Spoiler:
1 across: Mutombo
1 down: Mineshaft
For a minute was wondering if this was a paid post for the premium crossword service. But puzzle (and [*MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT*] solution) can be found online here. He notes a characteristic (the theme clues being down rather than across) that I probably would have missed.
Crosswords be berry, berry good to Bave.
Ok, that was at most a solid B on the amusingness scale. You did get me to do the Monday puzzle, though, for which I usually have contempt (why not just play trivial pursuit with 7 year olds if you are willing to descend to that level of easy intellectual ego stroking). Only the Saturday puzzle is worthy of respect; in not unrelated news, I am generally not able to do the Saturday puzzle without significant cheating.
I'm not particularly good at crosswords -- I usually run into trouble around Thursday. You're right that Monday isn't mostly worth the trouble -- I just had a no-time-pressure breakfast and figured I might as well.
6: Then you do it for speed. Current best is 1:32 if the online sidebar is to be believed.
I was filling them in basically as fast as I could write, but I'd expect anyone who does crosswords at all to be doing the same. Speed on something like this would be about manual skills, not so much solving prowess.
Halford likes crosswords like his men, hard and easy to cheat on.
8: It's a slightly tense one -- I've got a couple of cases with conflicty stuff going on, that I may have to pay attention to. I kind of hate that; if I'm working at all, I'd rather be in the office. But having two weeks off in a row is very, very nice.
I love the Saturday puzzle! When I was still struggling with Thursdays I thought doing the Saturday puzzle would mean I was a super genius. It seems this is perhaps not so.
This one I did in 8:07. My sister has made a game of doing early in the week puzzles ever faster but I have thresholds I can't seem to get much past. Occasionally I can do Monday in closer to 6 I think.
Mondays I generally do as fast as I can find the clues and write, but already by Tuesday that's not the case. By contrast, RWM does Mondays and Tuesdays in essentially the same amount of time.
I do the Saturday crossword remotely with my mother. Neither of us can usually do it on our own usually, so it's very mutually ego-boosting.
15: Yeah, I think I just have lumpy caveman fingers or something and the typing truly slows me down. I have to correct things constantly.
I used to do the crossword with Anand. He'd carry it on a clipboard and we'd work on it for a while, and sit close. If we were having a group hangout and doing the crossword, sometimes Chris would grab the clipboard and run away so we would chase him. He says that's the only way crosswords could possibly be fun. Anand has a baby now and lives in Oakland, so I can't foresee a time when we have hours to spend on a crossword. I miss it.
I do as Smearcase's sister does but have gotten faster only by like 20 seconds in the last decade, and I think I'd need to improve my typing skills to get any faster. Mondays feel like a party trick, though. Saturdays consistently below 10:00 is the mark I'd really like to hit.
I do the Sunday puzzle on and off all week. I think this makes me an Untouchable, crossword-caste-wise.
So folks talking about typing subscribe to the premium puzzle service?
I did back in 2002 or so. I never did get to where I could do Saturday without looking up lots of stuff.
Saturdays consistently below 10:00
That is crazy talk.
I assumed it was hours and minutes.
Do people doing it for time think of it as cheating to handwrite on paper? Because that'd be way faster for me on any puzzle where I wasn't getting stuck.
25: What, you mean as opposed to solving the whole thing in your working memory?
No, everyone seems to be talking about doing it online someplace. I mean, I do it in my working memory, but I understand that doesn't work for most people.
25: Oh goodness no. Paper is way slower, with all the hunting for clues.
Way slower for me, I mean. Though it's been so long since I solved for speed with pen and paper that I don't know how big the difference would be. Probably a couple of minutes early in the week, and much less later on.
It sounds like Gabardine needs to start solving it sans voir.
Why would it be cheating? If anything, you'd get a handicap.
I do subscribe to the premium crosswords, yes.
Honestly, the crossword puzzles are too easy for me as-is, so I run each clue through Translation Party first.
20: no! Are you having fun? Then you're doing it right.
Sorry, I probably sound like an ass, and the baby is about to wake up. I'll bow out.
Why are you talking to a sleeping baby?
I have a love/hate with everything in life crosswords. I used to time myself against some that Games magazine published with winner's times from competitions. My airplane magazine challenge (yeah, I know, airline magazine levels) was to finish them before the plane left the ground. Then at some point they just annoyed me as too easily exposing my stupid competitiveness in meaningless mental endeavors and also I was never good at the really hard ones. And I came to hate crossword words.
