Crossword 193: Identity Crisis

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I know many of you are wondering about my identity—my race, and gender, and age, and sexual orientation, and all that.  If you think my name implies something about some of these, you’re wrong:  “David Alfred Bywaters” has no more existence than Betty Crocker or Mr. Clean.  In fact these puzzles are made by a diverse collective of organically-fed artisans, working in a carbon-neutral environment with hand-crafted crosswording materials.  That’s why they’re so good for you!

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193 Identity Crisis

Crossword 192: Inner Sancta

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This puzzle should properly appear in 2023, the next year in which July 15 falls on a Saturday—but by then I may be gone, or you may be gone, or some competing constructor may have given the theme an inferior treatment.  So here it is now: just make a note to yourself to solve it again in 721 days.

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192 Inner Sancta

Crossword 191: Ha Ha

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Today’s crossword concludes this year’s series. The final entry presents a mirror-image counterpart of the first—just one of the more obvious manifestations of the intricate structure of meaning that informs this web site; and a good point of entry for scholars hoping to tease out its multiple, richly interwoven strands of semiotic implication.

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191 Ha Ha

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A crossword of mine will appear Thursday, July 22th, in the Wall Street Journal.

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Crossword 190: Hoo Ha

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Hoo boy it was hard to find theme answers for this puzzle, especially since Sutton Hoo was ineligible, because of its association with offensive weaponry and violent death, two of the many things I’m trying to stamp out by not putting them in crossword puzzles (another is “medical malpractice,” which, along with “Woody Allen,” and “bisphenol-A,” I’ve managed to keep out of all my puzzles to date).

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190 Hoo Ha

Crossword 189: Yee Ha

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At the beginning of every summer I’ve featured on this website a ground-breaking, norm-shattering series of crosswords.  Three years ago I engaged in a six-part existential meditation-in-crosswords on the nature of being (Crosswords 029-034).  Next, in a four-part series (Crosswords 081-084), I examined the deep syntactic structures that underlie our language, determining not just how we make meaning, but what we can mean.  Last year I sounded a warning in three puzzles against the encroachment of decadence in our society (Crosswords 135-137).  And last week I embarked on an exploration, which continues today, of the essence of comedy—illustrated with paintings by John Atkinson GrimsHAw whose titles also contain the consecutive letters HA.  Interspersed with these will be recommendations for the nine volumes of Frances Trollope’s laughter-inducing Widow Barnaby trilogy, illustrated with paintings by Frederick Daniel HArdy.

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189 Yee Ha

Crossword 188: Ah Ha

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One of the great satisfactions of the crossword—the sense of understanding something that has confused or mystified us—is provided as well by the conventional Victorian novel.  And this is so satisfying a satisfaction because it’s what life itself so often, so implacably denies us.  Where did this go?  Why did that happen?  What’s the point of everything?  We don’t ever get to figure it out.  But we do get to figure out that the governess was actually the evil baronet’s daughter by his first wife, and that 49 Down is GMBH.

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188 Ah Ha

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A crossword of mine appears Friday, July 2, in Universal Crossword

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Crossword 187: Irregular Armies

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Here’s a joke!  Q: “What do you give irregular armies?”—A: “PX-Lax”  Get it?  Ha ha! I just thought that one up.  Funny, huh?  No?  Well, don’t worry, it has nothing whatever to do with the puzzle below.

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187 Irregular Armies

Crossword 186: In Group

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Every human endeavor attracts an in-group: people who know what’s up, and who’s who, and how to signal to each other over the heads of the ignorant crowd.  So it is with crosswords. And are you wondering who sits at the center of the crossword world, posing smugly as the arbiter of cruciverbal fashion, setting trends, attracting unearned admiration, inspiring fear of unearned contempt?  Well, I’ll tell you:  it’s me!  I’m so far in that most solvers barely know about me; only the cognoscenti truly appreciate me.  Maybe you’re one of them?  If so, enjoy the attached puzzle, and sneer confidently at those dull-witted, commonplace solvers who still think the New York Times is cool.

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186 In Group

Crossword 185: Taking the Easy Way Out

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Yes, we’re taking the easy way out again.  Someday I’ll stuff my puzzles full of things you’ll feel bad about not knowing.  Someday I’ll make my theme answers turn corners, and double back on themselves, and run outside the grid, and use the black squares in odd ways, and otherwise require all sorts of reinterpretation, so that, though they look like random assemblages of letters in the grid, they turn out (once you’ve discovered the trick) to be the names of celebrities you ought to admire.  Someday.  But not today.

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185 Taking the Easy Way Out

Crossword 184: On End

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Did you ever have to read Moby Dick?  It was justly panned by discriminating contemporaries (an “ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact . . . disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English,” said the Athenaeum; “the soliloquies and dialogues of Ahab, in which the author attempts delineating the wild imaginings of monomania, and exhibiting some profoundly speculative views of things in general, induce weariness or skipping,” said the Spectator). But then some misguided cabal of English professors, at some point in the 20th century, contrived to make it required reading, and generations of students have paid a heavy price.  53 Across is a terse comment on the incalculable suffering induced by ill-judged curricular decisions.

