This was pretty cool. There was a clue in this week’s NYT crossword puzzle “The better sci fi franchise” where the first word was “Star” and whether you used “Trek” or “Wars” all the surrounding clues worked. Nicely done.
I reported this to have some of it spoilered, just FYI.
I loved (loved!!) that puzzle! They did something similar on the eve of the Dole/Clinton election, where the central squares worked equally well with Bob Dole or Clinton, and the clue was “Winner of the 1996 presidential race” or something.
Spoilered
It didn’t even occur to me to spoiler a day old puzzle but okay, sorry.
Well, the Sunday puzzle is pretty big, so it may take some time for people to understand the sheer awesomeness of this puzzle. This is my favorite Sunday in a while.
Thursday’s was pretty cool, too – I didn’t get the trick until nearly the last clue. I was just baffled by some of the answers along the way.
They’re called “Schrödinger puzzles” at least by some. NYTimes has had 17 of them so far, varying in complexity. The Dole/Clinton one was the most famous.
I love these, but it does bother me that It’s a TRAP crosses with Star TREK.
The site I do them on is on a two-week delay, so this is a spoiler for me, at least. Which I obviously don’t mind, or I wouldn’t have unblurred the boxes.
I do wonder how/whether the app will accommodate that.
Rex Parker is extraordinarily sour about it (and he’s kind of sour about everything):
Why - I say, why?
(Foghorn Leghorn wording necessitated by Discourse’s idiotic character minimum).
Why does it bother me? Search It’s a trap on Youtube and you’ll see that the most salient reference to it is from the other series.
Hah! That’s barely “extraordinarily sour” by his standards. Mildly peeved, at best.
Oh! I didn’t think it was trying to refer to either series. (The clues that were referring to them, said this explicitly).
You’re so right. Half the fun of the crossword is finishing (in several hours or days, of course, unlike him) then rushing to see if he was irritated by the same things I was. Me, I would have been delighted with the WARS/TREK thing.
I have the last dozen or so I haven’t gotten to yet. No big deal on the spoiler tho.
Did anyone else try to figure out how to view the spoiler in @puzzlegal 's post? No? Just me?
No, I realize that it’s not referring to them, it’s just that it’s a mild discordance that bugs me. Again, not a problem with the puzzle, which is quite clever, just a minor imperfection in reality.
Weird. I’ve been doing the NYT crossword puzzle for years but only remember the 1996 election puzzle. I don’t remember the other examples. I’ll have to go back and look for them.
I always work these on the app and really enjoyed this puzzle. I entered TREK and WARS as a rebus and put both letters in each square and it counted it. Not sure if you could have gotten away with just one or the other though.
You could. That’s how I solved it.
You better have used TREK, that’s all I have to say. The other one isn’t really even SciFi.