Puzzle 19: I ♥︎ Lollapuzoola 13 (guest puzzle by Ken Stern)

Yesterday was Lollapuzoola 13, the greatest crossword tournament held on a Saturday in August – whether in-person or virtual. If you weren’t among the 1,200 people who participated – and why weren’t you???? – you can still get the full set of great puzzles by Brooke Husic, Sid Sivakumar, Rachel Fabi, Joon Pahk, Stella Zawistowski and Robyn Weintraub for a mere $10. In the meantime, here’s a nice free puzzle than Ken Stern constructed during the breaks in the tournament, based on a grid he tweeted out in the morning.

Puzzle 18: Grids For Good

Remember last time, when I said I’d love to be able to offer you some bonus puzzles in return for donating to charity, but that I didn’t have any extra puzzles? Well now I have one, as part of Grids For Good. Grids For Good is a collection of 42 original puzzles created by 44 different constructors to raise money for organizations providing coronavirus relief, as well as for groups fighting against institutional racism. You can get the whole package just by donating $10 to one of the charities on the site, or even to a related charity that’s not listed.

And one of those 42 puzzles is a meta that Laura Braunstein and I constructed. What’s a meta you ask? Nothing! What’s a meta with you? (Sorry). Anyway, a metapuzzle is a crossword where the completed grid gives you a hint towards a bonus answer. And if you find that bonus answer (or the bonus answer in the two other metas in the package, you can be entered into a drawing to win a swag bag from The Inkubator (including a tote bag, notebook, stickers, buttons, and erasers). Entries are due by July 18, so get solving!

Big thanks to Evan Birnholz for organizing Grids For Good, and to Jeremy Horwitz for some brilliant edits. That’s all for this week. Have a happy Fourth of July!

Puzzle 17: Words on the Street (with Laura Braunstein)

Crossword puzzles can feel frivolous even in the best of times. I get a few hours of enjoyment (and frustration) from creating them, and I hope all of you get at least a few minutes of enjoyment from solving them, but we’re not exactly changing the world. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people around the world are out there protesting and are changing the world, and the least we can do is help them out. And while this puzzle offers moral support to Black Lives Matter, it can’t offer any concrete support. For that, I encourage you to join protests (while wearing a mask and keeping six feet away from your fellow marchers), lobby your officials, and, especially, donate money.

I’d love to be able to offer you some bonus puzzles in return for donating, but that would require me to actually have more puzzles available, and if that were the case I wouldn’t have gone six months without posting a puzzle here. Luckily, a bunch of other people do have extra puzzles to send you in return for your donations:

I’ve solved some of these puzzles already, and so far they’re all great.

I don’t have much else to say about today’s puzzle, since I think it speaks for itself. Big thanks to Laura Braunstein for co-constructing with me. The two of us will be teaching a free online class on crossword construction next Tuesday, June 23, and we’d love to see some of you there. We don’t exactly know what we’re doing teaching-wise, but we’ve taught some classes to kids so far, so I can guarantee that this will at least be fun and you’ll probably even learn something.

Puzzle 16: That Extra Push Over the Cliff

I’m back! Did you guys miss me? (Don’t answer that.) I assume you’ve all been so busy solving all the puzzles that Matt sends out in his Daily Crossword Links email that you didn’t even notice that I haven’t published a new puzzle here in *checks calendar* SIX MONTHS???? Wow, that’s embarrassing.

Anyway, here’s a new puzzle. It’s a theme idea I’ve had for a while but never got around to constructing, because of work, kids, the complete collapse of society, etc. Obviously this theme has been done before – so far I’ve found at least a half-dozen puzzles that used it – but I think my themers (or, at least two of them), plus the revealer justify doing the theme again. Also those puzzles were all 5-20 years old, so I figured it was ripe for a reboot.

Hope you enjoy this. New puzzle in two weeks. I (almost) promise.

Puzzle 15: Crossword Tournament From Your Couch

As many of you know, this American Crossword Puzzle Tournament was supposed to be starting today. Obviously, it’s not happening now, but to make sure that solvers can still get their tournament fix, Finn Vigeland and Kevin Dur have created the Crossword Tournament From Your Couch, which will take palace tomorrow, Saturday, March 21, from 1:00 – 5:00 pm Eastern Time. And one of the puzzles in there is a collaboration by me and Laura Braunstein! The others are by Patrick Blindauer, Rachel Fabi, Joel Fagliano, Finn Vigeland and Byron Walden, with a warm-up puzzle by Robyn Weintraub, and honestly seeing my name alongside those guys still feels surreal.

