Go Hand to Hand

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Graduating seniors during Whitman College's commencement in Walla Walla, Wash. Greg Lehman/Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, via Associated Press

THURSDAY PUZZLE — I was of two minds about Tracy Gray’s puzzle.

On the one hand, I like Ms. Gray’s puzzles thus far and her theme today, while I feel like it has been done before, is pleasant enough for a Thursday. Ms. Gray has taken common phrases that end in “ON” and set the first half ON top of the second.

On the other hand, there is some pretty gnarly fill in this grid, and it makes me wonder if a different grid design might have enabled her to fill her grid with entries better than AAHED AT or AT ONE, both of which sound awkward to my ear. There’s also the particularly tough crossing of TEASELS and SAHEL. Instead of cluing the new phrases — which would have increased the entertainment value of the puzzle, because the resulting phrases are all sort of based in reality — the puzzle is rooted in Thursday level by cluing the theme entries “literally.” Mostly, this grid looks, to me, like an immense struggle had taken place not to duplicate fill. I’ve enjoyed solving Ms. Gray’s other puzzles much more.

However, I did like the entries SMACKER, SCARFED and KISSCAM, which makes its debut today.

Clue(s) of the Day for me were “It’s a wrap” for ROBE and “Flip over,” a nice bit of misdirection, for ADORE.

Constructor’s Notes:

The idea for this puzzle came to me right off the bat … Baton Rouge, that is, which my constructor mind parsed as BAT-ON-ROUGE – two legitimate words separated by “ON.” I then found many other phrases including JACKS-ON-FIVE, WAG-ON-TRAIN, NIX-ON-TAPES, and DICED-ON-IONS, and I began building my grid with the first word literally (over) “ON” the second word.

In a perfect constructing world, I would have been able to keep some of my favorite phrases. But, with the constraints of five stacked theme entries and symmetry, I struggled with the fill and had several grids going at one time, moving the location of the theme letters above and below each other and swapping out various theme entries. Eventually, I was able to fill a grid successfully but still decided to beef up the center of the grid and changed my seed entry BATON ROUGE (3 over 5 letters) to SURGEON GENERAL (5 over 7 letters).

I want to thank Will for keeping my original wording of “literally” in the cluing of the theme entries, but for editing them all to a Thursday level difficulty. For example: My cluing for CARSON CITY was “Literally … Capital of Nevada” and Will edited it to “Literally … a Western state capital” — which is ambiguous and definitely more Thursday-appropriate.

Also, with the recent discussions of how long it takes to get from acceptance to publishing, here is the info: Mailed July 16, 2014, accepted Sept. 10, 2014, published Nov. 13, 2014. Thanks, Will and Joel!

Your thoughts?

Repeat Offender

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A view from the Rock of Cashel in County Tipperary, Ireland. Derek Speirs for The New York Times

Administrivial Deb-Amlen-In-N.Y.C. Fun Times Alert! Pencils up, New York! If you plan to be in New York City on Sunday, Nov. 16, come hang out with me at the Ace Hotel, located at 20 West 29th Street, as I show people that they can solve the Sunday crossword puzzle with a minimum of tears and bloodshed. The fun starts at 11:00 a.m. E.T. and it’s open to the public. Hope to see you there, and if you are a Wordplayer, please be sure to come up and say hi. Click here for more information.

WEDNESDAY PUZZLE – As you’ll read in his notes below, Daniel Landman is a wildman with somewhat violent tendencies who likes to break things, so please, no sudden moves while you solve this puzzle. It’s hard enough keeping the emus in line; the last thing I need is a rampaging constructor wilding his way through his grid.

