Words: 44 (11×11)
Average Length: 4.73
Today’s puzzle focuses on stuff I learned or saw on my recent safari. I hope you enjoy it!
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Tag: Medium Difficulty
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More Anagrams on the Side
Words: 62 (17×11)
Average Length: 5.03
After I posted “I’ll Have Anagrams on the Side” a few weeks ago, I began wondering how many anagrams of a single word I could reasonably include in a similar puzzle. The answer, it turns out, is five.
In today’s puzzle, the five edge answers in the top half of the puzzle are anagrams of one another. Likewise, the five edge answers in the bottom half of the puzzle are anagrams of one another. The clues for the five edge answers in the top half are presented in random order at 1 Across; likewise, the clues for the five edge answers in the bottom half are presented in random order at 33 Down. Solvers must determine which version of the anagram goes in which answer.
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I just returned from a terrific trip through East Africa. I’m including links below to my blog posts about the trip, which are filled with pictures and hopefully interesting commentary. Please check them out if you’re interested!
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I’ll Have Anagrams on the Side
Words: 78
Average Length: 4.79
Word nerd that I am, I love anagrams. So much so, in fact, that I decided that each edge of this puzzle should be populated by three anagrams. The first answer of each triplet has three clues; the solver has to determine which clue applies to which member of the triplet. (I think it’s actually easier to do than to explain, but just in case it’s not, I toned down the difficulty level for the rest of the fill.)
Many thanks to Jeanne Breen (find her wonderful word puzzles on her blog, In Pursuit of Puzzles) for taking a look at an earlier draft and assuring me the concept is not too annoying!
I leave tomorrow for 17 days in Africa: two days in Addis Ababa followed by a two week safari with Odysseys Unlimited through the major nature preserves in Kenya and Tanzania. I’m going to take a break from posting puzzles until I return, but in the meantime, please follow my adventures on my travel blog, www.PuffinlessTravel.com. I promise there will be lots of photos of charismatic megafauna!
Words: 43 (11×11)
Average Length: 4.79
The idea for this puzzle came from a book I just finished, Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead, by Dennis McNally. There’s a particular song (8 Down) that the Dead covered in live performances more than 500 times, and I thought the title of the song lent itself to a midi grid.
Alas, the only way I could make the concept work was for the first seed entry (1 Across) to be an obscure French artist. I’d never heard of him, and I’d guess that very few of you have either. But the crosses should help with 1 Across, and once the concept becomes apparent, the answer should fall into place easily. (To help the concept become apparent, the online version includes some shaded cells, but the circles should work just as well, if less colorfully.)
There’s an additional hint in the solving note, which references my original entry at 1 Across – a very similar word that’s a bit more widely known but spoiled the purity of the concept.
Categories
On Balance
Words: 40 (11×11)
Average Length: 5.05
The seeds for today’s puzzle were 1 Across and 6 Across, after which I had fun playing around with different uses of “scale.” I’m also happy to include my one of my very favorite female rock singers at 14 Across. Here’s a video of her singing a great John Prine song, “Angel from Montgomery.”
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Trainspotting
Words: 75
Average Length: 4.85
Today’s puzzle is straightforward, so I’ll devote the write-up to two musical links. The first, “Girlfriend Is Better” (see 17 Across) is from the Talking Heads. I saw the movie in 17 Across half a dozen times after it came out. The second, Chick Corea’s brilliant “Spain,” features Bill Watrous on 3 Down, along with Hubert Laws on flute, George Benson on guitar, Stanley Clarke on bass, Lenny White on drums, and Corea on keyboards. Please listen to the whole thing – if you’re like me, it’ll energize you face for hours – but definitely check out Watrous’s solo (its starts at 2:42) if you want to be amazed at what can be done with a 3 Down.
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To and Fro 2
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.
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P(f)un With Food
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.
Categories
To and Fro
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.
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