William Etty, Youth on the Prow, and Pleasure at the Helm
Does 8D leave you with a sense of 40A? Let 35D console you. Everything's great! So far.
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Crossword 071: Reinterpretation
Frederick William Hulme, A Quiet Retreat, Surrey
Do you ever wake up in the morning and wonder why you are maintaining a website that offers weekly crosswords and weekly Victorian novel recommendations? Am I the only person who does that?
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A puzzle of mine will appear tomorrow, March 31, in the various newspapers that run the Universal Crossword .
Crossword 070: Need for Speed?
William Powell Frith, The Derby Day
Today's puzzle will be distributed (thanks to "Bob Kerfuffle") at the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, where people try to solve puzzles as fast as they can. I myself don’t like to solve puzzles fast. I like to savor them, to meditate on the nuances of the fill and the cluing, and on the ramifications of the theme. That’s why I design puzzles the nuances and ramifications of which can be easily meditated on. I won’t spoil your fun by explaining just what those might be in this puzzle.
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A puzzle of mine will appear Friday, March 29, in The Los Angeles Times (and The Chicago Tribune, The Houston Chronicle, The San Francisco Chronicle, etc.)
Crossword 069: Technological Innovations
From Dickinson's Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851
This puzzle evokes a dystopian future in which machines, built to drudge for us, acquire wills of their own and become our masters. At first glance it may seem like just a good thriller. More serious solvers, however, will find beneath the surface a profound meditation on what it means to be human.
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069-Technological Innovations.puz
069-Technological Innovations.pdf
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A puzzle of mine will appear next Thursday, March 21, in the Wall Street Journal.
Crossword 067: Doubling Back
William Fraser Garden, Back Lane, Holywell
I’m back in action, with back-to-back thrills! I've got your back! It’s payback time! So don’t hold back! Just download the puzzle.
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A puzzle of mine will appear Friday, March 8, in The Los Angeles Times (and The Chicago Tribune, The Houston Chronicle, The San Francisco Chronicle, etc.)
Crossword 066: Multi-PL Choice
Joseph Farquharson, An Aberdeenshire Farm Under Snow
My choice of painting was inspired by 39 Down. I looked up the term online and found it originally referred not, as I thought, to a raucous but harmless celebration of some sort, but to a noisy, sometime violent mock-parade held to express collective “disapproval of different types of violation of community norms” (Wikipedia). And this reminded me of everything that arouses the misanthropy against which, dear solver, I am perpetually struggling—it reminded me, that is, of mindless tribalism, hideous clamor, deliberate cruelty in the service of some sanctimonious purpose. I found myself longing for silence and emptiness. The inhabitants of these Aberdeenshire farms, however maliciously inclined, have got to remain quietly in their snowbound buildings for the present.
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Crossword 065: Trial Runs
Herbert Draper, The Lament for Icarus
I have crafted this puzzle specifically for those elite solvers who are able to soar above the petty, earthbound considerations of vulgar linguistic usage that limit the intellects of the common herd. If you belong to this group, I congratulate you, and invite you to congratulate yourself. For self-congratulation is a primary—in fact, for many, the only—purpose of cultural experience. Let us wallow in it together.
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A puzzle of mine will appear next Tuesday, February 19, in the New York Times. Meanwhile, on the very same day, another puzzle of mine will appear in the various newspapers that run the Universal Crossword .
Crossword 064: Direct Addresses
Henry Holiday, First Meeting of Dante and Beatrice
A crossword puzzle, says Aristotle, or Coleridge, or somebody, should create its own alternative world, one in which, though people may not behave as expected, they nonetheless follow an internal logic of their own. I have tried, in my humble way, to obey these strictures, nowhere more than in this present offering.
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Crossword 062: Leeds
Atkinson Grimshaw, Park Row, Leeds
I’m afraid the relation of the title to the puzzle is arguably just a little bit strained here, requiring both a parsing and an unlikely abbreviation. Normally I am all too scrupulous in making titles that simply and exactly delineate the nature of the puzzles to which they are attached. I make an exception today in order to give myself an excuse to haul in another painting by the great Atkinson Grimshaw. Maybe somewhere there’s an alternate art world, into which (if we’re good) we will pass when this earthly life is over—a world in which the fame of Grimshaw is choired by angels, and Picasso is unknown.
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Crossword 61: Inflation
Charles Robert Leslie, Gulliver Presented to the Queen of Brobdingnag
Why say in one word what you can just as well say in two, or three, or four, especially if you can thereby come up with 15-letter grid-spanning phrases?
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A puzzle of mine will appear next Thursday, January 24, in the Wall Street Journal.
Crossword 060: Hair Lines
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith
What Darwinian purpose does hair serve? How are the odds of human survival increased by its plentiful presence on the top of the head? Maybe it provides protection from sun and rain and snow? But if so, why do so many men who are deprived of this protection after their first youth successfully breed other men who will be similarly deprived? And why do they meanwhile retain the facial hair that just gets in their food?
Well—it’s another of life’s unsoluble riddles. Crosswords, by contrast, provide only soluble riddles, so console yourself with this one.
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Crossword 059: Aeration
Henry Moore, Light Airs at Sunset
Is it permissible to alter a certain letter in a crossword theme phrase, and yet allow that letter to remain unaltered elsewhere in that very phrase? Will it, as I’ve heard more than once, confuse the solver? Maybe so, if the solver is a primitive computer capable of processing only the simplest “if-then” algorithms and immune to humor. I construct my crosswords, however, for genuine, warm-blooded, passionate human beings! I’m not saying that, if you object to what you think is my inconsistency in the matter of theme-answer-letter alteration, you’re not fully human—but it’s a possibility worth considering.
