If you've liked what I've written here, you can find me blathering about crossword puzzles on a regular basis at Diary of a Crossword Fiend. It's been a lovely week standing in for Rex, and I hope that he's had a lovely vacation, away from public puzzling discourse. But now we invoke him to disparage anyone who appears skeptical about technological progress.Īnd that's all I've got. : LOOM - Ned Ludd, who ostensibly smashed a loom in the 1770s and became a legend among textile workers and labor activists for an ensuing century, was likely fictional.: PRAIRIES - I see you, Canadian constructor.: ANISETTE - This almost feels like a portmanteau of : ALANIS.Stuff that seemed fresh: SEXYTIME, YOINK!, THANX. My social companions drinking buddies suggested SHUTE (Word of the Day, above) and : DUFFY as entries that might be out of the purview of the average solver. But reparsing, if that's all you're doing (and the constraint here is only that each entry is split into three), is not formulaically predictable from the solving perspective.įill thoughts: Some opportunities in the long downs in all four corners: ARMANI SUIT, ON A SAD NOTE, TABLE D'HOTE, and ROMA TOMATO are all phrases that made me sit up a little straighter. So it took more time, and YOINK! I ended up getting almost all of the themers from the crosses, and then went back and parsed the themers to fit the clues, upon which I thought, "ah, clever!" Re-parsing is a fun linguistic trick pro pagan DA is probably my favorite. ITEM ONE : while I and my drinking buddies social companions understood the mechanism of the gimmick right away, it was tough to predict what the successive themer entries might be - which, when you're solving, is a crucial step in filling in the rest of the grid: being able to predict future themers, or possibilities for the set, once you've sussed out the way the puzzle's main entries work. YOINK! If you catch my drift, which may be explained by an explication of the. The frustration was generated from an understanding of the theme's mechanism, coupled with an inability to predict exactly what form that mechanism would take. But: It was in the context of respect for the constructor's skill in finding seven candidates for themers for this gimmick. There were some exclamations of frustration, and universal agreement that : WOOSH needed an extra H after the W. We solved together, and let me tell you, for all of us, YOINK! it was over our usual times. Puzzle friends Jesse Lansner, Bruce Ryan, and Ben Smith (a fellow Diary of a Crossword Fiend blogger and also a Eurovision Song Contest podcaster) were my companions. I solved this puzzle while out on the town at a purveyor of beverages in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the night before Boswords.
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