QuillxWords

Time: 36:29 Average Friday: 29:14 Best Friday: 10:21 Last night was another late one for me, but only for the best reasons. On Thursdays on Delhi, you can travel to the outskirts of the city (I had no idea where I was and nor did my taxi driver) and play late night Ultimate until 11:30pm, which meant that I wasn’t back to my hotel until around 1am. But I’ll traverse all of Delhi to play Ultimate every day of week.  However, it was another rude awakening of a Friday crossword, although that may not have been a result of tiredness. Despite the relatively easy long acrosses, I struggled mightily to manage a great deal of the fill. Mainly the NW was rife with complete unknowns, so I probably spent about 20 minutes in that region just tugging away. One of my main goals for this blog is not to make claims about what it’s reasonable for a crossworder to know, but I’ll just admit that I simply didn’t know some of these things. HART CRANE , modernist American poet influenc...

Time: 20:13 Average Thursday: 26:31 Best Thursday: 10:18 Only the mildest of hangovers this Thursday morning meant that eggs, coffee, and crossword were just right for me, despite my utter failure to sleep past 6am. I quite enjoyed the AD BLOCK theme, in which four black squares needed to read as AD, affecting up to four answers each. It's fairly straightforward, but some surprisingly current answers made it feel pretty fresh. MANSPRE ( AD ) ("annoyance from a subway seatmate") over ( AD ) ULTING ("doing grown-up things, in modern lingo") are absolutely in regular usage among people I know. And I've come to think of myself as ( AD ) ORKABLE ("endearingly awkward, in slang"), which may or not be true. Really, just a BUTTLO ( AD ) of theme answers, most of which worked for me. Once the theme clicked, the puzzle mostly cruised along, despite some not overly enjoyable fill such as AUST ("neighbor of N.Z.") and B.M.O.C. ("Dorm V...

Time: 18:10 Average Wednesday: 17:53 Best Wednesday: 7:24 While I solved this one over another fairly quiet breakfast, I'm writing my review after a day of far too much human interaction. This one played on the difficult side for me, mostly due to a couple short answers and abbreviations that eluded me along with a theme that I found tiresome: Question mark clues leading to anagrams of cities along with the city names. Once I figured it out, the theme helped me parse HASTEN ATHENS , but most of the rest had already been rather grudgingly filled in. I just this second figured out why the clue "Yellow belly?" yields ELS . This may be my least favorite clue type, but it's because the word "yellow" has two L's ( ELS ) in its middle or, if you will (I won't), belly. Ugh. The fact that it crossed NEBR for "Big Ten school: Abbr." meant that I was just running the alphabet until I dropped that E in there and got the congratulatory note. I...

Time: 8:31 In terms of crossword influences, I have to put Liz Gorski’s brilliant Crossword Nation near the top of the list. If you’re looking for a weekly low-difficulty crossword that is consistently better than The NY Times Tuesday Crossword, look no further. My blog could just as easily be a Liz Gorski fan site. She’s also a regular contributor to the New Yorker’s crosswords these days. In addition to constructing lively grids with peppy themes, Liz tends to share tidbits about how she went about constructing her crosswords and often mentions her starting point, which is beyond fascinating to me. The emails that deliver the Tuesday crosswords are probably my main influence in autobiographical crossword blogging.  This week’s “High Stakes” stemmed from listening to T-BONE WALKER ’s “Stormy Monday.” As I’m sure you’ll glean, the theme features four steak types that are high, as in the top part of four down answers, the other three being SALISBURY PLAIN , SKIRT LEN...

Time:8:49 Average Tuesday: 13:58 Best Tuesday: 6:10 I’m generally uninspired by themes involving circled letters that, when you take the moment to inspect, end up being, ya know, something. Even once I’ve recognized the theme, it’s quite rare that it has any effect on the solve. In this case, the theme revealer was BACK CHANNEL (“Covert means of communication”) and, look at that, the circled letters spell out famous TV channels, but backwards. Once again, I didn’t think about it while solving, but I’ll give some praise to the constructor for managing to keep tricky sets of letters in order. It can’t have been that easy to find NNC, OBH, XOF, CBA, and SBC in sequence, so kudos for keeping them all together.  I’ve never seen SEERESS before. I suppose it’s plausible for a female seer, but that’s a negative in terms of actual usage.  Even though I just recently watched “Battle of the Sexes,” I couldn’t recall BOBBY RIGGS ’ name; I needed almost all of the cro...

