCRUED INTEREST. I don’t understand. I see that the clue is about paying a debt, and the answer seems related, but I don’t get it.
29A. Between green and black, say : RIPE. This is a major stretch, and I’m torn between thinking it’s incredibly clever and completely horrible. I *do* understand this one, though, so no need to smack me in the face with a green banana.
40A. Fort Worth’s ___ Carter Museum : AMON. Sometimes, when the grid is just full of random letters, I guess one can just Google an entry and then later figure out if there’s a clue to go with it. This idiot blogger has no clue about this museum.
42A. Jack : LONG GREEN. Is this about golf?
52A. Pulsar, e.g. : RADIO SOURCE. Is Pulsar a brand name? Or is this something in outer space? Or both?
59A. Explosive measure : KILOTON. As in “a kiloton of explosive stuff.” But then, couldn’t BAGGIEFUL also be an explosive measure?
2D. Crackpots : LOCOS. Aren’t crackpots people who are experts at things? For example: “Dan Feyer is a crackpot at crosswords.”
13D. Certain twin : SIS. Who’s twin is this? It’s apparently someone certain.
18D. Nigerian native : IBO. That’s a word?
28D. Hokey jokes : CORN. Right.
30D. Like correctional facilities : PENAL. Yes, when I’m trying to describe one of the other million things that are penal, I usually struggle to find the word, and say, “Well, it’s like… it’s… it’s like a correctional facility.”
31D. ___ Bowl : ALAMO. Might as well have been “Five-letter word” for the clue. Super Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Aloha Bowl… Really? There’s an Alamo Bowl? I challenge anyone reading this to tell me anyone who has ever played in the Alamo Bowl without looking it up.
34D. Year in which Middle English began, by tradition : MCL. It could be anything. And “by tradition”? Isn’t a tradition something that we do year after year? Like we all tease my father for using an electric knife on the frozen meringue-sorbet cake. That’s a tradition. What year a dead language may or may not have started is not a tradition.
44D. 1990s President of the Philippines : RAMOS. President + Philippines = Imelda Marcos’ shoe collection. That’s all I have.
46D. German magazine article : EIN. Why “magazine”? And for what it’s worth, the list of six German articles I know does not include this one (das, der, die, sie, ich, ach — and I’m sure at least one of those isn’t actually an article).
53D. Marsh bird : SORA. Sora, Amon, corn… these could be rivers I haven’t yet learned.
55D. Boot attachment : SKI. I always thought we attached the boots to the skis, not the other way around. Or is “attachment” a mutual experience?
56D. 1961 hit song for the Angels : TIL. In 1961, the Angels were a brand new expansion team in the American League. Their best player was leftfielder Leon Wagner, who hit 28 homers and batted .280. They went 70-91 and finished in eighth place. I know a lot about baseball, but I had no idea that the Angels ever released an album.
57D. Each, in scores : ALL. What scores use this? Is this supposed to be like “all the violins play here” as in “each and every violin”? Every score I’ve read, when they want all the instruments to play, use TUTTI.
Ryan, I am pleading with you. Don’t ever make me do a Saturday puzzle again.
There on the New York Times leaderboard: danfeyer — 1:54
I finished Monday in 3:15 — until I learned I had an error. My New York Times official time is 3:57, which is about seven hours slower than the future Champion of the A Division, Mr. Daniel Asparagus Feyer III.
So in yesterday’s post, I went on at some length about my intrigue over how different constructors have something distinct about their puzzles… Are these distinctions in the clues? Maybe not, since Will Shortz writes a lot of the clues. So in the grid? How distinct can you be with a scramble of words? I pose that question to you, our readers. Talk to me about puzzle design, and what you think makes any one constructor different from another. (And read yesterday’s post, where I talk more about this whole thing.)
The subject is valid today, too, since Monday’s puzzle was designed by Bob Klahn, a gentleman who I believe is one of the tougher puzzle makers out there. In fact, the last time a Bob Klahn puzzle was published on something other than a Friday/Saturday/Sunday was Wednesday, January 7, 1998. What is he doing here on a Monday?
I guess the theme here is Small Amounts, as each of five clues has within it a word with that meaning:
If this were a map of Ryan’s apartment, where the doorway in would be in the lower left corner, my trouble happened right around where he has a Norman Rockwell print of umpires deciding whether it’s raining hard enough to cancel the ball game. 33A. Try to strike is apparently HIT AT, and not SET AT, as I would have liked. Of course, my version makes no sense going down, but I actually filled in about 85% of the grid with the across clues only. Is it interesting that the clue is geographically aligned with Ryan’s framed baseball-themed artwork, yet in baseball, a “strike” is most definitely not a hit? I can’t tell if that’s irony or meaningless.
Having zero clue who DEBI THOMAS was (relative to Ryan’s apartment, the cat litter box goes through her midsection) slowed me down in that corner, especially since I thought 34D. Pavarotti performance would be a TENOR ARIA instead of a TENOR SOLO, I had no idea how to spell ISAIAH (47D. Book after Song of Solomon), and for some reason, I couldn’t get my mind to let go of DROP or DRIP instead of DUCT for 48D. It’ll bring a tear to your eye. Again, stupid stupid Mr. Dumbass Brian!
Anyway… Bob Klahn, thank you for bringing your puzzle design to the lower-level solvers like me. I’d love to hear some folks chime in with what they think differentiates one constructor from another. And if you haven’t heard our last podcast, we did a mid-week show since Ryan and I aren’t able to find common time over the weekend to do one.
Ryan will be back tomorrow, and take over the blogging for a bit. I have somewhere between little and zero internet access while I’m off in Vermont for a stretch. Hope to see you all next weekend.
