Words: 8 (4×4)
Average Length: 4.00
When I posted the first To and Fro puzzle a couple of weeks ago, I kvetched at length about what a construction challenge it was. Then my second attempt came together pretty quickly, though I did spend an hour or so trying to improve 1D – to no avail, as you’ll see. Perhaps 4D will make up for it.
Words: 77 (13×17)
Average Length: 5.06
This is my 500th puzzle since starting this blog in April 2021! Two hundred eighty-four of those have been full-sized (15×15 or larger): 132 themeless and 152 themed. One hundred forty-two have been minis (including 34 Mostly Musical Minis and 4 Cryptics), and the remaining 74 have been midis. I’ve had 31,000 visitors (72,000 views) from over 100 countries. My heartfelt thanks to all of you!
This is my first full-sized puzzle that isn’t symmetrical – I figure once every 500 puzzles or so that’s OK, so don’t rat me out to the crossword cops! As with many of my themed puzzles, this one is food-focused (my second-most fertile source of inspiration after music). The four seeds, 36A, 54A, 13D, and 32D, are all inspired/ridiculous food-related puns, and it a lot of the fill concerns food as well. I must have been feeling a bit peckish while constructing, not to mention puckish while cluing!
Again, thanks so much for solving! I have many more visitors each week than I do subscribers, so if you like my puzzles please follow my site – my understanding is that having more followers enhances search visibility, but as far as I know, SEO could stand for Sorcerers, Enchantments, and Oracles.
Words: 8 (4×4)
Average Length: 3.75
On an hours-per-square basis, this must have been the most time-consuming puzzle I’ve ever constructed. Its lineage stretches back for months. Early last winter, I decided it’d be cool to design a puzzle where each entry formed a different, valid word either forward and backward or up and down, as relevant.
I began by trying to make a 5×5 grid work, but got nowhere slowly. Then I set my sights at a 4×4 puzzle. Because I expected this to be a trivial exercise, I took on certain constraints: no foreign words, no acronyms, no abbreviations. One by one, I dropped each of these and decided a 4×4 grid with no black squares would be fine.
That limitation, too, turned out to be effectively insurmountable. I did come up with a draft that worked, except that one of the down entries, when read in the upward direction, was just too obscure to include. And so, many months later, I give you this puzzle, black square and all.
Before finally giving you the links, I need to thank Jeanne Breen, fellow cruciverbalist and baseball fanatic who took my unintentionally opaque attempt at an explanatory note and turned it into readily understandable prose. If you enjoy creative, varied, entertaining word games, you owe it to yourself to follow Jeanne’s blog, In Pursuit of Puzzles.
Words: 72
Average Length: 5.14
This is a thoroughly reworked version of the themed puzzle I decided not to post last week. How reworked? I kept the four theme answers, chose a new revealer and title, and scrapped everything else. Enjoy!
Words: 18 (7×7)
Average Length: 5.00
I just finished a fascinating (to me at least) book about the relationship between Bob Dylan and The Beatles, “Where the Music Had To Go,” by Jim Windolf. At one point, the book discussesthe Dylan song that’s in 8A, which is one of my favorites of his. I think the first verse is among the most evocative passages he ever wrote:
Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks
When you’re tryin’ to be so quiet
We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin’ you to defy it
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of [redacted] that conquer my mind
Later in the song, the lyrics become (to me, at least) impenetrable, and that’s where the title of this puzzle comes from:
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say, “Jeez, I can’t find my knees”
Come back Saturday for a full-size themed puzzle titled “What’s the Big Idea?”
Words: 76 (14×16)
Average Length: 4.79
I’d had the idea for this puzzle for ages, but the construction turned into more of a challenge than I expected. I even had an entirely different puzzle with the same theme ready to go, but I wasn’t happy with it and decided to start over.
I’m a sucker for unusual time signatures, and 11D fits the bill: it’s one of only two rock songs I know of that’s predominantly in 7/4. (The other is “Solsbury Hill,” by Peter Gabriel; the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” alternates between 7/4 and 4/4.)
19A is something my mother used to say. She had other precipitation-related expressions as well: if it was raining while the sun was shining, she’d say “las brujas bailan” – “the witches are dancing” – an expression she picked up during her childhood in Puerto Rico.
Jeff's Puzzles