Time: 6:14 Average Monday: 8:53 Best Monday: 4:51 First Name + First Name = Someone else’s First and Last Name. As themes go, I’m not sure it gets any more straightforward. I like quite a few of the names involved, especially STEVE MARTIN and JAMES TAYLOR . My dad told me growing up that he wrote “Sweet Baby James” for me and I believed him for an embarrassingly long time and I still kind of believe it in my heart.  I can never remember how to spell Elaine BENES and had an I as the fourth letter, which cost me a few seconds.  Outside of the fairly boring theme, I’d say this is exactly what one should expect from a Monday puzzle. It’s easy and hums right along. There really isn’t any garbage fill beyond some overused 3 letter words like TKO , SLO , and SAX . Those are reasonable. Also, AERATE seems to be making an awful lot of appearances lately. I’m not crazy about the low-grade cleverness of “where a mole shouldn’t be, in brief” for CIA , but maybe t...

Time: 30:41 Average Sunday: 51:18 Best Sunday: 21:55 I'll take Sunday mornings like this as often as they want to come. I slept through the night all the way to 8am and then got a breakfast of eggs, hash browns, and dragon fruit while sipping decent coffee and cruising through the crossword. OK, the crossword itself was fine, but I'll take THE US OPEN theme, even if there wasn't much in the way of exciting cluing. After breakfast, I took in the Delhi sites, including Jama Masjid , India Gate , and Humayun's Tomb . So, the morning was probably more exciting than the crossword. After I post this, I'm off to check out the Delhi Ultimate team Stray Dogs in Sweaters . There's really not much to say on the theme of this crossword. There's a lot of tennis stuff here, none of it particularly electrifying. Also, the circled letters spell out "ball," which you'll need several of to play tennis. So, there's that. Might need a couple ra...

Time: 01:06:06 Average Saturday: 40:34 Best Saturday: 20:09 I was pretty scared about this one as I crossed the one-hour mark. Fortunately, I had a four drive from Mumbai to Pune, a drive that supposedly takes two hours but apparently speed limits are actually enforced along the highway these days. The jolt of hitting a pothole, getting a flat tire, and having to switch cars apparently woke up my brain and I finished the last quarter of the crossword in a few minutes.   I probably should not have struggled as much as I did, so perhaps I can blame waking up at 5am (and I’m no longer jet lagged; just regular tired) for some of these extra minutes. I was able to plop down the total gimme early on, ACE OF BASE , for their “1993 #2 hit “All That She Wants.” Maybe that will be harder for non-90s kids.  The western portion of the grid would have been easy except for the “Program-closing command on a PC,” into which I kept trying to cram CTRL+X and then, when BB...

Time: 45:50 Average Friday: 29:08 Best Friday: 10:21 This one was a nightmare for me. Generally speaking, I enjoy the triple stacks at the top and bottom of a tricky Friday puzzle, but the fill on this one drew a lot of blanks for me, which meant that I struggled to get traction. However, by far the worst for me was that little bit in the west, where Correo AEREO (I guess it’s a Seattle band that plays traditional Latin Music?) and PACA (a South American rodent; I didn’t know "Agouti" either). SAPOR eventually got me there as a word that I could vaguely recall as something to do with taste. Yikes. Finally, I was scanning the puzzle for that last mistake for about 10 minutes because I felt fine about REFRIGERATedCAR and, nope, I don’t know Grammy winner Chris REA either and eLMSTEAD sounds about as plausible as OLMSTEAD (sorry, Emily, if you read this). I also had “hunGrY eyes” for a long time before ending on GOOGLY  eyes, which I enjoy just as much.   A...

