Nice set! Plus you get bonus points for fact-checking your sitcom titles – two !!'s is correct on that. Your Penn and Teller clue is a bit dry. #1, I’d add “, in a song title,” or “, for Glenn Miller,” or something like that.
Overall: B.
#1, #3, #5, #8, and #13 are all excellent; #9, #10, #11, #14 are all very good. #2 a bit dry (I really thought someone would come up with something fun for him – so far I like FatBaldGuy’s Sean Penn clue the best). #6 you’ve got a parts-of-speech problem: Pensive is an adjective, you clued it as a noun. “Like a …” would work fine.
Overall: A-.
#1 – I assume you’re aware you left out a letter? :dubious:
Penguin – v. nice; but lowercase “i” on “ice.”
Happening – sorry, don’t get it. (Therefore a bad clue, QED. 
)
I like the Rodin clue – but you might want to tweak it a bit – “man” → “model,” perhaps?
Sixpence, you forgot the quotes and the blank – and it’s a bit easy.
General address is wonderful.
Iike your Penn and Teller clue, but not sure how I’d want that spelled – looks tres goofy as is.
Impending, v. nice – appendix, lovely prhasing.
Don’t get the Open Door clue.
Overall: B.
:smack: Apply this to other proofreading mistakes as well.
This was definitely the hardest–on googling Happenings, it turns out that the term first came into artsy usage with “Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts”. Reference to that, and yeah, weird.
I liked the rhyme. What about “Rodin’s man’s mood”?
I went back and forth on that one (and also I goofed: Teller didn’t help in the production).
Huh–I thought this was one of the weaker ones.
It’s the Open Door Policy in China bit: it sparked the Boxer Rebellion. The other hardest clue.
Thanks for the challenge; this was fun!
Daniel
William’s colony-PENNSYLVANIA
Michael’s brother, Amy’s brother-in-law SEAN PENN
Mexico has 2 ____ days- INDEPENDENCE
Bird in a tuxedo PENGUIN
the “In” scene- HAPPENING
a brown study- PENSIVE
“___ none the richer”- SIXPENCE
Terrorist target-PENTAGON
one talks, one doesn’t- PENN AND TELLER
any time now- IMPENDING
vermiform organ- APPENDIX
portal ajar- OPEN DOOR
Colorado evergreen- ASPEN
M’s girl- MONEYPENNY
Portugal and Spain _____- PENINSULA
Woo-hoo! I seem to be improving! Once again, twickster, thanks for the challenge. Great fun!
Question though. One of the things I was thinking of for INDEPENDENCE was “Washington avenue.” Then I realized that PENNSYLVANIA would also be appropriate for that clue–and both INDEPENDENCE and PENNSYLVANIA contain the same number of letters. Would the clue “Washington avenue” be appropriate for one word or the other under these circumstances, or would you like to see a more specific and/or different clue for each?
As you can see, I stayed away from the street name idea for both INDEPENDENCE and PENNSYLVANIA, but I’ve been wondering about this today.
Again, thanks for the critique–and I’ll review my parts of speech. 
Excellent question! The short answer is: It depends. 
[/smartassery]
Seriously, though, it does depend. One of the things that’s implicitly guaranteed in a puzzle is that the answer is unique. Thus, in a crossword, even when you have two possible answers for a given 12-letter (or whatever length) space, only one of them will work with all the crosses.* The editor will often go for a deliberately go for that kind of ambiguity in a medium or hard crossword. (An easy example: Five- letter word beginning with S, clue: “SST part.”)
In this particular case, however, there’s no ambiguity – and no problem with uniqueness – because the solver knows where the letters P-E-N actually go. Therefore you’re totally okay.
*Aficionados will recall the NYT puzzle the mornging after the 1996 election; non-aficonados can read about it here.
(Sorry – previewed to check the link – should have read through the post itself. Oh well.)
A yeomanlike selection. “William’s colony” is kind of interesting. I’d rephrase the INDEPENDENCE clue – “Mexico has two days celebrating this.” PENGUIN: nice, but a little easy; there’s other places to go with this. PENSIVE: Parts of speech problem; it’s an adj., you clued as a noun. SIXPENCE – good.
PENTAGON – Something we haven’t talked about yet, so here’s our opportunity: People solve puzzles for fun, so we try to stay away from the grim and the depressing. (A former colleague called them the four D’s: Death, disease, disaster, disability.) The guideline I give trainees is “Imagine the solver in a hospital waiting room trying to concentrate on anything other than the ordeal their loved one is going through elsewhere.” You may have noticed that clues for DIANA referring to the former princess disappeared virtually overnight after her rather gruesome end. We’re also very careful about references to New Orleans right now, though that’s starting to loosen up a little as they rebuild. So, for this clue – I’m gonna veto it, but you’d have no way of knowing that, so no harm, no foul. So to sepak.