It took me a while to suss out the theme in Mr. Landman’s puzzle, but that’s no surprise considering this is a midweek puzzle. If it fell with no argument, everyone would be complaining that it didn’t feel like a “Wednesday puzzle.” So it pays to look out for those revealer hints, like the one at 37- and 40 Across, which says “…repeat offender? … or something found, literally, in four rows in this puzzle”. If you look carefully, you’ll find the shards of BROKEN RECORDS that Mr. Landman has smashed in rows 3, 5, 11 and 13. Moving across row 3, for example, we have the entries GRANDMERE and CORDS. The RECORDS are broken by the black square between the two entries. You can find the rest, but do be careful amongst the shards.

Outside the theme, I liked BAT AN EYE and HORSE CAR (an endearingly old-fashioned entry). I was intrigued that VIAGRA is not, in fact, making its debut, but has appeared six other times before in the Times crossword.

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Share a Single Bed

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The Statue of Liberty. Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

TUESDAY PUZZLE – If you read James Mulhern’s notes below, he believes that his theme is not necessarily “overly thrilling,” but that in forming this theme set, he offers us some lively entries. I would have to agree. Is it the world’s most thrilling theme? No. Maybe this is a result of having solved thousands of crossword puzzles and, in doing so, inadvertently set the bar too high in my mind for themes. But is it a perfectly fine Tuesday puzzle that is a pleasure to solve? Yes, of course it is.

I feel like we’ve seen this theme before, although the revealer seems newish and creative. It took a bit of solving to get DOUBLE UP, but once I did, the whole puzzle fell into place fairly quickly. And Mr. Mulhern is correct in that there is some really lively stuff in here: I especially liked APPLE TV (as someone who is contemplating cutting the cable cord, that is one product that is on my mind), CHUPACHUPS, CUP-A-SOUP, LOUIS C.K., SUPERDUPER, SUPPORT GROUPS, AFTER DARK, LOVE CHILD and INKPAD.

It took me a while to get SOO from 14 Across’s “‘Your point being…?’” probably because it struck me as kind of arbitrary in terms of the number of Os it possessed. We’re used to seeing SOO clued either as the canal or as the late actor Jack. Once again, I understand the desire to come up with a fresh clue, but this was a stretch, in my humble opinion.

On the other hand — there’s always another hand — I did like the clue “Clothes line?” for INSEAM (very clever misdirection, especially on a Tuesday) and “What gets rubber-stamped?” for INKPAD.

Let’s hear from Mr. Mulhern:

Constructor’s Notes:

This is my first themed puzzle in five years, almost to the day. Although my main focus is the themeless form, I really enjoy making themed puzzles when the inspiration strikes. The challenges are different, but the reward is equally satisfying. I hope to make more in the future.

I’m a big poker player, and somehow DOUBLE UP revealed itself as a neat revealer in my mind. The reason I went for it with this theme is not so much that the core concept is overly thrilling, but rather that the resulting phrases are all fun. Combined with some cool fill, I hope this makes for an enjoyable Tuesday!

That it was, Mr. Mulhern. I’m looking forward to more puzzles from you, themed or themeless.

I wanted to link to a video by the hilarious comedian LOUIS C.K., but unfortunately, there are precious few that meet the New York Times standards for language. If you have a chance to see him live or look at some of his performances on YouTube, I highly recommend it.

Your thoughts?

Numberplay

Truth-Tellers and Liars

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A conga line at the Tonga Room in San Francisco's Fairmont hotel. Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Numberplay Logo: NUM + BER = PLAY

Our puzzle this week was suggested by Marco Moriconi, a regular Numberplay contributor and professor of physics at the Universidade Federal Fluminense, in Niteroi, Rio de Janeiro. (He also writes a monthly math column for the Brazilian national science magazine, Ciência Hoje (Science Today), called Qual o Problema, or “What’s the Problem?”). Dr. Moriconi found this week’s puzzle in a blog by its creator, Roy Cook, a professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota who tells how he momentarily stumped the famous paradox master Raymond Smullyan with the challenge. (Check out Dr. Cook’s recently-published Paradoxes and Dr. Smullyan’s Beginner’s Guide to Mathematical Logic, selected by Amazon as a favorite book of 2014.)