Now I get that juice via online Boggle (where I can mouse* rather than type awfully) and I can work with honorable word "groups" like tinea, tenia, taenia, teniae and taeniae; meter/retem and the like.
*Albeit getting crushed on the massive grids--some people can type really, really fast it turns out.
I realized I had no idea on the mechanics of online crossword word entry. So I started one at the WaPo (free) and found it very frustrating. Is the the NYT the same system? Presumably one learns it and gets good at it.
Not the first time this has happened.
And writing on paper isn't cheating. That's how they do it at the tournament.
Wow. Everything really is in the archives.
40: Apparently not yet all Nine Billion Names of God.
41: they're all there, just cleverly goog/eproofed.
A month or so ago I decided to give British crosswords a go. They are madness and I'm not sure I like them. I've gotten slightly better at them. It seems very likely I already mentioned this and very likelier I will have some very cross words indeed for anyone who links to me having done so.
I tried a British crossword puzzle once and got absolutely nothing right, not a single clue. What the hell, or maybe you can only do them after first learning about 10,000 British equivalents of "Mel Ott" and "Ulee's Gold" to get started.
I love cryptics but find the mass of actual British ones I can find from here to be kind of unpleasant. There are too often too many loosey-goosey function words that don't actually fit into either half of the clue, and also a few too many references to things that really don't cross the ocean, like second-tier television presenters and that kind of thing.
I have a block on British cryptic crosswords. I've never been motivated to learn all of the signs and signals [that it's an anagram, or reversed, or whatever], and the whole exercise is just frustrating. I can see the satisfaction other people get from doing them, but I've never really been one for puzzles, anyway.
after first learning about 10,000 British equivalents of "Mel Ott" and "Ulee's Gold" to get started.
Quite.
Even with something like:
http://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/cryptic/25974
Where you can click to see the solution, half the time I've no idea how the answer connects to the clue.
Huh, I'd have to say I have no idea for well more than half, maybe for all of them. But I don't really like or do the cryptics even here.
re: 50
I might be flattering myself when I say half. A couple are obvious, some I get but they aren't obvious, and probably more than half are 'wtf?'.
I knew somewhere someone would have done this, but it is more detailed than I even imagined: Crosswordiest words* and most common answers (corpus: NYTimes puzzles 1996-2012).
*Ratio of frequency in the crosswords versus Google n-gram frequency over the same period.
"Ott": 103 times.
"Ulee": 47 times.
Top is "era" with 323.
Only calculates crosswordiness for recognized dictionary words. "[A]sea" lead for those with more than 50 uses (76x), while "titians*" does for those used even once (121x).
*A useful Boggle word.
Drilldown at the site literally gives every clue used for the answers and top keywords. For instance:
Top clue keywords for ERA
1. stat
2. time
3. history
4. period
5. pitcher
6. cause
7. low
8. detergent
9. historical
10. victorian
From a quick scan every "OTT" was Mel Ott except,
"N.H.L. Senators, on scoreboards" and
"John who pioneered time-lapse photography" (I hope that was a Friday or Saturday one).
But I'm disappointed that "GRBA" doesn't show up even once. Nor even as one of the clues for the 251 "ELI"s. A fun resource (that will stale quickly).
If it's not apparent, I am desperately behind and under the gun at work this week.
I did enjoy the Nation cryptic crossword puzzle in college. The process of reading four puzzles in a row with their answer keys to figure out how it worked was a good start. There was a girl who I dated briefly until it turned out that our peak smolder was in a coffee shop over a Nation puzzle, and any nearer position lost all heat.
I'd subscribe to their digital edition if it came with the crossword. But it doesn't, so I don't.
56.1: Whereas Ott gets 2 of the 56 "MEL"s.
"ENT" is clued as a suffix 26 times, the medical specialty 29 times, and the tree-race 21 times.
http://www.cruciverb.com has a fantastic database with good search tools, but you have to buy a membership to use it.
59: But nothing for "ENTP" (my usual Myers-Briggs result).
I thought that the approved method of increasing difficulty for the Monday crossword (and Tuesday, if you're showing off) was to solve using only the down clues. This usually results in disaster for me, but I try for it anyways.
As for the cryptic, or "British," crosswords, there are a number of people (though not enough) who make them for North American audiences. They are really excellent puzzles for team solving--much better than straight crosswords, especially given the serious discrepancy between Blandings and I in crosswords-solving prowess. (He's the prowess-having one, to be clear.) Unfortunately, there tends to be a lot of Canadian content, and for the above-mentioned B-list broadcasters and such, Canadians might as well be British as far as I know.
