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James Sant, Self-Portrait
Me! It’s me time. It’s all about me. Not other people, and certainly not you. Me. I’m tired of everybody else always being everywhere and having everything. It’s my turn. I need to take care of me. At least, that’s what my therapist says.
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Edward Matthew Ward, The South Sea Bubble, a Scene in ’Change Alley in 1720
It’s time for David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade and Fortnightly Victorian Novel Recommender to launch its initial public offering. True, our profit margins are in negative territory as yet, but prospects for growth are enormous; and the infusion of cash we’re expecting from our stock sale will allow us to (1) develop and implement an AI solution that will reduce our labor costs by ninety-nine percent, and (2) purchase enough social media influence to increase our eyeballs a thousand million times. I’ll be issuing a prospectus shortly; you’ll want to get in on the ground floor.
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Richard Parkes Bonington, Fishmarket
Some five years ago (see Crossword 127) I found it very fishy that my crosswords were not appearing in The New York Times. Since then, they have continued not to appear there, and no doubt you too are wondering how that could be. It’s not that I’m not sending crosswords to the Times (though I admit it has been awhile since I’ve done so). And it’s not that the crosswords I’m sending don’t deserve publication—anyone can see that they’re much superior to many, perhaps most, that have appeared there of late years.
So what’s this really about? Well, have you ever noticed that, if you zoom in on a digital black-and-white picture until its pixels look like squares, those squares together, in 15 x 15 sets, resemble crossword grids? Okay, so it stands to reason that if you take several crossword grids, arrange them together, and then zoom out, you’ll get something that looks like a black-and-white picture. Now, have you ever thought that maybe the Times crosswords of the past few years can be arranged so as to make such a picture, for those who are in on the secret, that they might in fact have been constructed for that purpose? And have you ever wondered what that picture might reveal? I don’t dare to be more explicit, but I will say this: there’s definitely something fishy going on here.
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Edward Matthew Ward, The Disgrace of Lord Clarendon, after his Last Interview with the King - Scene at Whitehall Palace, in 1667
It’s been nearly ten years since I published my first crossword—ten years of awards too numerous to mention, of adoring media plaudits, of untold wealth and fame. A backlash was inevitable. Some now find my crosswords too funny, some not funny enough. I am accused here of Positivism, there of Negativism. My wordplay, it is alleged, has rewired the brains of the young, rendering them unable to bear the responsibilities of adulthood. Well, what can I do? I owe it to my many remaining admirers—to you, loyal solver—to continue doing what I do better than anybody else: that is, to make the best crosswords ever made!
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Marie Spartali Stillman, By a Clear Well, Within a Little Field
All is not well. After an exhaustive analysis of current society, politics, and culture, that is my conclusion. Conflict is more violent, immorality more shameless, ugliness uglier, and badness worse than it ever was before or, if the world survives, ever will be again. We live in really and truly desperately terrible, horrible times. But here’s a crossword.
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Thomas Benjamin Kennington, The Pinch of Poverty
It appears that artificial intelligence (AI) can do your job better than you can, and so you won’t be asked to do it anymore. But so what? You’ll have all the more time to solve crosswords and read Victorian novels. And if you should run out of crosswords to solve, or Victorian novels to read, never fear; AI can produce more of them. Of course, if you’re dependent on income derived from your job for food, shelter, clothing, and such things, there will be some drawbacks.
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Andrew Carrick Gow, A Lost Cause, Flight of King James II after the Battle of the Boyne
This is my second defeat; the first (see Crossword 136) took place nearly five years ago. That makes my win-loss record 350-2. To what do I owe this triumphant career? Exercise and diet. I spend at least six hours a day lifting virtual weights in my AI-assisted smart gym, and I fry my tofu only in lard.
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Richard Redgrave, Country Cousins
You’ve got on your top hat, white tie, and tails, or your evening gown and string of pearls, and you’re seated at table next to the countess of this or the earl of that, and you’re using the right fork. “I wonder whether the weather will improve,” you say. Eyebrows are raised, gazes averted. Nobody responds. You’re never invited back. What, oh what, have you done? This puzzle supplies you with five practice phrases; learn to pronounce them properly and you may face your next dinner in high society with confidence.
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350-Practice-Phrases-for-the-Aspirational.puz
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A crossword of mine will appear Saturday, March 14, in The Wall Street Journal
John Frederick Lewis, Veiled Egyptian Girl, Cairo
Don’t let the title frighten you: this crossword is, like all my crosswords, free from full or even partial nudity, in fact of “erotic” content of any kind, and appropriate for family solving. In fact, I cleanse various phrases that might have once had an impure implication and redirect them to innocent ends, for my aim as a constructor is and has always been to save the world from itself, one puzzle at a time.
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349: Strip Joint
A crossword of mine will appear Wednesday, March 4, in The Wall Street Journal
Stanhope Alexander Forbes, By Order of the Court
I’ve made seven phrases for today’s puzzle; my legal team is having them all properly copyrighted, or patented, or trademarked, or whatever—maybe all three. Meanwhile, I demand that everyone in the world refrain from using them (unless for nonprofit educational purposes) until they have entered the public domain in, I believe, February 2131.
