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Albert Joseph Moore, The Dreamers
This puzzle contains only 72 words. I think that’s fewer than any other on this site. It has 5 theme entries, which account for 51 of its 191 letters. 34 blocks take up the remainder of its 225 squares. I’ll leave you to calculate its merit on the basis of these statistics.
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Edward Wilkins Waite, Autumn
It seems only yesterday we were celebrating the spring with horrible puns; here we are already celebrating the fall with hidden words in nonsense phrases. Nothing makes time’s winged chariot hurry faster than Victorian novels and language-torturing crosswords.
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A puzzle of mine will appear Tuesday, October 16, on David Steinberg’s Puzzle Society Crossword site, and comments on his blog. And another puzzle of mine will appear Thursday, October 18, in The Wall Street Journal.
Frederick Daniel Hardy, Preparing for Dinner
This puzzle was inspired by 31 Across, which came to me as an airline ticket locator code. Was this the hand of a benevolent Providence reaching down to interfere directly in human affairs?
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Helen Allingham, Baking Bread
I once made a cd for a friend with 24 distinct recorded versions of the song on which this puzzle is based. He hasn’t spoken to me in years. Do you think there’s a connection?
The original title of this puzzle—which almost no one understood—was “Put on the Skillet! Put on the Lid!” The final, much superior, title was the inspiration of Ralph Bunker, who, along with a man who prefers to be called “Bob Kerfuffle,” has been test-solving my puzzles for months. I’ll take this occasion to express my profound gratitude to both. Would you also like to test-solve my puzzles? Send me an email! The qualifications are minimal: an unerring sense of which Roman numerals correspond to which Arabic numerals would do (I find myself surprisingly shaky on this subject). The compensation, however, is even more minimal: nothing whatsoever!
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045-No-Matter-How-You-Slice-It.puz
045-No-Matter-How-You-Slice-It.pdf
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A puzzle of mine appears today, and another will appear Thursday, October 4, in The Wall Street Journal.
John Atkinson Grimshaw, Shipping on the Clyde
The great John Atkinson Grimshaw and the famous Paul Cézanne were almost exact contemporaries. I would wager that anyone uncorrupted by a course of art history or a habit of gallery visiting would prefer the moodily atmospheric genius of Grimshaw to the blotchy dullness of Cézanne, if presented with samples of each. Yet Cézanne is celebrated, Grimshaw obscure. It’s rigged no doubt—but by whom, and for what purpose?
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Lord Frederic Leighton, The Return of Persephone
Wait! Come back! Not you!—the “L.” Everybody’s welcome here at David Alfred Bywaters’s Weekly Crossword Cavalcade—even you. As so often before, we at “The Cavalcade” have taken something unpleasant, a phrase that may perhaps evoke bitter memories, and made it—fun! (By “we” I mean, of course, “I.”)
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A puzzle of mine appears today in The Wall Street Journal.
Francis Danby, The Deluge
30 Down is based on a very old, very bad joke, one I must have heard, and should have got over, in early childhood.
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A puzzle of mine appeared yesterday in The Los Angeles Times (and The Chicago Tribune, The Houston Chronicle, The San Francisco Chronicle, etc.)
Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, Dignity and Impudence
In is out! That's the kind of upside-down, through-the-looking-glass sort of a wonderland world this bold new puzzle creates. And just so you don’t get too comfortable, at least one in . . . is still in! You won’t find that feature in many other puzzles.
The above painting refers to a subtheme, daringly embedded in baffling cross-references.
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Edward Burne-Jones, The Mirror of Venus
I try, as much as possible (given my other aims) to avoid product names in my crosswords, because I want my crosswords to continue to provide enjoyment centuries hence, when all those products will be forgotten. And I especially dislike “fashion labels,” which encourage us to act from combined motives of personal vanity, financial recklessness, and mindless herd conformity. When this puzzle, however, insisted on one designer-label name, I figured I might as well “double down.” Solvers of the future will infer them from the crossings.
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Evelyn De Morgan, Hope in the Prison of Despair
Feeling anxious? Why spend a fortune on talking cures or psychotropic drugs, when you have access on this website, free of charge, to cruciverbal-behavioral therapy (CBT)? Work this puzzle, and you’ll find yourself growing reconciled at last to life’s enduring misery and your own congenital inadequacies!
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039-Shedding-Anxieties--Literally.puz
039-Shedding-Anxieties--Literally.pdf
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Albert Joseph Moore, A Garden
When I wrote the clues for this puzzle, the temptation to cross-reference was particularly difficult to resist. 10 Down, 33 Down, and 19 Across all refer to an activity that may be performed on 4 Down, 6 Down, 12 Down, 14 Across, 60 Across, and in fact anything 47 Down. But for your sake, gentle solver, resist I did.