And then there are the absolutely diabolical--but American!--Atlantic cryptic puzzles, which helpfully inform you, for example, that some of the answers will need to have some letters dropped or reformed before they can be entered into random spots on the grid. Just infuriating, but just the thing for long bus trips (our neighbors tend to hate us).
our neighbors tend to hate us
So you go on long bus trips to avoid them I guess.
My neighbors hate groundhogs. It's sort of like Caddyshack if Karl was a math professor.
65: OK, but then how do the bus trips help you get away from them?
Because we were traveling to Unfogged meetups, silly!
Canadians might as well be British as far as I know.
You don't know the cast of Corrie!?
I'm a bad half-Canadian. They never seem to ask about Owls in the Family or The Cremation of Sam McGee.
Funny thing came up about the latter just this evening in a conversation with my dad: apparently Robert Service lived for the short time he was in the Yukon two houses down from my great-grandad. After the poems were published, Service gave an author's copy to my great-grandad--now we guess in possession of my uncle--made his fortune, and straight skedaddled to the Riviera and never had anything to do with Canada again. Can't blame him, to be honest.
32: Translation Party is working again? I had no idea.
I tried a British crossword puzzle once and got absolutely nothing right, not a single clue. What the hell, or maybe you can only do them after first learning about 10,000 British equivalents of "Mel Ott" and "Ulee's Gold" to get started.
There's definitely a threshold level of knowledge of indicators and abbreviations before you can satisfyingly attack a cryptic crossword, though it's not as much as it might initially appear. For beginner level crosswords, which are more weighted toward anagrams and hidden words, it's not such a high bar. I'd recommend starting with the Guardian's Quiptic crosswords, which are an amalgam of cryptic and more US-style puzzles. The Telegraph's crosswords are probably the easiest of the regular broadsheet puzzles, and Everyman in the Observer is on the easy side of the norm.
Where you can click to see the solution, half the time I've no idea how the answer connects to the clue.
ttaM: This blog breaks down the answers into their constituent parts.
The Guardian used to have a very handy for beginners list of common cryptic abbreviations/codes, eg "gen" for "information", but I can't seem to find it now. It may be somewhere on the internet still, and there are plenty of blogs and tips sites. The Guardian still has an extensive archive of articles for beginners.
Oh, and whatever you do, don't attempt Private Eye's crossword until you've mastered the basics. It adds another layer of insider knowledge (eg "Brenda" --> "The Queen"-->"ER") and scatological misdirection to the mix.
I haven't the faintest idea who or what "Mel Ott" and "Ulee's Gold" are.
It's said with some truth that to become really good at cryptics you have to know the setters, their little psychological quirks, their interests, etc. To learn this you have to do their crosswords for years until they feel like old friends. This is why, frex, people who can solve The Times in 20 minutes are stumped by The Guardian and vice versa.
Mel Ott must be one of those clues I get by doing the cross clues if it's that common because I had to google him to know that he's a baseball player. Baseball clues are my ruin. And rivers. Fucking Yser.
72.1: I've never seen it, but given that Peter Fonda can't act, it's probably best that you missed Ulee's Gold.
73: Fucking Yser.
71 times in 17 years.
If you name a child something that is unusual and useful for puzzle writers, the threshold of accomplishment required to achieve lasting fame gets quite a bit lower. I wonder if any parents have tried that as a deliberate strategy and, if this is the case, why so many of them have kids who become architects.
Wow. I hadn't done a puzzle for years before the one yesterday. I did today's, and actually had difficulty. On Tuesday. Euthanasia may be the only solution.
And when I say I had difficulty, I mean that there's a spot on the middle of the right edge I didn't get done. On Tuesday.
Give us the troublesome clues and we'll promise to mock you be gentle.
Do all of you who are talking about the crossword pay the subscription fee? If not, how do you do the crossword?
I get the NYT on paper.
I thought the "paper" in "newspaper" was metaphorical.
Shut up. The kids asked. And
I read different parts if I have it on paper.
You could make a better case that the "news" in "newspaper" is metaphorical.
Okay, I did the archived Monday crossword on the NYT website in six minutes. Now I have a vague idea of how to calibrate. I thought probably even the Monday one was nontrivial and you were all bragging, but it was easy.
Back when I was doing them, Monday and Tuesday were indistinguishably trivial, Wednesday slowed me down some, Thursday I might not finish, and Friday and Saturday I wouldn't finish.
