Oh dear, I did deserve that! Actually, I really didn’t mean it as a brag, but it sure came out that way, didn’t it? I had just been talking with a friend about the NYT crossword in general - she’s been doing them since she was about 15 - and she looked right at me and said:
“Tell me you don’t do your crosswords in pencil.” And I laughed. My puzzles often end up with really bad changes on them - this past Sunday was a doozy, actually, big blacked-out blotches all over - but to me, it’s actually kind of a good corrective to have to see just how bad my mistakes were.
I’ve been working on the puzzle in fits and starts all week. I’ve made some real progress, but I’m not even close to done. I’m going to have to sit down at the computer soon and dig around for some answers. (Yeah, I know that’s not entirely kosher, but I usually can’t finish it just using the ol’ brain.)
I’ve only been doing crosswords for a year or so. I regularly tried to do the NYT crossword, and always failed because I didn’t know how to do a crossword puzzle right. but I’ve been “working out” by doing the early-in-the-week (easier) puzzles, and I’m getting a lot better.
I’ll be doing it this afternoon; Thursday’s usually the earliest I can get around to it.
Little Banjo has a karate class in Brooklyn Heights, two doors down from a very nice Irish pub. I like to see whether I can finish the Sunday puzzle in less time than it takes to finish a pint.
That’s what I did, too. You start building up a pretty strange vocabulary, especially in subjects that aren’t all that interesting to you; I now know who Bobby Orr is (please don’t whack me, hockey fans) and that “eft” is another word for “newt.”
I think the hardest are actually the Saturday puzzles - most Sunday puzzles seem to be about the same difficulty as a Thursday, just bigger. But Saturday (and often Friday) a just wack.
**Oxymoron snippet: “I think the hardest are actually the Saturday puzzles - most Sunday puzzles seem to be about the same difficulty as a Thursday, just bigger. But Saturday (and often Friday) a just wack.”
**
On the money, IMHO.
I’ve read that the theory (even before Will Shortz) is, Saturday’s puzzle is the hardest because you have the weekend to work it out. I personally don’t see the point. If I give it an hour, I know whether or not I have even a prayer at solving the damned thing. (And rather frequently, I don’t. - have a prayer, that is
I find the Thursday puzzles challenging and often witty enough to cause me to laugh out loud. Today’s was an exception. Not at all up to snuff.
Sunday’s puzzle is a rollercaster that can range from a piece of cake to impossible.
But how lucky we are that Shortz came along. I found the previous Times puzzle editors to be stultifyingly stodgy. One of them (her first name was Margaret (I think) would not allow the name of a diease or anything remotey unpleasant to find its way in any puzzle she edited. “Puzzles are supposed to be FUN!”
But she was loved. You can still buy crossword anthologies that award a “Margaret” to the best puzzle in the collection. (Then if you do the puzzle, you might wonder, “Why did this piece of crap garner a Margaret?”)
I used to work with a group of extremely smart people who try to (working together) solve the NYT crossword puzzle each day… using only the ACROSS clues.