Time:36:52 Average Thursday: 26:37 Best Thursday: 10:18 I'll take a certain amount of satisfaction in this one despite my poor time because I'm sure that this is precisely the puzzle that I would have not have finished a year ago. Rebus squares of an unknown quantity, undefined spaces, and different words present a definite challenge to a novice like me. A friend of mine recently asked how I knew when there were rebus squares and I just said that after you've done enough crosswords, you just start to sense when something's wrong. That takes doing multiple crosswords everyday for a year or so, at least. This CROP ROTATION  theme is enjoyable and well-executed. As you can see above, we have three rebus squares crops (rye, rice, corn) that cause the answers to make a ninety degree turn. Rice was probably the simplest, with ELECTRIC EEL   just begging to be plopped in 3-down but not fitting. 46-Across' vague STORY EDITOR  was trickier, especially since it requi...

Time: 12:06 Average Wednesday: 17:53 Best Wednesday: 7:24 Sometimes I wonder if the frequent crossword appearances of Enos Slaughter are just subtle jabs at Boston Red Sox fans coming from New York. But, as usual, it's probably just the letters. I felt like I struggled with this one even though my time fell about where it usually does on a Wednesday. Perhaps it was the number of apparently complete unknowns to me that ended up being fairly inferrable. Omnia vincit amor , which is "love conquers all" as it turns out, drew a blank because I just don't really Latin at all, but hey, I recognize amor  as a thing. Likewise "Hi and Lois," which is a comic strip I've never read because I don't think it was in the Boston Globe when I was growing up, features a pooch named, again inferrably enough, dawg . STK ? Stocks, I guess. OK. Meanwhile, Gallo  (I don't really Wine so much either) and  alar  (Daminozide, which is the stuff that makes apples...

Time: 9:01 Tuesday Average: 14:01 Tuesday Best: 6:10 Submitted for your perusal , an ordinary crossword, with a not so ordinary Darwin evolution theme. Obviously, that's to be read in your best Rod Serling voice, since the word perusal is always for Twilight Zone intros in my mind. The theme is quite straightforward, with the circled letters "evolving" toward Darwin, starting strong with Tenacious D and Da Ali G Show and onward to Bobby Darin . For whatever reason, Steely Dan always seems rather over-represented in crosswords. I wonder if it will bother anyone that the letters evolve in almost left to right order, but not quite. If they were going with Garfield, couldn't Jon  have been the star of the Garfield Minus Garfield comic strip? Or would that not have gone over well in a paper that, I assume, is still running Garfield strips for some reason? I've been eating quite a bit of biryani  since arriving in India, including last night waiting for a d...

Time: 6:25 Monday Average: 8:54 Best Monday: 4:51 Hey, it's a Peter Gordon joint! If you told me a year ago that I'd have a top 5 list of crossword constructors, I probably would have laughed at you. Usually, Peter Gordon is crushing my crossword dreams on a near weekly basis over at Fireball Crosswords . So, it's nice to have him bringing his talents to a Monday crossword. If this wasn't a NY Times Crossword, I'm sure he would have clued phat  a bit more playfully than "Excellent, informally." Maybe he'd mention that nobody has said that word in that way without irony in, oh say, 20 years? Unless I'm not up on my revived slang (very likely). The theme is straightforward enough; I suppose you could say something like Capital Dishes. Not much more to say on that, other than that London Broil  calls to mind only school cafeterias. Is there a more enjoyable version out there? I don't think I'll ever order it. Happy to see infield fl...

Time: 36:03 Average Sunday: 51:38 Best Sunday: 21:55 There are several realms of trivia that regularly appear in crosswords that I simply pass on and hope that I can eventually piece together from overheard conversations or just general crossword familiarity. One of those realms is college sports. When I see "the Bears of the Big 12 Conference," I just skip right to the next clue and hope I can eventually make sense of something. In this case, it took only BAY to get me to say, " Baylor ! That's a college!" That's about as well as that could have gone. There's a lot of 3-letter garbage in here that makes for a rather lifeless outing. Ast crossing asp right by ape in one corner and a three-stack of pep , esl , and nee ... it's not exactly scintillating crossword fare. But I don't want to be a bitter crossword blogger. I'm still new enough that finishing a Sunday on my own gives me a little thrill. I don't assume I'll grasp the...