APPENDIX – nice phrasing.
OPEN DOOR – blah. Synonyms are generally pretty weak clues, esp. when it’s a two-word phrase with idiomatic or other meanings. Try again.
MONEYPENNY: nice.
PENINSULA – doesn’t work. The body of land is the Iberian peninsula, not the Portugal and Spain peninsula. You could do something like “Portugal and Spain share one” or “Portugal is on one,” something like that.
Overall: Gentleman’s C.
It seems to me to add a little theme to the puzzle, you could make all the clues about writing (since the letters are “PEN”). So I wrote my clues that way:
- Where to write the Constitution: PENNSYLVANIA
- Actor to write a Dr. Seuss remake: SEAN PENN
- Freedom to write alone: INDEPENDENCE
- Bird writing to ask for flight: PENGUIN
- Society page write-up: HAPPENING
- Too shy to write: PENSIVE
- Cost of a writing implement in England: SIXPENCE
- Home of military writers: PENTAGON
- Writing and banking on funny magic: PENN AND TELLER
- Going to be written soon: IMPENDING
- Write this at the end: APPENDIX
- Written office policy: OPEN DOOR
- Writing about Colorado ski resort: ASPEN
(Wanted to put “What a proctologist writes with”, but didn’t.) - Someone written about in Fleming: MONEYPENNY
- The jetty you sit on to write: PENINSULA
(Now to read the rest of the thread…)
Easy:
Look intently
____ down (to intimidate)
Hard:
Ungrammatically look to assert existence of saint, in brief
Look at celebrity ends in error
Fred, dancing, looks odd without ‘A’ and I
Sounds like a step should be taken to get a dirty look
Rats look backwards after taking ecstasy
Doh - minus marks already I fear for: missing the fact we had moved on to a second set of words (but you did say reply before reading the thread!); overly cryptic clues; and not completing any medium ones :smack:
Yeah, we’re doing American-style here – if you want to take another whack at it before I grade, go ahead.
Are there no such thing as cryptic clues/crosswords in the US? Genuinely interested, not a snark.
Anyway, thanks, but no thanks - I don’t find the non-cryptic ones that interesting.
Yes, we have them, but they’re considered a separate category of puzzle.
Of your cryptic clues:
Yes, we have them, but they’re considered a separate category of puzzle.
Of your cryptic clues: the first three aren’t that great (the surface sense, if any, is a bit murky), and the last two are pretty good.
There are some excellent US cryptics, like the monthly Puzzler thematic in The Atlantic (sadly no longer available to non-subscribers). The clues in that puzzle are generally somewhere between the Daily Telegraph and the Times in terms of difficulty, but they’re always elegant, and rigorously fair, unlike those of some British setters coughAraucariacough.
Damn, I forgot to add my own attempts at cryptic clues for SPARE:
Famous English peer (5)
Eyeball’s partially lost a retina (5)
Glare from sun perhaps beginning to ebb (5)
self-critique:
‘Famous’ clues STAR as an adjective, defensible but inelegant. ‘Peer’ is not a great definition.
Eyeballs only have one retina - the ‘a’ is obviously only there to make the wordplay work.
I haven’t looked at other people’s answers; hope these aren’t the same things everyone else is posting.
First oil-producing U.S. state PENNSYLVANIA
Oscar nominee for “Sweet and Lowdown” SEAN PENN
Breaking away INDEPENDENCE
Submarine “flier” PENGUIN
Do HAPPENING
Apt to mull PENSIVE
“Sing a song of _____” SIXPENCE
Military position PENTAGON
Prestidigitating pair PENN AND TELLER
Soon and certain IMPENDING (And a cryptic: “Brat’s finale is nigh”)
It may follow “The End” APPENDIX
Invitation to chat OPEN DOOR
Pitkin County seat ASPEN
Bond girl MONEYPENNY
Denmark or Florida PENINSULA
Sorry about the delay in responding – my afternoon got busy, and I only had time for some quick driveby posting.
Fun idea! some of them work a whole lot better than others, but you get all kinds of bonus points for doing it.
A few phrasing things; 1. should be “Where the Constitution was written,” since it’s a completed past tense thing. 2 is a joke, so it needs a question mark; 4 is cute; 5 is good; “pensive” doesn’t really mean “shy,” so maybe “mulling over what to write” might be better. Sixpence – good. 9 is another joke (nice!), so it gets another question mark.
Thanks for skipping the proctologist joke.
13 you’d have to rephrase – maybe “Resort written about in the January tabloids,” something like that. And 15 – a jetty isn’t a Peninsula.
So, a bunch of small problems, so you lose points there, but you tied it together with an overall theme, which truly impressed me as a creative idea, so you gained points … grinding noise from twick’s noggin as she calculates the grade … B++.
Yes, two plusses.
Thanks for playing!