Anyway, I can’t tell you any more about the puzzles, except to say that they’re all really good and you should definitely sign up for the tournament, especially since participation is free.

In other puzzle news, I’ve added “crossword construction” to our attempts at homeschooling, and so far my daughter and I have made two puzzles. For now I’ve just been posting them to Twitter, but if we ever get up to constructing something closer to a full-size puzzle I’ll definitely post it here. In the meantime, here are images of the first two puzzles. See if you can guess what books we’ve been reading for the last year!

5x5 Crossword puzzle
7x7 Crossword Puzzle

Puzzle 14: These Two So Like

Crazy at it may seem, I do have interests outside of crossword puzzles, and one of those interests is the works of William Shakespeare (you may have heard of him). Somehow, this interest has led me to become part of the Rochester Community Players Shakespeare Program, even though I’m not at all a theater person. My acting career – such as it was – peaked when I played Max in my fifth grade class’s production of The Sound of Music, which is about as far as one can go with no actual talent other than an ability to remember one’s lines. (As befits a fifth-grade production, this version of Max was a lot less of a Nazi collaborator than the Max of the original musical/movie.)

Our production of Comedy of Errors opens tonight, so I thought I’d construct a twinlet puzzle to go with it. For those who are unfamiliar with the format, a twinlet puzzle is two identical grids with the clues all mixed together. For those who are unfamiliar with Comedy of Errors, it’s Shakespeare’s second greatest comedy about twins who have been separated by a shipwreck and are now constantly being mistaken for each other – and you might want to take a quick look at the names of the characters, since that will make the puzzle a lot easier. And if you’re in the Rochester area, please come to the show.

Finally, since there’s no way to solve a twinlet puzzle on a computer, this puzzle is only available as a PDF.

Puzzle 13: Mutant Squash (with Laura Braunstein)

You may have noticed I didn’t have a puzzle up here two weeks ago. I’d like to say that my lapse had something to do with the Jewish holidays, but really it was just me not getting around to finishing a puzzle. At least I already have something to atone for next year!

This puzzle started with a tweet from Chris Adams. (You’re all already subscribed to his puzzles, right?) I wasn’t going to actually construct it, since I didn’t really want to do another quote theme — especially not another one with “adult” language in it — but Laura insisted because the idea was so “baroque and demented”, which is apparently my brand (I think she meant that as a compliment). Anyway, it’s timely, and she offered to co-construct, so here it is. There’s not much else to say about it; you’re either ready to solve this freaky-assed puzzle or you’re not.

In other crossword news, I want to thank Will Nediger for picking JKL M ‘n’ O as one of his Indie Puzzle Highlights for September. Since there’s no official hierarchy of crossword awards, I’m just going to declare this the equivalent of winning an Oscar. Also, Queer Qrossword 2: 2 Queer 2 Qurious is now out. You can get this collection of 32 LGBTQ+-themed crosswords by simply donating $10 or more to LGBTQ+ charity. I’ve only had time to solve a handful of these so far, but they’ve all been great.

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.

Puzzle 10: Flash Fiction (with Laura Braunstein)

This puzzle is late because I’m still recovering from Lollapuzzoola last Saturday. Or, more accurately, I’m still recovering from the flight delays that led to me not getting home until 3:00 am on Monday. The tournament itself was a lot of fun, and marks a great end to the 2019 crossword circuit. I finished all the puzzles cleanly, which I believe makes this the first year that I haven’t had a mistake in any tournament. I also finished 12th overall, after finishing 8th at both Boswords and Indie 500, and 24th (6th in the B division) at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.

If you weren’t at Lollapuzzoola you can still get the puzzles and compete in the at-home division — or just solve them for fun. Also, you can do the puzzle below, which we handed out for free at the tournament. Laura Braunstein, who co-edits The Inkubator, came up with the theme, and then she and I roughly split filling the grid and writing the clues. Hope you enjoy it.