Crossword 335: Is That a Dog I Hear?

 

John Collier, Love Me, Love My Dog

 

I used to have a dog.  I loved him, and he loved me.  But since he left this sad world, I’ve found dogs annoying:  the little yappy dogs next door yapping their little yaps all the yappy day, the muscle-y dogs lunging at me on the sidewalks, the sweatered and bootee-ed stroller dogs that complicate my efforts to regard their owners with the respect I try to confer on all humankind—they annoy me.  Now, my old dog had his bad habits.  He would leave his scent everywhere. He would shed all the time.  He would try to kill the plumber.  But he had a deep, rich voice, respected pedestrians, would have scorned to wear bootees—was, in short, just a better dog than the dogs of other people nowadays. This puzzle is dedicated to his memory.

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335-Is-That-a-Dog-I-Hear?.puz

335-Is-That-a-Dog-I-Hear?.pdf

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335 Is That a Dog I Hear?

Crossword 331: Or Else

 

John William Waterhouse, Magic Circle

 

It has lately come to my attention that the Internet is infested with a great many people who have wrong opinions and do bad things.  And I have to ask myself—and invite you, dear solver, to ask yourself as well—does not our use of the Internet render us complicit with these wrongheaded people and responsible for these bad things?  I fear it does. So I’ve decided that if the Internet does not remove these people within a reasonable amount of time, I will withdraw from it myself and invite you to do the same.  Reform, Internet, or else!

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331 Or-Else.puz

331 Or-Else.pdf

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331 Or Else

Crossword 322: Trash Bin

 

Ernest Normand, Evil Sought

 

Here is yet another in my series of crosswords exploring the dark side of the human condition (see, for example, Crosswords 112, 114, 115, 224, 306), the filth and misery that other crossword constructors never come near.  Why don’t they, I wonder?  Is it that they are afraid—afraid, perhaps of the darkness within themselves, lurking just beneath their facile self-regard, their bourgeois pieties?

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322-Trash-Bin.puz

322-Trash-Bin.pdf

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322 Trash Bin

Crossword 320: Overworked Abbreviations

 

Charles Sillem Lidderdale, The Letter

 

Where would crossword constructors be without abbreviations?  How many themes would have to be discarded if it weren’t for EEO and EOE? And the AAA and the ABA and the ACA and the ADA and the BBA and the BBB and the BBC?  Indignant solvers may complain that they’ve never seen a screen referred to as an SCR, that SSRs aren’t much talked about anymore, that SPR is not a season they’ve encountered outside of a crossword, that an STR is not and has never been an orchestra section, or a narrow maritime passageway, or a stock unit, or a riverboat, or a soft-shell clam.  And they have a point.  But what they don’t consider is just what these guessable letters may have spared them in the way of unguessable jargon, or trivia, or slang.  This puzzle is a grateful tribute to the hard-working, much-abused abbreviations that have got us all out of more than one tight cruciverbal corner with minimal semantic damage.

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320-Overworked-Abbreviations.puz

320-Overworked-Abbreviations.pdf

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320 Overworked Abbreviations

A crossword of mine will appear Wednesday, January 15, in The Wall Street Journal