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A puzzle of mine will appear next Wednesday, January 9, in the Wall Street Journal.
Crossword 058: Accentuate the Positive
Edward Frederick Brewtnall,
The Princess and the Frog Prince
“Oh goodness infinite, goodness immense!,/That all this good of evil shall produce,/And evil turn to good!” you will exclaim, “replete with joy and wonder,” after you finish this puzzle. (See John Milton, Paradise Lost, XII.468-71)
We owe 32 Across to my test-solver, proofreader, and sometime editor “Bob Kerfuffle,” who has also spared me the embarrassment and you the annoyance of many errors of all kinds. He will not permit me to use his real name, preferring to “do good by stealth.” (See Alexander Pope, Epilogue to the Satires of Horace, Dialogue I, l.136)
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058-Accentuate-the-Positive.puz
058-Accentuate-the-Positive.pdf
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Crossword 057: The Worst Crossword Puzzle Ever Made
John Martin, Pandemonium
Tomorrow I will publish a Sunday crossword in The New York Times. The success has gone to my head.
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057-The-Worst-Crossword-Puzzle-Ever-Made.puz
057-The-Worst-Crossword-Puzzle-Ever-Made.pdf
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Crossword 056: Di-Graphic Language
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Une Vocation
That’s this week’s crossword she’s got there. Judging from the position of her pen and the expression on her face, she’s at 52 Across, and trying desperately to remember what exactly a “ratite” is. She’s seen the word before, maybe in another crossword—but what does it mean? It’s nothing to do with rodents, or rodent-followers, but it is some kind of animal, isn’t it? A “gnu” maybe?
If you attended last August’s Lollapuzzoola tournament, you may have picked up a promotional copy of this very puzzle, which was distributed there on my behalf by my test-solver, editor, and promoter, the inexplicably generous “Bob Kerfuffle.” I was not myself in attendance, as I prefer to cultivate an air of reclusive genius—in the hope of being revered as the J.D. Salinger, the Emily Dickinson of crosswords. Do please try to play along with me in this.
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Crossword 055: Monkey in the Middle
Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, The Travelled Monkey
I never construct a puzzle without exhaustive research of its origins and implications. For this puzzle I looked up the etymology of the word “monkey” in the OED. Apparently it derives either from “monk,” on the theory that the unknown coiners of the word found some satirical resemblance between the animal and the religious community member, or from “Moneke,” the name of the son of Martin the Ape in the 1498 Middle Low German classic version of “Reynard the Fox.” Next time you find yourself at a dinner party at which conversation falters, mention these two possibilities: lively debate is certain to ensue.
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Puzzles of mine will appear next Wednesday, December 12, in the Wall Street Journal, and next Thursday, December 13, the Los Angeles Times.
Crossword 054: Northern Cities Vowel Shift
Louise Rayner, John Knox's House, Edinburgh
For a learned account of the phenomenon on which this puzzle is based, see the Wikipedia article on “Inland Northern American English.” I was born and raised in Kansas City, where English is spoken in its purest form; and so, when fate relocated me to Chicago for awhile, my ears were often offended by wrong vowels. If you yourself use these wrong vowels, I know I can trust you to train yourself to stop.
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054-Northern-Cities-Vowel-Shift.puz
054-Northern-Cities-Vowel-Shift.pdf
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Crossword 053: Carved Turkey
Hearty Thanksgiving Greeting
Thursday was Thanksgiving. I was thankful for you; and you, I’m willing to suppose, were thankful for me. But now we have these turkey parts all over the place. Like so many of my puzzles, this week’s holds a mirror up to nature, showing the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
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A puzzle of mine will appear next Thursday, November 29, in The Wall Street Journal.
Crossword 052: Crosswordese Cavalcade
Henry Stacey Marks, ‘Hark, hark! / The dogs do bark. / The beggars are coming to town’
If you’ve done more than a few crosswords, you know that some relatively rare words and phrases appear in them with annoying frequency. The crossword constructor’s life is one long wearisome battle against these. “Does nothing fit here but Caesar’s last words crossed with the founder of Yale? Oh, why was I born to suffer?” asks the sorrowing crossword constructor. This week, however, I’m just giving up and letting them in. In fact, I’ve made an especially large 21 x 21 puzzle to accommodate them.
And so I conclude this website’s first year—with this puzzle, and with a second and final solicitation for support. Donate $12 and get a free bonus crossword: either a 15 x 15 puzzle made entirely of words and phrases current in the Victorian era, or a 21 x 21 puzzle made of the usual stuff. Donate $15 and get both. Just click this button:
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052-Crosswordese-Cavalcade.puz
052-Crosswordese-Cavalcade.pdf
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A puzzle of mine appears today in The Wall Street Journal.
Crossword 051: Sole Patches
John Collier, The Beggar Man
I’ve now given you fifty 15 x 15 crossword puzzles. Because I love you and want you to be happy, I will conclude my website’s first year by giving you two extra-large 21 x 21 puzzles. Are you wondering what to do with the overflowing sense of gratitude you can’t help but feel in response to all this? Wonder no longer—because now you can donate money to this site! Just click the button below and follow instructions. Donate $12, and I'll send you either another 21 x 21 puzzle, or a 15 x 15 Victorian crossword puzzle (that is, a puzzle that uses only words and phrases current in the Victorian era)! Donate $15 and I’ll send you both!
And that’s not all! I have a special bonus for the first person who donates $10,000,000 or more: not only will I send you both puzzles, but also I’ll rename this website in your honor! So if your name is, say, Bill Gates, after your donation the website will be known as "Bill Gates Presents David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade and Victorian Novel Recommender." But act fast—because, again, only the first donor at the $10,000,000 level will be eligible for this bonus.
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