We’ll take on Dr. Moriconi’s slightly-altered form of the puzzle, which presents the challenge in three different scenarios. “Since the answers are so different,” he says, “it shows how precise statements in mathematics can make a huge difference.”

Let’s try —

Truth-Tellers and Liars

In a party there are truth-tellers and liars. At some point, they all form a huge conga line and start singing. The first one goes, “There’s at least one liar here!”, the second one goes, “There are at least two liars here!” and so on, until the end of the line. Who is lying? Who is telling the truth?

In a second version of the party, the first in line sings, “There’s exactly one liar here!”, the second goes, “There are exactly two liars here!” and so on. In this case, who is lying, and who is telling the truth?

In the third version, the first sings, “There’s at most one liar here!”, the second, “There are at most two liars here!” and so on. What then?

We also have a bonus puzzle suggested the mathematician and computer scientist, Bill Gosper, who proposes the following:

An Interesting Angle

Where would you go to find a physical object having an angle of 2π/37? (Hint: If you don’t look far enough, you might only find π/19.)

James Randi in front of a painting done by his partner, the artist José Alvarez. Jeff Minton for The New York Times

Also, in case you missed it: a beautifully-written piece (click here) by Adam Higginbotham about the skeptic James Randi (with its stunning photograph of Mr. Randi by Jeff Minton), the popular investigator of claims of paranormal abilities. If you enjoy math puzzles you may be familiar with Mr. Randi from his connection to recreational mathematician Martin Gardner, who helped create the modern skeptical movement through his landmark 1957 book, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.

That concludes this week’s puzzle. As always, once you’re able to read comments for this post, use Gary Hewitt’s Enhancer to correctly view formulas and graphics. And send your favorite puzzles to gary.antonick@NYTimes.com.

Solution

Check reader comments on Friday for solutions and commentary by Marco Moriconi and Bill Gosper.

Archipelago Component

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Getting some coffee coffee at the Entenmann's Bakery Outlet in Astoria, Queens. Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times

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.

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Colorful Characters

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Yao Ming, playing for China in the 2008 Summer Olympics,  grabbed a rebound against the United States. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

SUNDAY PUZZLE — I don’t give out awards for puzzles, because I think that if they’ve made it into The New York Times, they already have something special going for them. If I did, however, I would give Tom McCoy’s puzzle a gold star, just for all of the thematic theatrics that he has piled into today’s grid. It took me a while to fully appreciate the depth of the theme, but when I got it, as Will Shortz says below, it was definitely a wow.

We have seen themes where the set has a missing word in common, and we have seen themes where the theme entries form pictures. We have seen themes where constructors make nifty use of the black squares as part of the theme. And we have seen ELEVENTY million themes where the theme revealer was stashed elsewhere in the grid.

But have we seen a puzzle that has all of these in a single grid, that is also in Technicolor? I’m not sure we have.

Tom McCoy offers us a very colorful grid, particularly if you’re solving in crayon. You might want to try that today, because it really highlights his theme. In the corners of our puzzle are entries that FORM LETTERS (also a great play on words that is the ultimate revealer at 102 Across) if you can find the entries that are missing the appropriate colors.

Is that as clear as mud? Let’s look at the upper-left-hand corner, starting with 1 Across. The clue “Extremely attractive bodies” could have a few different answers (I’m watching you guys in the comments. Keep it clean!), but in this case what fits is the entry HOLES. Hmm. There’s a black square directly to the left of it; could the answer be BLACK HOLES?

Yes, but that’s not the reason. It turns out that that was a mean trick by Mr. McCoy to throw you off. Look again. “Banning from future work” at 3 Down is LISTING in the grid. There’s no black square there. Let’s keep going. At 40 Across, the answer to “That old’ stuff of song” is MAGIC. Shouldn’t that be BLACK MAGIC?