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Henry Stacey Marks, What is It?
Lately I find I make crosswords mainly to give myself a pretext for railing in these comments against things I dislike. A couple of weeks ago it was orange and blue; before that it was dogs; before that it was something else. I can’t keep track of them all; I need to compile an inventory so that I don’t forget to dislike any of them.
Today it’s the back-up beeper, the piercing tones of which announce to everyone within a radius of a mile or two, and especially to everyone who might be napping, or reading quietly, or listening to soft music, that SOMEthing SOMEwhere is BACKing UP. I think there might be a special suite of rooms in hell where the popularizers and profiteers of the back-up beeper, and the leaf blower, and the car alarm sit forever and ever and ever deprived of all sensory experience except the beeps and the wails and the whining roars they inflicted on the rest of us in life. I won’t say I hope so, because that would be cruel, but I will say that I can easily reconcile such a possibility with the existence of a just and loving God.
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Hubert von Herkomer, Hard Times
Times are hard here at David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade and Fortnightly Victorian Novel Recommender. With the new year, our emergency Covid funds have run out. We’ve had to lay off 30 percent of our staff. We’ve considered crossing fewer words; after some painful soul-searching we’ve decided instead to lower the quality of our recommended novels by 20 percent.
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Atkinson Grimshaw, Sunset from Chilworth Common, Hampshire
Some things are the wrong color. The blue once associated politically with Toryism and the red with Communism have now become, by a process I don’t understand, the colors of Democrats and Republicans. The screamingly orange subway benches on some New York City lines make sudden violence seem probable and even appropriate. And orange should never under any circumstances be juxtaposed with blue, in logos, in school colors, in textiles, or anywhere else. FedEx, and the University of Illinois, and certain Scottish clans, please take note.
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A crossword of mine will appear Wednesday, January 7, in The Wall Street Journal
Kate Greenaway, Christmas Card
Attentive solvers will recall that, 183 crosswords ago, I posted a puzzle called “Noels” (see Crossword 161), so this puzzle is not, they will suppose, my first “noel.” In fact, however, this is the prequel to Crossword 161, the second part of a projected “noel” trilogy, which will in turn form the first part of a trilogy of trilogies all exploring my “noel” universe, and all of which should appear, if not by the end of the century, early in the next. So stay tuned!
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Daniel Maclise - Scene from Ben Jonson's 'Every Man in His Humour'
True happiness comes, I have found, not from riches or love or power, but simply from the ability to endure calmly the many affronts—to common sense, to simple morality, to good taste—that the world forces upon us every day. This puzzle is designed to give you practice in cultivating that invaluable skill.
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George Paul Chalmers, Reading by the Fireside
This title is, of course, tautological. All puns are stupid. Words that sound the same have different meanings. So what? Who cares? Why fill a crossword with such stuff when you can fill it instead with actors, or athletes, or other celebrities who embody your tastes, or values, or identity, or whatever? Alas, having vowed to read every Victorian novel, I have no time for television, or movies, or social media; and so, not knowing the names of any celebrities, I’m left to embody my tastes, and values, and identity all by myself, and to fill my crosswords with stupid puns.
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Henry Perronet Briggs, The Progress of Civilisation
The arc of history bends towards today’s crossword.
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Cecil Gordon Lawson, Battle Scene Outside a Town
Things are getting tense here at David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade and Fortnightly Victorian Novel Recommender. The homophone faction is no longer on speaking terms with the homonym faction, while the parsing faction is threatening to break off and start its own site. Meanwhile, on the novel side, the female-novelist recommenders have made common cause against the male-novelist recommenders, each side rejecting out of hand my calls for mutual civility and reasoned debate, on the grounds that the bigotry motivating the other side deserves no consideration. We have, in short, devolved into a state of hopeless partisan rancor. How has this happened? I blame social media, artificial intelligence, online pornography, capitalism, forever chemicals, digital currency, and food dyes.
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Charles Burton Barber, Time to Wake Up
I’d been wondering— Why is my every move being recorded by a network of hidden cameras? Why have all my writings, however private, been uploaded to secure online databases? Why are my innermost thoughts being monitored in underground laboratories? And then, the other day, while solving a crossword, and finding that, yet again, a word was clued exactly as I had clued it in an unposted crossword I had made not a week before, it struck me: an international cabal of crossword publishers, unwilling to give me proper credit either in money or in fame, was secretly tapping into my mind for crossword content. It all adds up! If you find yourself admiring a feature of somebody else’s crossword somewhere, you would do well to remind yourself that in fact it’s probably actually something I thought up already.
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George Dunlop Leslie, Untitled
I’ve been so busy! Everybody wants me to do everything, because I’m so good at it! So, finding myself short of time for this fortnight’s crossword, I’ve had to settle for just some assorted answers, an untitled painting, and no more interesting introductory comment than this one.
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