This is the crossword puzzle thread

id be up for it

Send me yr e-mail, Lamp.

send me one too j - my full name at gmail.com

hook me up

Sent.

v. nice theme jmc! i had to complete two of them before i got what it was and in total i think the puzzle took me 25 minutes which is about a wed/thurs time for me

a couple of the clues frustrated there were a lot of proper name clues i think? but overall it flowed really well

yeah dude good job--it probably took me about the same time as lamp did, but i somehow didnt get the theme at all until the next day (i thought the thrd one was a reference to samuel morse, which made me think it was a rhyming theme, and i was going, what rhymes with koala?). but i liked it!

Cool, thanks guys!

(I don't want to talk about it too much in public before it's accepted anywhere, but I will note that Jordan had the same thought re Samuel Morse. Which may not be a problem -- it could work as a useful diversion.)

in today's ny times, "modern way to put out an album" is ONCD = lol, will shortz u r old

ha yeah i was trying to think of an itunes/emusic type service w/ four letters

Who's the constructor?

someone who should know better, sounds like (from crossword fiend):

today's puzzle is, i believe, a debut for this constructor. i think i remember reading that this puzzle was used at the recent brown crossword tournament, and that the constructor is a student there. in any event, congratulations to joey weissbrot on at least his NYT debut.

I guess it still could've been Shortz's clue.

also--origami commonly depicts a crane, not a swan, right?

yeah, the swan initially made me think of ice sculptures for some reason

OK, after doing the NYT puzzle for a few weeks after a multi-year hiatus, I now notice the following clues and answers popping up regularly

1) Emmy Winner Ward = SELA
2) Parent's (or Sitter's) Scourge = IMP (or some synonym)
3) Argument Refrain = "AM SO" or "IS NOT" or variant thereof
4) Former Boomer = SST. This is a holdover answer from the Eugene T. Maleska days. Haven't seen ORT or TERN in a while. AERIE still pops up though.

To everything
tern, tern, tern
There is a season
tern, tern, tern

Haven't seen ORT or TERN in a while.

According to xwordinfo.com, ORTS was last used on 3/12 and TERN on 3/20.

Ha, I definitely did both those puzzles, guess I didn't notice/remember these classic answers. That site is pretty useful, thanks for the link. I see that ASTA is still going strong in the Will Shortz era and that ATTU hung around for a while, but died out in 2006.

My pal Ben did a write-up of the first Chicago amateur crossword tournament. Out of the 25 competitors, I was 6th on the Monday puzzle, 9th on the Tuesday (though I had one dumb error, so I would've been disqualified even if I'd finished 1st), and abysmal on the Wednesday, due to one corner that just wouldn't fall into place. Pretty fun afternoon, though.

i liked todays nyt theme even if the rest of the puzzle was boring

I might've done a little better at the tournament if I'd realized from the get-go that the Cubs players were going to be given in order. I knew who they were, I just held off on filling them in until I could confirm how they were going to appear.

Kind of cool that they're perfect 15-letter fills, though.

i had never heard of the players so that didn't help me at all. at the end i had the rest of the puzzle filled in except for those names.

That was maybe a tribute to old school Maleska-style crosswords, where those three guys appeared regularly.

yeah--one of those puzzles thats really easy if youre familiar with the rhyme and probably a big pain in the ass if youre not

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball's_Sad_Lexicon

Was there one extraneous circle today?

Yes, as far as I know.

Thanks for the confirmation. It was the last in the sequence but didn't really figure into the special clues or the bigger picture.

OK, I guess you kind of need that last circle for the big picture.

lol, was going to say, its a weird boat with the "i"

i mean, WITHOUT the i

Oh, I didn't even think about connecting the dots A to B, B to C, etc. I was drawing the lines in the patterns that the clues dictated, and after doing 49-Across ("E-F-G-H-E"), the "I" seemed superfluous.

ditto

ah, see, the way i was working i realized it was a sailboat before i had filled in those clues, so i had basically drawn the whole thing already

Or maybe I should have said "dotto"
(xp)

Yeah, I'm embarrassed to say that I was the one of the people who got 1-Across wrong, because I didn't bother checking 2-Down. (I was too busy tearing my hair out over the bottom-left, since I'd never heard of YEGGS before. I originally had YOGIS.)

yeggs annoyed the shit out of me

Yeggs is old school xwordese too. See also "Pete". Often clued by "Second story man."

http://www.google.com/search?q=yegg+pete+second-story&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

i had never heard of the players so that didn't help me at all. at the end i had the rest of the puzzle filled in except for those names.

Haha, me too -- it seemed uncharitably un-Tuesday-like to cross baseball names with a college athletic conference, a Biblical location, and a boating term, cause I had no chance on those.

i connected on today's puzzle pretty well but didn't get the drawing until i looked it up online after finishing it. maybe if i had done it on paper instead of in across lite i would have been more apt to draw a big ol' boat on it.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/97/257848457_24bcb4bcec.jpg

I was scared going in after reading jaymc's friend's blog, but today's wasn't so bad.

But today's I could not finish.

By which I mean I got nowhere on the SE and next to nowhere on the NW.

But Saturday's was a lot better.

Constructed a pretty solid grid yesterday with one exception that I can't seem to get out of: OHER.

Here's hoping that Michael Oher becomes a huge NFL star and/or The Blind Side becomes a buzzed-about box-office hit. I might just have to wait a few months to find out.

uh, something about an Ohio emergency room?