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Variety: Cryptic Crossword

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Cryptic Crossword

by Rich Silvestri

November 9, 2014

VARIETY PUZZLE – When I have solved all of the crossword puzzles I need to solve for the blog and I need a bit of a break, I turn to cryptic crosswords for a breath of fresh air.

I know; they kind of look like crossword puzzles, they smell like crossword puzzles, but they’re not what we’re used to. To the rest of the world, when you say “crossword puzzle,” this is what they picture. On these shores, however, we colonists refer to them as cryptics. Then we shake our collective American heads and walk away from them.

I personally don’t understand that. They are so much fun, even though they require that you fold your brain into innumerable shapes in order to decipher the clues. In fact, I would posit that the reshaping of our train of thought is what makes cryptic crosswords so much fun. When you’ve done enough cryptics, American-style crosswords seem, in comparison, to be somewhat… plain.

Sure, the clues in a cryptic can sound like gibberish to the uninitiated, but there’s always a method to the MADCAPness, as long as you learn how to understand cryptic vocabulary. Let’s take a look at some of today’s entries, and maybe I’ll make a cryptic solver out of some of you who haven’t tried them yet. The Times will be launching a cryptic crossword pack in the mobile app in the near future and we have plenty of them in the archives, so you’ll have a lot of puzzles on which to practice.

Rich Silvestri is back, and I had a blast with today’s cryptic crossword. Where did you gain your toehold? My first entry was LEOTARD at 2 Down. If you read the clue, “Accidentally” is code for mixing up or anagramming the letters of the words “tear old” and “dance costume” is the hint we need to know that LEOTARD is correct.

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A Tiny Bit Strange

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Racehorses headed for the the finish line  at the Ruidoso Downs Race Track in New Mexico in 2011. Jakob Schiller for The New York Times

SATURDAY PUZZLE — Barry C. Silk writes puzzles for grown-ups — tough yet elegant grids filled with lots of scientific and political entries — but if you look carefully, there are always a few entries that remind us that, no matter how old you are, the kid in us remains.

Sure, he can fool us with entries like BLOOMBERG, EARTHRISE, QUARK and GREENTAPE (a new one on me, but a terrific entry), but there are also entries like the BAT SIGNAL, CEREAL BOX and RAY GUN (which I hoped fervently for as a child, because they looked so cool in B movies) to remind us that we never really grow up, do we?

That sense of play continues with all of the “question marked” clues in today’s puzzle: I loved “A tiny bit strange?” for QUARK, “Life preserver?” for CEREAL BOX and “Up-coming world phenomenon?” for EARTHRISE, also known as the photo of our planet taken from space in 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission.

The only clue that made me blanch was “Offensive observance?” for TET. TET is usually clued as having to do either with the TET offensive or the Vietnamese New Year. If the constructor wanted to engage in a bit of wordplay, the Offensive was clued as “Offensive time?”, which is not bad, because it keeps the war in its own frame. I understand the need to come up with fresh clues for entries that are a bit long in the tooth, but the word “observation,” to me, smacks of holiday observance. By cluing TET as “Offensive observation?” it feels as though the two very different meanings have been conflated to mean that observing the Vietnamese New Year is offensive. Hopefully, that clue will be relegated in the future to the crossword cutting room floor.

Even so, one clue out of the many that make up Mr. Silk’s puzzle doesn’t detract from the fact that I am a fan. I love the balance of entries in his grids that make solvers rack their brains and remember their childhoods at the same time. Here’s to more Silky grids in the future.

Constructor’s Notes:

My puzzle essentially had two seeds: EARTHRISE and GREENTAPE. I was inspired to use EARTHRISE in a puzzle after looking at a photograph with that name taken during the Apollo 8 mission. My original clue for EARTHRISE referred to the photograph. I ran across the use of GREENTAPE in an article about excessive environmental regulations and thought that would be a cool entry for a puzzle. I don’t recall the whole construction process for this puzzle, but when I fill a grid, I try to strike a balance between ‘interesting’ longer entries (BATSIGNAL, BIOWEAPON) and high-Scrabble value fill (GASTAX, CEREALBOX, QUARK), although the puzzle didn’t turn out to be as Srabbly as I would prefer.

