Just kidding. I haven’t timed myself on them for a while, since I usually don’t have enough free consecutive minutes to do it all at once these days.
Let me see if the current Times puzzle is free. (You will need to register.) I get it delivered, so I don’t remember. If not, we can do the Yahoo puzzle (pretty easy) or one of the others.
Oh well, I am releived that you are not timing yourself anymore.
It isn’t foreplay, man. 
But I read in the New Yorker that Henry Hook times himself…
And you can have your sexual fetishes, and I have mine.
Uma Thurman, Aga Khan and Emo Philips also turn up a lot. Everybody say it with me: OONA UTA UMA AGA EMO! Don’t dat feel goooood? No? Oh well. (If it did, go here.) Anyway, 3- and 4-letter words with 2 or 3 vowels would seem to be the Tinkertoy connector wheels of crosswordom.
I think during the old guard era at The Times it was actually expected that you’d keep a hand on your dic. (-tionary.) Either that, or that the typical “solver” had postgraduate degrees in at least two wildly unrelated disciplines (eg: medieval history and inorganic chemistry).
“Solver.” Yeesh, I loathe that word. Sounds like a little silver tray, or a nasty chemical.
Funny as hell! Thank you, Beware of Doug.
I think this is the second time you mentioned your eight-years of xwords book.
Please tell us the title and editor.
Oh shite!
It wasn’t you with the crossword book. Was it Voyager?
How many of us are in on the puzzle contest? And what is the reward?
How about giving the winner a special sig to sport until the next contest rolls around.
There’s a program called Crossword Compiler that looks good. It’s $50, but seems to have all the features of Across Lite, the big name in the field, for $500.
Let us all know when you’re done!
Ahem! What about the Brits? Someone send me a New York Times,I’ll join in!
I often wonder if anyone else handicaps their puzzle solving.
I.e., put in your own rules to make the solving more challenging, and thus make the puzzle last longer. Fact is, I like to take things slowly, especially with a very good puzzle, to savor the composer’s ingenuity, humor, etc.
I started doing this with the then syndicated moron-level puzzles that appeared daily in our local paper.
Usually, I study the clues and grid for a good starting place, select a clue and write in the answer.
From then on, I build off that word by solving at least one of the intersecting clues., and thus work my way through the puzzle. No jumping around to vacant portions of the grid.
By the time I got around to bitching to the newspaper editor about the dumbass puzzles he was buying, I was hooked on this system., and now always try to do this with every puzzle I work on. (No, I have never succeeded this way with a Saturday Times puzzle.)
Happily, our paper (Danbury News-Times) has now copied the NYT by making the Monday puzzle a snap, with each getting harder as the week progresses. Sundays are still on the boring side, though.
It was me. The title is The New York Times Jumbo Sunday Crossword Puzzle Book (Eight Volumes in One From the New York Times Sunday Crossword Puzzles, Volumes 1-8) Copyright 1996 by Random House, Inc. and published by Wings Books. It doesn’t exactly name an editor, but there is a brief foreword by Will Weng. The numbers on the bigger puzzles are tiny, so I keep a magnifier handy.
I went to the Games Merriam Webster tournament in 1986, and I noticed that the champion solvers did all the acrosses and then all the downs, since that increases your speed, not having to jump across the clues.
I did an entire book of Middleton acrostics once never filling in any letters until I solved the entire thing - not quite in my head, since I looked at the grid, but almost. Then I lost interest in them. That was when I was in grad school, and smarter than today.
Look for a new thread on the tournament. Won’t be NY Times, since you have to pay, not just register, to get access.
Wow, I think I’m gonna be horribly out-classed, but this sounds great. Can I get in on this tournament?
Anyone can get in. See this new thread.