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184 On End

Crossword 183: Um...

Henry Stacey Marks, Where Is It?

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I don’t know. . . .  I’m completely at a loss. . . .  I’m pretty sure I was about to say something—something pretty important, too—but I just can’t remember what it was. 

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183 Um…

Crossword 182: Extraordinary Cooperation

Charles Robert Leslie, Children Playing at Coach and Horses

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Why can’t we all just get along?  What’s wrong with people, that they’re always fighting about one thing or another?  I blame irresponsible crossword constructors.  How many times have you, gentle solver, awakened in the morning full of warm, happy feelings about the entire human race, and then, in the course of solving your daily crosswords, encountered some word that made you hate everybody?  I can’t be sure I haven’t included such a word in the puzzle below (it’s hard to predict just what might set a person off—for me, it’s “alii”), but if I have, I hope to have counteracted the effect with my theme, which fosters a whole new kind of cooperation.

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182 Extraordinary Cooperation

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A crossword of mine appears Thursday, May 20, in Universal Crossword

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Crossword 181: Digital Waste

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Beautiful Hand

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Are you aware that, in the course of a lifetime, the average American adult discards enough ones and zeros to fill seven virtual football stadiums?  It’s just one more way that technology is making our world into a dystopian hellscape.  I’m thinking of doing my part to reverse this trend by etching my crosswords in stone the old-fashioned way and delivering them by ox-drawn carts.  Subscription fees may rise, of course, but won’t it be worth it?  What can equal the sound, the smell, the tactile thrill, of entering your answers in granite, with a chisel?

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181 Digital Waste

Crossword 179: Midwestern-State-Sponsored Terror

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I have already mentioned on this site that my crosswords promote human betterment by mentioning those things we ought to pursue (“good,” for example, has appeared in six of my puzzles) and those other things we ought to shun (“evil” has appeared in eight).

But lately I’ve been exploring the crossword form as a vehicle for soul-searching confessional autobiography. So this is the second puzzle based on U.S. States in which I have lived (see Crossword 128).  Like much autobiography, it’s designed not just to indulge the writer but to give a voice to others with similar life experiences—in this case, to solvers who have lived in one or more U.S. States.  They will, I’m sure, “relate,” and feel gratifyingly “validated” in consequence.

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Midwestern-State-Sponsored Terror

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A crossword of mine appears tomorrow, April 25, in Universal Crossword. (The usual link is not operable; you may download an Across Lite version here.)

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Crossword 178: That’s Thats

George Frederick Watts, Echo 

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This puzzle celebrates the versatility in English of the terminal “s”—which can indicated plurality, possession (either singular or plural, depending on apostrophe placement), or nothing in particular (as in the name “Bywaters”). It can also (with an apostrophe) indicate an elided version of the common word “is,” but I'm saving that for another puzzle, in which I’ll celebrate the versatility of the English apostrophe.  

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178 That's Thats

Crossword 177: Coming In Last

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Among the many human proclivities that baffle me is the love of racing—of doing a thing, or of watching somebody or something do a thing, faster than some other body or thing.  It honors the tyranny of Time, that inexorable force which impels us all helplessly towards apparent annihilation. It upsets the restful calm for which we ought all to strive, as both an aesthetic and a moral ideal. Rather than be in a hurry, I’m happy to come in last.

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177 Coming in Last

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A crossword of mine appears Wednesday, April 14, in Universal Crossword

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Crossword 176: Parliamentary Divisions

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Though the inspiration for this puzzle was 64 Across (see my remarks on “The Star Spangled Banner” accompanying Crosswords 032 and 033), I’m proudest of 38 Across, which I recommend to any statistics-compiling social scientist stuck for a topic.

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176 Parliamentary Divisions

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A crossword of mine will appear Friday, April 9, in the Los Angeles Times.

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Crossword 174: Is It In Or Isn't It?

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Like other hip crossword constructors of today, I ask myself that question over and over again, as I decide on each word:  not “will it be known to the average solver?” but “is it in?”  Only the hottest new celebrities, the coolest TV shows, the freshest slang, will do.  To be sure, the French painter in today’s puzzle died in 1665, and its “mild oath” was in use as early as 1815:  but they’re fadding—wait, I mean trending—now!

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174 Is It In Or Isn’t It?

Crossword 173: Faulty Instrument Panel

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This week I continue my ongoing attempt to render in crossword form the lighter side of all possible human afflictions.  Next week I might try to take the sting out of intake manifold runner control system malfunctions, unless something better occurs to me in the meantime.

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173 Faulty Instrument Panel

Crossword 170: Beastly Puns

John William Waterhouse, Circe

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When I test-solved this puzzle, I found I’d clued 35 Across “Jacob’s brother” and 55 Across “Seth’s son.”  This seemed like too many Biblical relatives, so I substituted two “hidden-in” clues, which are more fun anyway—not that modified homonym cliché-based animal pun phrases aren’t already more fun than anybody ought to be trusted with.

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170 Beastly Puns