Puzzle 4: E-Quips
The seed for this (which ended up as 60A) came to me while I was solving a recent WSJ Meta puzzle. One very slow database search later, I had a list of about 1,000 words that could potentially fit the pattern. Of those 1,000 words, only about 50 would actually work for the theme, and those 50 words yielded just 20 or so potential theme entires. Of course my personal favorite ended up being the only one that was nine letters long, so the only way to include it was to have five theme entries. That forced me to use some questionable fill in the middle — though my daughter assures me that 32D would at least be familiar to Pokémon fans — but I think it was worth it.
This weekend is the 5th annual Indie 500 crossword tournament in Washington, D.C. If you haven’t signed up yet you can try to get on the wait list, or just participate in the solve-at-home division. If you have signed up, come say hi. I’ll be the guy eating pie and solving a bunch of puzzles.