Your thoughts?

Lines of Reasoning

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Adélie penguins in Cape Royds on Ross Island in Antarctica. Andy Isaacson for The New York Times

FRIDAY PUZZLE— A Patrick Berry puzzle! What a great way to cruise into the weekend. Thanks, Will Shortz.

I was not much of a late-week solver when I started here, but with persistence I have learned to love a really snappy Friday puzzle. There are people that I meet in my travels who designate themselves “solid Monday through Wednesday solvers,” as if there were no possibilities for advancing further than that. When I try to persuade them that Thursday puzzles are where it starts to get fun, and that at least trying to solve them will turn them into Thursday and even Friday solvers, they shake their heads, as if I was suggesting the impossible. Why is that? What stops people from pushing the envelope to get to their goals?

Anyway, once you get there, there are rewards to be mined, like this puzzle by Mr. Berry. There are quite a few abbreviations here, but that’s a low price of admission for entries like BIG BUCKS, BLIND ALLEYS, PENALTY SHOT, STAKEOUTS, THREEFOLD, MONEY CLIP, LOOSE-LIMBED and BULLETIN BOARD, which also wins Clue of the Day from me for the brilliant “It might be beneath your notice.”

See? You probably won’t see that sort of thing on a Tuesday, and it makes me sad that you’re missing it. Give Friday puzzles a try, and before long you may be able to call yourself a solid “Friday solver” as well.

Thanks, Mr. Berry and Mr. Shortz. Let’s move past our comfort zone to the Saturday, with the adorable PANDA Zhen Zhen to keep us company:

Your thoughts?

Winter Plantings

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A game of beer pong. Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times

THURSDAY PUZZLE — I finished Matt Ginsberg’s puzzle and had an unusual reaction to it: I thought I was losing my mind. Or that maybe there was some meta puzzle in here that I just wasn’t seeing. Because isn’t PESACH in the spring? Well, we’re not going to hold that against anybody; Happy Passover, everyone! Pass the matzo down this way, please.

I admired the visual aspect of the PARTING of the RED SEA in the center of the grid, which gives us a neat dividing line between MOSES and the ISRAELI who is apparently benefiting from said PARTING and PHARAOH in EGYPT. Since we’re celebrating early, it’s worth noting that the way Mr. Ginsberg reads the Old Testament, MOSES and his fellow Israelites celebrated by playing BEER PONG and PHARAOH gets his by coming down with a bad case of PTOMAINE poisoning. I had trouble finding backup for that in my copy of the Old Testament but, again, I’m not going to hold that against him. We’re all about artistic license here at Wordplay.

A theme like this needs careful grid design, and it tends to constrain the constructor when it comes to fill. That would explain some of the hairier stuff, like the bone prefix OSTE, the partial A MAN and awkward words like INAPT. But I did like SKI POLES (and the very clever clue “Winter plantings?”), OBI WAN, HEDONIST, ODD ONE, BEER PONG and PTOMAINE (some people feel that negative words like those that have to do with diseases shouldn’t be in crosswords, but I liked this one for the Scrabbly beginning).

I’m wondering if this puzzle was meant for spring publication, given the very devious clue “Belated observation of 4/14/12″ for BERG. That would be 1912, by the way, and the observation was the iceberg that took down the Titanic.

Let’s hear from our constructor:

Constructor’s Notes:

This is a relatively straightforward puzzle, but it reminds me how curious the whole process from construction to publication is. So, for example, this puzzle took 132 days from the time I submitted until it appeared, which seemed fast. Best ever for me is an incredibly quick 27 days; longest is 1,377 days — just over 3 3/4 years! I have no idea why some puzzles go quickly and others don’t; it just seems to be part of the process.

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