MONDAY PUZZLE — This week’s Monday through Thursday puzzles were part of the fourth annual Arlington (Va.) Puzzle Tournament. Will Shortz explains more about this and the worthy causes he donates puzzles to farther below.
Hey, kids, back before we had the Internet and you could stream just about anything you wanted or download video games to your heart’s content, we had PONG. In 1974, before the days of smartphone apps and the Game Boy 3DS, Atari’s PONG was the second-most-exciting thing ever to happen to our country, right after newly sworn-in President Gerald Ford, in a miscommunication between the president and his aides, accidentally pardoned the Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev during a visit to the U.S.S.R.*
Even if you weren’t interested in video games per se, you had to admit that it was a great way to kill an afternoon. The way it worked was you and your opponent sat in front of the television set (that contraption your parents still watch their shows on, even though you have explained Internet streaming to them eleventy-two times) and held the game controllers.
A fuzzy black-and-white picture of two short vertical “paddles” and a pixelated “ball” would appear, which was exciting in and of itself, because believe it or not, we had never seen anything on our television sets that was not put there by the networks. People used to come from all over the neighborhood just to look at the “ready” screen.
The idea was for both players to use their “paddles” to hit the “ball” back and forth, until someone missed or, more likely, passed out from dehydration. The makers of the game clearly understood that we, as a species, did not yet have the gaming mojo to hit anything that traveled across our screen at more than a tenth of a mile per hour, which meant that the ball traversed the screen at a speed that was virtually undetectable by the human eye. You could take your turn, go to school, come home and do your homework, eat dinner, take a shower and, by then, it might just be your turn again. The aim of the game was to score 11 points, which, according to experts, will never be achieved in our lifetime.
I bring this up because PONG happened to be an entry in Bruce Haight’s very verbal puzzle today. Mr. Haight has published puzzles for almost every day of the week now, and hopefully, he’ll hit for the cycle by publishing some weekend puzzles. Today’s grid is all about the exclamation “No way!” and we have a set of four synonymic expressions. Two of those, FUHGEDDABOUDIT and YOU’RE KIDDING ME, make their New York Times debuts today.
In nontheme news, there seems to be a minitheme going on with the “Said”/”Say” crossing at 10 Down and 22 Across and the “Marries”/”Brings together” pair of entries. I also hit a few tricky speed bumps, with 38 Down’s “What might give a water-skier trouble” (I had WAVE before WAKE, until I realized that the phrase YOU’RE VIDDING ME was gibberish) and 57 Down’s “Narrow coastal inlet,” where for some reason I filled in CAY, the polar opposite of a RIA. I claim Monday morning blues, even though this post will appear well before Monday morning.
Oh, and if you are solving in Across Lite, you will see a different clue for 8 Down than you will in the print version or the web game. Across Lite does not allow for the replication of a “Magic Square” in the clues, so they clue is gettable, but it reads a bit differently.
Let’s see what Messrs. Shortz and Haight have to say:
Will Shortz’s Notes:
The Monday to Thursday puzzles this week were used on Saturday at the fourth annual Arlington Puzzle Festival at the Arlington (Va.) Public Library. During the past 12 months, I have supplied unpublished Times puzzles for 12 events like this around the country — mostly for libraries or other nonprofit institutions. Crossword contests are happy affairs, and I’m happy to help.
Constructor’s Notes:
Not too surprisingly, this puzzle started with FUHGEDDABOUDIT, and I just needed to find three more entries that meant “aboud” the same thing. My initial impression was that I would need to use the FUHGEDABOUDIT (one D) spelling since that is the way it appeared in Daniel Kantor’s Aug. 7, 2007 New York Times puzzle. I had trouble finding another 13-letter theme entry, so I looked up FUHGEDABOUDIT and was happy to find that the “preferred” Wiktionary spelling has two D’s! I wasn’t familiar with the term “eye dialect” — a little embarrassing, since I am an ophthalmologist — but apparently this is an “eye dialect” spelling based on colloquial or dialectal speech. I have to tell you this word-nerd stuff is really fascinating to me!
My first try at this puzzle had NINE entries that Will did not like — mostly plurals like SEPTS, CDRS, GRRS, and LSTS. My impression is that Will is not really enamored of plurals or abbreviations, so plural abbreviations might be a good thing to avoid when possible. This second try at filling the puzzle has slightly harder but more interesting words and a lot less “glue.” The only clue I was sorry to see on the editing floor was “trips the light fantastic” for DANCES at 46 Down — Wikipedia attributes that phrase to a Milton poem of 1645 and says it has been hackneyed since 1908, but NO WAY! — I think it’s a classic. I don’t remember starting with any desire to make my first pangram, but when I got down to just the northwest corner and all I needed was a J …
If you’re still wondering how to pronounce 26 Across, here’s a lesson from the veteran etymologist James Caan, who tries to teach the very British Hugh Grant how to say it New York style:
Your thoughts?
* [She's kidding. There is absolutely no historical backup for that. We checked. — Ed.]