Huh, that is pretty easy, isn't it.
(I looked up the answers, and what happened in my trouble spot is that I had "Get on" for "Manage" where it should have been "Get by", which led me to "Nag" in a spot that should have been "Yap".
I pay to have the puzzle on my phone. I do it on the subway most of the time but have stopped doing Mon-Wed unless someone makes an unfogged thread about it. Also I often skip Thursday because if I wanted gimmicks I'd do crytpics. Lately, though, Fridays are often easier than Thursday, so I take a stab at Thursday unless I'm not getting the gimmick and it's annoying me.
I used to do the cryptic in the Nation, by which I mean that I'd get between a quarter and a third of it done. I find solving cryptics very satisfying, but I'm not much good at it.
Hmph. I'm a paper subscriber, but I'm at work. Does that mean I'd have to give them money to try this out while wasting company time?
Relatedly, we randomly started doing puzzles whilst down in a sort of beach-type area this summer. My reactions in order were: 1. hah, a puzzle. 2. I haven't done a puzzle in years and years. 3. Do people still do puzzles? 4. God fucking damn it, I will finish this puzzle. 5. Hah! 6. MOAR PUZZLE. 7 goto 4. I don't know quite how it happened; does this mean I am turning eighty?
92: the previous couple of days are free, I guess?
Or at least Monday's was free and Saturday's seemed like maybe it was also free.
I must be missing something. I can't find a way to do it, logged in as myself. Probably for the best.
Oh wait, I seem to have done a Monday puzzle from 2005.
I get The Nation on my Nook, but it doesn't contain a crossword.
97: Right, if you follow the crossword link from the left margin, it gives you a couple of old ones to do for free.
Just like how tobacco companies used to distribute free cigarettes at kindergartens.
Okay, I did that same free one from Monday 2005. I should probably not reveal how long it took, or how many hints.
That reminds me. One night I was at a bar and some woman comes around handing out coupons for a free pack of cigarettes. You had to give your name and show ID to get one. This was her job, I guess.
As we learned in Waking Life, older crosswords are easier to complete, but I'm not sure if there's an expiration. Do the solutions to really old ones drop out of the collective subconscious?
I couldn't quite get the Saturday one from 1996. There were two letters I couldn't pin down. I think I spent between 20 and 30 minutes on it.
I haven't tried that one specifically, but that sounds quite good for a Saturday to me.
As we learned in Waking Life, older crosswords are easier to complete
This always gnaws at me when I'm doing a several-days-old puzzle even though it is obviously untrue.
104 -- just looking at that one, I have to say that it seems weirdly much easier than most Saturday puzzles (though maybe there's a Roger Bannister 4 minute mile effect going on, knowing that you completed it.
Holy keyboard shortcuts batman, just about everything about the interface seems counter-intuitive to me...
I guess you get there the same way you do to Carnegie Hall--break a leg.
One night I was at a bar and some woman comes around handing out coupons for a free pack of cigarettes. You had to give your name and show ID to get one. This was her job, I guess.
She was hitting on you, Moby.
re: 102
That's a point. I remember 'Marlboro' girls coming round clubs when I was in my late teens, doing exactly that. Or rather, they took ID, and handed out free packets of fags. There were similar marketing strategies for Absolut. Viz, attractive 'Scandinavian' looking girls with trays of free vodka.
These were pretty low rent rock clubs, too, rather than the sort of venue you'd think they'd want to target.
111: they still do this in remarkably cigaretty Germany.
Yeah, I've seen the cigarettes and drinks marketing before, but not in coupon form. I assume there's some kind of legal restriction that means they can't do it directly in Mobyville.
Yes, there is. In fact, there are restrictions on which bars that mean most of them cannot allow smoking. (You have to have less than 20% of your revenue from food.) I've seen promotions in bars for various beers and whatnot. But they were all bigger deals, like what ttaM is describing. This was just one woman in street clothes individually approaching everybody at the bar. I thought maybe she was hiding from the bartender until she said hello to him.
The bar nearest my college campus had drinks and chewing tobacco promotions along those lines--pretty much every weekend. It was quite close to frat row, so no surprise.
114: Here they give out both packs of cigarettes and coupons. It might actually have just switched to coupons now that the other side of the river is smoke-free. I haven't asked at the local smoke-free bar how they dealt with the change for cigarette girls with the little machines to scan people's licenses and send them stuff, but I'm assuming they're still doing their thing.
I looked it up and I think that there was now (since 2010) a federal law against handing out free cigarettes.