Words: 74 (17×13)
Average Length: 4.95
Difficulty: Somewhere between yacht rock and pop punk
Surely, you thought (hoped), Jeff has run out of musical puns. Um, no. This one bears some thematic resemblance to Rock of Aging (available here), but is less focused on decrepitude and more on just plain brand extension. Enjoy, share, and come back next Sunday!
Words: 78
Average: 4.78
Difficulty: “All difficulties are easy when they are known” (W. Shakespeare, Measure for Measure)
Yesterday was 62 and sunny; now it’s 26 and snowing. Such is mid-March in the DC area. Mid-March on JeffsPuzzles features a climate-independent, Ides-themed puzzle, so lend me your ears, or at least your pencils/pens/phones/laptops/whatever, and let the Ides march.
Words: 78
Average Length: 4.79
Difficulty: For those with naturally gray/silver/white/nonexistent hair, like sliding down a snowy hill. For those without such badges of maturity, like trying to escape a leopard seal.
Having just returned from Antarctica, I am compelled to post a penguin-related puzzle. This one definitely and unapologetically skews (Skuas?) old, but I come by that naturally. Antarctica was spectacular, at least until I and around 30 other passengers and crew on our expedition ship tested positive for COVID and spent a week quarantined in remotest Tierra Del Fuego. I’m happy to say I’m now home and healthy.
Apologies for the technical glitch with last Sunday’s puzzle (“Cupid Is As Cupid Does”) – there was only the most tenuous Internet service in the Drake Passage, and apparently the Dropbox links didn’t copy, which is why I reposted it from dry land on Tuesday.
Words: 78
Average Length: 4.92
Difficulty: Like aging gracefully – it can be done but takes some commitment
There’s been a lot of news recently about musicians selling their catalogs for hundreds of millions of dollars. But there’s another way for chronologically advanced rockers to monetize their hits – adapt them to tout cures for various afflictions of the aging. Such as, you may ask? Solve and find out!
Words: 68
Average Length: 5.51
Difficulty: Like one of those mini golf holes where you need to hit the ball up a slope without letting it go down the other side. Kinda hard, but doable.
This one’s friendly enough, I think. A little geometry, some tennis, a couple of expressions of distaste, one of my favorite childhood toys, and quick nods to the objectively best Steely Dan album and a terrific book by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Please enjoy and pass it along. Next week (Feb. 6), look for a themed puzzle built around some rock classics retitled by their aging performers.
Words: 74
Average Length: 4.89
Difficulty: Like deciding what to wear to a dinner with friends who always get spiffed up when they go out, even though you prefer jeans and a sweatshirt
Disclaimer 1: I had never heard of 17 Across until I saw a news story about his passing, yet he was someone whom style mavens consider a giant in the field. I’d been mulling over possible theme entries for a puzzle with 57 Across as a revealer but tabled the idea because I couldn’t come up with a decent grid-spanner to place symmetrically to the revealer. I watched the news story with interest and then realized that not only is the subject’s full name 15 letters long, but he was a towering 6’6” tall. Problem solved, puzzle created!
Disclaimer 2: I have no business constructing a crossword about style. Buried deep in my files, securely under lock and key, is a photo of me in 1976 conducting our high school wind ensemble. I had near-shoulder length bushy hair and was wearing a very loud plaid sports jacket, a tie that must have been 5 inches wide, and orangy-reddish platform shoes. Yes, it was the ‘70s, but still ….
Coming up next (Jan. 29), a moderately challenging themeless.
Words: 66
Average Length: 5.42
Difficulty: Surmountable with a stepladder
After last week’s end-of-the-civilized-world vibe, this week’s grid is kinder, gentler, and a comparative ray of sunshine. Please enjoy!
I figure crossword solvers generally like to read, so I’m linking below to lists of the best fiction and non-fiction books I read in 2021. I’m always happy to get book recommendations, so let me know if you’ve got any, particularly if they’re not well-known.
Words: 70
Average Length: 5.54
Difficulty: Quartzish on the Mohs scale?
I hope you all had a wonderful time last week with friends and family. The seed for this grid was 14 Across, where my brother and I will be going in February! (Oh, the difficulty rating thing: numbers are falsely precise, I think. Henceforth I will come up with other ways of estimating the sweat of your collective brows.) Please enjoy, pass along a link to the puzzle or my site, and be well!
Word Count: 69 (14×15 grid)
Average Length: 5.04
Difficulty: 2 out of 5
Here’s an easy holiday puzzle for y’all. To mark the 4th, I thought I’d focus on “American” music (gee, that’s a surprise, says anyone who’s solved one of my puzzles). I put “American” in quotes because the music we play, listen to, and create is a hodgepodge, an olio if you will (yes, you can use the word outside of crosswords) of indigenous, European, African, Latin American, and Asian influences. We harmonize our disparate heritages in our music.
In brainstorming – never ideating, which is a horrible word and should be banned from crosswords despite its friendly orthography – possible theme answers, I found the three here. Not only are they symmetrical; they illustrate my “olio point” in an appropriately tinted manner.
Finally, one specific comment on the puzzle: Given the theme, I had to give a shout out to Ms. Russell in 50D, as the co-star (with husband Matthew Rhys) of one of the greatest shows in television history.
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