Professor Farrell has a prototype chrono-cannon, which is currently able to retrieve small items from the near future. On a recent test firing, it somewhat randomly managed to bring back a fragment of the puzzle page of an edition of the North Yonkers Tribune, from an unknown date thought to be in the next week or so. The fragment includes what appears to be a weekly crossword called “Topical Teaser”. It might be fun to get a head start on readers of the Tribune?
30-down is “adar” (a month in the Hebrew calendar)
33-down is “nil” (another synonym for “zero”)
34-down is “try,” although I don’t know any football codes where a try is worth only 1 or 2
36-across is “nadir”
38-across is “rely”
___________________________________________________________
|1 2 3 4 |5 6 7 |
| : : e : | m : o : d : i : f : y |
| ... ... ... ... | ... _________________ ... ... |
|8 |9 10 |
| : : n : : a | g : e : n : o : a |
| ... ... ... ... ... | ... _____ ... ... ... |
|11 12 | |
| m : o : r : t : g : a : g : o : r | k |
|___________ ... ... ... ... ... ... ... |_____|
|13 14 |15m a d a 16m |
| p : h : o : t : o | t : r : u : m : p |
| ... ... ... _____ ... | ... ... ... _____ ... |
|17 18 |19 20 |
| a : u : n : t | g : e : i : s : h : a |
| ... ... _____ ... |___________ ... _____ ... ... |
|21 22 23 24 |25 26 |
| d : e : j : a : v : u | n : s : e : w |
| ... _____ ... ... ... ... |_____ ... ... ... |
|27 28 |29 30 |
| s : a : u : t : e | d : a : w : n : s |
|_____ ... ... ... ... | ... ... ... ___________|
|31 |32 33 34 |
| | p : r : e : s : i : d : e : n : t |
| ... | ... ... _____ ... ... ... ... ... ... |
|35 |36 |
| : : y : : t | n : a : d : i : r |
| ... ... _________________| ... ... ... ... ... |
|37 |38 |
| m : e : t : t : l : e | r : e : l : y |
|___________________________________|_______________________|
I think 31-down is “yam”, but I can’t think of anything for 35-across that would fit.
1-down might be “aim”
Nice! I completed this having only read the OP and the first line in the spoiler box of the first reply. I spotted fairly quickly that
the topical clue answer was “Trump President” and based my answers around that. I had to use the internet to confirm a few of my answers and was stumped for some time on the bottom right corner as I failed to spot that “rely” was a possible synonym for “count”. In fact, that was one of the things I liked about the puzzle - like most good crosswords, nearly all the clues had a few possible interpretations and quite often the correct answer was a surprise as I hadn’t been thinking of the word in the right sense. Ironically, one thing that tripped me up for quite a while was working out where K364’s comment about “fora” fitted - I thought it was clue 22 somehow, but
what I completely missed,
despite knowing about this puzzle’s famous antecedent, was that there was an alternate solution with “madam” instead of “trump”, and it is in this version that “fora” appears. Really nicely done.
I disagree with K364’s comment that
“fora” and “nous” are obscure (the former especially as we are on a forum, another nice touch) but that’s just personal knowledge I guess - I struggled with “Magog” and I didn’t know “Apse” was particularly common in eastern architecture, though I’d heard of the word in the sense of it being part of a church.
My only slight gripe with the puzzle is
I feel the multi-word clues (“deja vu” and “as yet”) should have been marked as such, with “(4.2)” and “(2,3)” after them respectively. And on a similar note I don’t like the answer “NSEW” as it’s not a word - (nor, arguably, is “ism”) they wouldn’t be considered acceptable in a British crossword, but that could be a cultural difference.
To the spoilered comments above: multiword answers are never denoted as such in American crosswords, at least not the ones I’ve ever done. You won’t see stuff like (4,2) in a New York Times crossword, for instance. That’s part of the fun, at least for me.
I have almost always seen two word and hyphenated answers marked as such, although not with letter counts - it would just say “2 words” or “hyph.” at the end of the clue. Then again, this may or may not be the case with, say, the New York Times puzzles.
The Games Magazine puzzles will mark an answer as (2 words) or the like, but won’t give the number of letters in each. Most other American publishers won’t bother at all.
And while I’m not too fond of answers like “NSEW”, I’ve certainly seen them show up in puzzles (including, I’m pretty sure, that exact one).
Yes, I have seen stuff like “two words” in, say, the TV Guide crossword or the crosswords you get in in-flight magazines. The crosswords that I personally enjoy (like New York Times or LA Times) do not do this. I have never seen letter counts given in American crosswords. Part of the fun for me in doing these crosswords is figuring out if they are going for a single word or a colloquial multiword phrase. Signifying it as such from the outset makes it less fun for me (which is why I hated stuff like the TV Guide crossword as a kid. Does that even still exist?)
And the creator of that celebrated NYT puzzle was a certain Professor Farrell…
I thought I’d try to do my own little homage. Turns out – who knew? – that it’s difficult to write clues that have among their reasonable answers two words that differ by just one letter. It’s even more difficult to make those letters spell out two thematically related words, while having the answers fit into a grid of other words. The real professor managed to write seven such interlocking clues. I had the luxury of shaping the grid to fit the words, and of including some unchecked squares around the edges, which I understand would never be allowed in the NYT. The New York Times, that is, not the “North Yonkers Tribune.”
Re the clue for “apse”, it’s actually referring to the fact that the apse is usually found at the eastern end of a church.
Fair enough - as I said, just a cultural difference. I must admit a large part of my crossword solving comes from ‘what word will fit with those letters’, which of course doesn’t work nearly so well with multi-word clues if you don’t know what ‘shape’ of word to look for.
You also appear to have used a different style of grid from most American crosswords, with heavy lines between words instead of entire squares blacked out.
No way to use an American-style grid in this case, due to the convention that all letters must be checked by across and down clues. The N from GAIN/GRIN would be isolated, for example.
Given that a classic grid can’t be used here, the barred grid is both smaller and gives the setter more leeway. There are still some “unches” in this one, but they’re almost unavoidable, especially if you also disallow two-letter answers. At least the letters involved in the important part are all checked.