Time: 20:09 Average Saturday: 20:09 Best Saturday: 40:00 Morning Brain may well be Crossword Brain. Following a long day of travel from Kolkata to Delhi to Jaipur, I had my night #3 of jet lag, which in my experience is the worst one. I was up again at 5am and waiting for that 6:30am breakfast to open and another hour for the Saturday crossword to be available. And yet, somehow, over a leisurely breakfast with what felt like a barely functioning brain, I managed my best Saturday ever, apparently. It may well have just not been a difficult Saturday, but I'm still happy with how my brain functioned. One of these days I'll screenshot just how few answers I manage to place on my first run-through of an average Saturday. I think maybe I had Joe , Ang , and the Northeast, where Jon Hamm had me chuckling to myself, " I've been Jon Hamm'd ." I expect my Savannah kin may well disown me when I say that I needed every single cross for  skipjack ; neither the typ...

Time: 39:20 Average Friday: 28:53 Best Friday: 10:21 I'll have to confess that I've been dreading Friday and Saturday for this week. It's my first week blogging as if I know crosswords and throw in some jet lag and I figured there just couldn't be any guarantees I could get this one done. This puzzle had enough total unknowns for me to give me a good scare, not to mention a time well above my Friday average, but the final tile to fall came with my screaming objection to " sliest " with an "i." That just looks terrible and probably cost me a solid 5 minutes of checking every other tile for plausibility. Of course, it would have to cross sagitta , which wikipedia tells me "should not be confused with the significantly larger constellation Sagittarius." So, thank you for that. As long as we're crossing sagitta, I tried Perri Clark, Kerri Clark, Jerri Clark.... and on and on before finally landing Terri Clark. I also scanned th...

Time: 21:05 Average Thursday: 26:28 Best Thursday: 10:18 I closed this one out with the disappointing realization that "Time T-Rex" is not a "bygone sci-fi series." That cross along with the Ammeter/Arne were the killers for me. OK, and I really didn't enjoy Osage County. Most of the rest of my time was spent pleasantly recalling Robert De Niro films. I'm sure it must have been frustrating that The Godfather Part II doesn't fit in a standard size crossword. The constructor (Alan Arbesfeld) fit a lot of the greats in. And also The Fan, I guess. Comedy Club  was forced in as a themer by way of the immediately forgotten The Comedian . Couldn't we have gotten "Heat" in there somewhere? So close with teat . A crossword with both " at it " and " is in " should probably undergo some editing. On the other hand, Riga  will always make me happy. I spent Noel alone there in 2002 and I have fond memories of wandering a ci...

Time: 15:15 Average Wednesday: 17:57 Best Wednesday: 7:24 Following a mad scramble through the Newark Airport to catch my flight to Delhi, I collapsed into my seat and compulsively refreshed the NY Times Crossword app until Wednesday's puzzle appeared. So, I suppose my crossword state was one of gradually diminishing anxiety, which itself is no small part of why I do crosswords in the first place. Of course, a typo delaying my puzzle completion momentarily revived that anxiety (I inexplicably had DOJ and JETS at the bottom, which looked fine when you don't remember the clues). I needed every cross for USMA , because I was apparently content just knowing it as West Point. I'll take that bit of knowledge. Bebe Neuwirth was unknown to me, but as I'm learning now that I'm back to internet, hey, it's Lilith from Cheers! And Frasier, I suppose.  I just watched an episode of Cheers with the cold open of Lilith getting her fist stuck in her mouth. I didn...

Time: 6:22 Average Tuesday: 14:05 Best Tuesday: 6:10  I'm currently sitting in a bar in Indianapolis Airport having already been delayed one full day on my flight to India and now sitting out having been bumped to an earlier flight and not told about it, racing to the airport only to find that said flight had been delayed back to the original time, and now just having a well-deserved beer. But this isn't a United-bashing blog yet. I just figured that anxious, angry, and uncertain is the correct state for launching a new blogging era. On the other hand, I'm starting out with a near record Tuesday, despite confidently plopping in BLT at 1-across only to find that I had misplaced that particular three letter sandwich. "Lima's home" set me straight fairly quickly. I was excited to see a clue about the Stooges, only to find that I'd been fooled again and the clue was not about Iggy Pop at all. Rather, I don't think it was. I'll confess that I...