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James Charles, On a Sussex Farm
This puzzle is based on my experience of farm life, which is drawn almost entirely from children's books with animal sounds.
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John William Waterhouse, Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus
Do you worry that online media are creating illusory bonds and instilling obsessive habits that rob you of your authentic self? Of course you do! But not this website: on the contrary, I’m here to put you on your guard.
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A puzzle of mine will appear this Wednesday, August 1, in the Wall Street Journal.
Edwin Longsden Long, Spanish Girls
I’ve always been annoyed by the saying that this puzzle is built on; maybe after you solve it, you will be too. By the way—this puzzle is a pangram: every letter of the alphabet is represented. I don’t usually care about such things, but when I found I was only one very famous basketball star away, I thought—“why not?” Don't worry—he’s so very famous even I have heard of him, and I confess I’ve never sat through a whole basketball game live or televised. I have nothing against the sport particularly, but I can’t endure the sound of those squeaking shoes.
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Richard Doyle, Under the Dock Leaves
We’ve come to my 6th and final magic-spell-based puzzle. I made a 7th, featuring “Mythballs” (legendary dances) and “Doctor Why” (pointless British sci-fi series)—but I’ve decided to spare you the pain and myself the embarrassment. An 8th, with the revealer “ibex,” never got past the early planning stages.
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A puzzle of mine will appear next Wednesday, July 18, in the Wall Street Journal.
Sir Joseph Noel Paton, The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania
The more I think about the national anthem, the more annoyed I grow. Take just the half-line “Whose broad stripes.” Try to say it ten times rapidly. Can’t do it? Neither can I. It’s hideously cacophonous: "dstr" is not a songlike sound cluster. And the words are not even true. The stripes on the U.S. flag are actually less broad than the stripes on most flags, just because there are more of them: 13; whereas, for example, on the French tricolor there are 3—which, since they’re vertically oriented, are very broad indeed. The ratio of height to width for the average flag is 3 to 5. So say your flag is 5 feet, or 60 inches, wide. If you’re French, your stripes are fully 20 inches “broad” (60/3). If you’re American, your stripes are not even 3 inches “broad” (36/13). The Union Jack, the enemy’s flag for Francis Scott Key, had broader stripes than that. If flag stripe-breadth is the measure of national merit, the U.S. falls sadly short. But like all bad poets, Key is not even thinking of what he means.
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A puzzle of mine will appear next Thursday, July 12, in the Wall Street Journal.
John Simmons, Fairy Lying on a Leaf
As to 18 Down, and Wednesday’s holiday—would you be interested in my opinion of our national anthem? The music is good, the words are beyond awful. The tortured syntax! The stilted diction! And the whole thing about a flag’s decorative pattern (is there anything broader about the stripes, or brighter about the stars, than one finds in the stars or stripes of other countries’ flags? and if not, can’t we be proud of something actually worth being proud of?) and the not-all-that-interesting fact that said flag didn’t catch on fire during some battle or other. Maybe a bipartisan Congressional majority can find something reasonably anthemish by Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson or John Greenleaf Whittier or somebody, and we can retire this unmeaning doggerel?
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Charles Altamont Doyle, A Dance Around the Moon
There’s an odd notion afoot, among some crossword editors and reviewers, and possibly some solvers, that if you do a thing to a letter once in a crossword—delete it, replace it, turn it upside down, whatever—you have to do the same thing to that letter every time it appears, at least in the theme entries, if not in the whole puzzle. Everywhere and always, but in this series in particular, I proceed in proud disregard of that notion. If a magician turns her scarf into a parakeet, do you blame her if every scarf in the building, or the world, does not likewise turn into a parakeet? Wouldn’t you rather it be just the one scarf?
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John Simmons, Titania Sleeping in the Moonlight Protected by her Fairies
10 Across was difficult to clue, in that there seems to be no one name for those little pads or screens with up and down arrows that you have to poke at in order to make some machine—the oven, the refrigerator, the furnace, etc.— do more or less of something. Does anyone prefer poking and poking at these arrows to simply turning a 10 Across? How do these idiotic design trends get started? And how can we stop them?
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A puzzle of mine will appear next Wednesday, June 20, in the Wall Street Journal.
Richard Dadd, Puck
This is the first of six “It’s Magic” puzzles, all illustrated with Victorian fairy paintings. You will wonder how you ever endured the prosaic dullness of quotidian reality without such opportunities for escape into a world of magical make-believe.
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A puzzle of mine will appear next Thursday, June 14, in the Wall Street Journal.
