Most of our highly skilled Doper crossword solvers won’t deign to do the Monday puzzle in the New York Times because the puzzles are too easy. The puzzles get harder as the week progresses, with Saturday being the toughest. Sunday is just a bigger Thursday-level puzzle, which for me is usually great fun to solve.
Anyway, I still attack Monday puzzles and today I encountered a themed clue (and it’s answer) that has me wondering.
This clue is just as you see it in the headline, replete with the question mark which indicates the answer is a pun or some sort of word play. It is the third, and last, themed clue in the puzzle
The 15-letter answer is:
BLAZE IN BROOKLYN
Someone please explain.
The two preceding themed clues are:
One-L lama (15 letters)
BUDDHIST HOLY MAN
Two-L llama (15 letters)
ANDES PACK ANIMAL
And for Twickster’s benefit, the constructor is Peter A. Collins. For those of you who don’t know, Twickster was formerly a puzzle mag editor. Sadly she has since gone richer and respectabler and is now a gardening magazine editor.
Ah well, I see I wasted too much time looking up the poem itself.
That poem was used by my English teacher in Catholic high-school as an example for literary analysis, in which he came to the conclusion that it expressed Nash’s lack of belief in the existence of Hell. The holy lama symbolized the higher realm of heaven, while the bestial llama symbolized the lower physical realm on Earth. Nash was betting everything he had (because when you are wearing silk pajamas you have nothing else on) that there was nothing below the physical realm, that is, Hell.
I’ve always suspected he was joking, but I’ve never been entirely sure.
Sorry – didn’t mean to imply you were impugning Peter – just giving you the inside scoop on the guy. (i.e., he’s not one of my favorite people ever, like Merl Reagle – but he’s not an asshole. And yes, I could name names on the assholes in the puzzle biz. But I won’t.)
I remember reading, in one of those Readers Digest snippets that they put at the end of their articles, that jokely that ends with a three-L lllama being a “helluva big fire.” I was a teenager, so that would have been approximately 30 years ago.
By the way, did you see the NY Times crossword a few weeks ago that had two cells with numerals instead of letters? I thought that was a good trick. Mainly because I had previously thought of the idea myself and wondered if it had ever been done.
It’s been done , and quite a while ago. Puzzle makers have done all sorts of tricks like that – using numbers instead of letters; using numbers as letters (especially “1/I” and “0/O”), using symbols like “@” for “at” and “&” for “and” (Like Alfred Bester did in his story “The Demolished Man”). The Bopston Globe’s Sunday crossword, for instance, usually has some clever twist in key words like this, and I know I’ve done one with numbers in the boxes many years ago.
It’s actually pretty common, usually on Thursdays. Sometimes it’s a symbol, a number, double letters, or a whole world that goes into a single cell. Thursdays can be fun.
