FRIDAY PUZZLE – This one by Tim Croce was a tough trek for me. I admired it, not only for its toughness, but also for the crunchy long entries and the devious cluing. This was a humbling experience for me.
It’s Friday, so you would expect things to be tough. And it’s always nice to learn something from your crossword puzzle. I did not know the word OSCINE, for example, but I sure as heck do now. That’s the kind of entry you look at after painstakingly piecing it together and you never, ever forget it.
But it got me a fabulous puzzle opener in “GOD, I HOPE NOT.” I love that entry, and it makes its debut today, so congratulations, Mr. Croce. I had ITUNES STORE, STEVE CARELL and ROSINS (although I messed myself up by misspelling it RESINS for a while), all of which helped me with the clever ITE for “End of Samson?” (think luggage). I guessed the O.
Then I got stuck again in the scrabbly center of the puzzle. I’m not fond of spelling out vitamin names like B TWO, but then they’d be completely banished from crosswords, and when you banish the vitamins, your health suffers. Fortunately, I’m somewhat up on my Rimsky-Korsakov and knew of “Le COQ d’Or,” but please don’t ask me to sing any of it.
And so on. I was grateful for any toehold I could grab, and I worked to piece them together until they all met up with each other. I guess that’s par for the Friday course, but I’d like to highlight some of the really cool stuff I saw along the way.
In addition to the above, I really liked DIE LAUGHING, RELEASE DATE (especially clued as “National coming out day?”), DEMONESS, TEA DANCE, TREE RINGS, TURNED THE TABLES, SUNTAN OIL, ACIDIFIED and DIVISIBLE. (Don’t ask me why. I just liked writing those last two in. Some entries are like that.)
But it was the cluing that really impressed and boggled me. “The end of Samson?” for ITE comes so close to feeling unfair, but it pulled me back in. How can I let Mr. Croce and Will Shortz get away with that? If they think that’s going to make me walk away from this puzzle, they’ve got another think coming. Onward and upward.
But I honestly wasn’t thinking marriage when I came across “Certain union member” for WIFE, nor was I thinking of getting a tan when I came across “Browning selection?” for SUNTAN OIL. That’s just evil.
But isn’t that why we do this?
Constructor’s Notes
I did this one the good old-fashioned way – by hand, sort of. I say “sort of” because I didn’t quite use pencil and graph paper, but Microsoft Excel. I think I might have singlehandedly crashed onelook.com at one point during the construction process, if not worn out the “?” key on my keyboard. This had been one of the odder crossword goals of mine, to get a freestyle hand-constructed puzzle published. I’m glad I did it, because I have gained a completely new respect for those folks who did this before computers were a thing … and for the few of those who still don’t use them. It’s hard to keep away from crosswordese when doing it this way.
Obviously, the whole thing started with 1-Across; when you’re building these things manually, you really have to have a definitive seed answer at a definitive position. What better place to put it than the most visible spot in the grid? Happily, Will loved the answer I put there. Unfortunately, I handicapped myself a bit by making an 11-letter stack, but it nevertheless progressed (slowly) from NW to NE, through the center to the SW, and then to the SE. As the hand-constructing process goes, the black-square arrangement went through myriad changes to make this thing work; I wasn’t even originally planning on having a 15-letter entry in the middle, but it just kinda worked out that way after building the NE. The SE was the painstaking part… I had to do it twice. Sometimes there’s one stack in constructions like this that suffers a bit because it depends on the rest of the construction… I confess that the original SE was such a stack. Plus, there was one particular entry (BADASS) that I thought may have been O.K. for The Times, but Will didn’t quite feel the same way. (There were a few other iffy crosswordese-ish entries in that corner that pushed it over the edge, too.) So, true to form, I revised it the same way until I got it into its final form.
Thank you for a brain-twisting Friday, Mr. Croce. For those of you who like indie crossword puzzles, Mr. Croce has started his own website called Club 72, where he will be freestyling it approximately once a week. Go visit his cruciverbal playground and try it out.
I grew up LAUGHING at the antics of Don Adams’s Maxwell Smart on the television series “Get Smart,” and have never seen the 2008 film with STEVE CARELL, but here he is, trying out the famous Cone of Silence:
Your thoughts?