Month: September 2019

Puzzle 12: Split Squads

“Anyone who wants to know the heart and mind of America,” wrote Jacques Barzun, “had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game—and do it by watching first some high school or small-town teams.” He was wrong on the larger point — his essay doesn’t provide any good evidence that baseball explains America any better than football or soccer or ballet or municipal zoning codes or anything else would — but he was right that the best way to watch the game is to find a small-town team, or at least a minor league team. Sure, the quality of the play isn’t as good as what you’ll find on even the worst major league team, but the tickets are cheaper, the views are better, and the experience is just all around more fun and relaxing.

I got the idea for this puzzle while at a [42-Across] game (still my favorite team, even though I’ve spend the last five years moving further and further away from the stadium) and figured there must be a whole bunch of potential themers out there, but it turned out these (plus two that had non-matching lengths) were the only ones that worked. But I have a bunch of great (to me) theme ideas where I can only come up with one valid entry, so I’m not complaining.

The major league season is winding down and the minor league season is already over, but thankfully it’s always crossword season.

Puzzle 11: JKL M ‘n’ O (with Ken Stern, featuring Laura Braunstein)

Here’s another puzzle we gave out at Lollapuzoola. The theme for this came when autocorrect garbled a message Laura sent to our metapuzzle group. I came up with a few more entries that could fit the theme, and then she tweeted the original out and a bunch of crossword twitter folks had a lot of fun coming up with many, many more themers, some of which were reasonable, and some of which were 26 letters long. Since Laura was responsible for the whole thing, I suggested we collaborate again, but she was too busy and recommended I team up with Ken instead.

But first I reached out to Nate Cardin, since he had used this exact theme in a puzzle back in January, to make sure he didn’t mind us duplicating his idea. (Nate is the organizer and editor of Queer Qrosswords, a pack of 22 really good puzzles that you can get by donating $10 or more to any LGBTQ+ charity. If you didn’t solve them last year, you should go get them now. If you did solve them, you should get Queer Qrosswords 2 as soon as it’s available.)

Ken and I settled on a set of themers, I set up a grid, and we proceeded to fill it with some really C-level entries. Luckily, by then Laura had some more free time, and between the three of us we managed to get most of the fill up to at least B-level and finished writing the clues a whole 16 hours before Lollapuzzola started.

This was truly a group effort, but I want to acknowledge that Ken came up with the awesome title, and Laura wrote the clue for 49-Across, since she’s always wanted to use that clue.