The Further Adventures of Jim Horne

Angel speed

Jeff Chen and I have been doing some work on XWord Info to improve the performance of the site, and now many of the pages load 10 times faster than they did before. This makes it easier to, for example, click the Next and Previous links to jump quickly from puzzle to puzzle.

If you donated at the Angel level, you get an even greater speed increase because we don't show ads for you on any of the most used pages. Whether you're looking at the home page, viewing puzzle solutions or the calendar or thumbnail lists, working on acrostics, or using our Finder page, you now get a slicker ad-free experience. It's one of the nice perqs of being an Angel. (Yes, I know Americans spell it "perk" but it's short for perquisite, so I like the Canadian spelling.)

Early next year, we're going to be rolling out a major new feature of interest to crossword constructors and it's only available to Angels, that is, to customers who donated at the $50 level or above. If you are an Angel, make sure you're getting proper credit. Angels get a special note at the top right of the home page. If you don't see one and you should, please let us know.

If you upgrade to an Angel level by making an early donation, you'll be an Angel for the entire time of your current subscription plus an additional year, so that's a hell of an Angel deal.

 

XWord Info Survey Results

We ran an anonymous survey in early January to find out what people really thought about XWord Info. Some of what we learned was predictable, some was surprising, some was baffling. We got specific suggestions about what we could do better (a couple have already been implemented) and we learned some things about the crossword community along the way.

I need to start with the usual caveat: this was not a statistically valid survey because participants were not selected randomly. They volunteered to offer their opinions. Those who weren’t interested never came to the site or found a link.

It’s not surprising, then, that those who chose to participate were overwhelmingly positive. 74% were extremely satisfied and another 18% were somewhat satisfied. Two participants declared that they were extremely dissatisfied but neither explained. Two-thirds of the respondents solved at least one puzzle a day. Perhaps surprisingly, the more people constructed, the less they solved.

The single most popular feature on the site is one that appears only occasionally – commentary from Will Shortz. Other high-scoring features were data organized by constructor, stats about record-setting puzzles, Jeff Chen’s commentary, and our Finder Page. (We knew the Finder was popular. It’s been used well over a million times already!) The Grid Art and Visual Puzzles pages are also widely loved.

The least popular feature is the Acrostic solver, although we know that solvers who use it are passionate about it. The rest of the Variety puzzles are nearly as unpopular. This continues to surprise me because I think that the cryptics and diagramlesses in particular are gems.

Jeff’s comments rated highly overall but had some low votes too. Some people though he was either “a buzz kill because he was too nitpicky” or “not enough like Rex” to be entertaining. Opinions also diverged on Jeff’s Puzzle of the Week with most liking it but some not. Personally, I think Jeff's comments are the best part of the website.

On the question of payments, the most common (and most adamant) comment was that everything should be free. Why not? Most constructors would consider paying for features that could help them create better puzzles.

As often happens in surveys, the most valuable feedback comes in what are called the verbatims, the free-form comments you type in. Here are some with our responses:

• It’s too hard to find, say, 15-letter words that contain a certain string of letters inside. DONE! You can now specify the length of words you want returned, so for example, you can find all 10-letter words that contain CAT by searching for *CAT* and specifying length 10. I don’t know why we didn’t think of this before.
• The “Constructors by Year” page would be easier to read if the order of the years was reversed. DONE!
• The home page is too confusing. We heard this a lot. A professional designer did the original design but our home page has now grown into a sea of hyperlinks that would scare anyone off. We’ll have to figure out what to do about that. One commenter complained that unlike Cruciverb's friendly user interface, ours felt too slick and "professional." We're not sure what to do about that.
• It should be possible to search for puzzles that contain a list of words, say *SLEEPY*, *DOPEY*, *DOC*, etc. to see if a theme has been used before. Interesting idea! This could never be 100% accurate but we’ll think about how to provide that functionality.
• Allow users to comment on Jeff’s blog posts. We don’t plan to do this. It turns out, though, that there are lots of other places on the web to comment about puzzles.
• XWord Info should come free with an NYT subscription. Not possible – we’re independent.
• Check for duplication of letter strings. I presume this means in uploaded puzzles. Good idea.
• Show number of times each answer word has appeared right on the Crossword page, that is, without having to click through each word. Probably won’t do that because it would clutter the page. That information is nicely available in one place when you click the Analyze button.
• Answers to Split Decisions and other PDF-only puzzles. We should do a better job linking to the NYT answers for these. We can’t add them to our database for analysis because parsing the PDFs is not simple, and answers that have no clues (like Split Decisions) are probably not so interesting.
• Create a page showing puzzles that have non-contiguous grids. Interesting idea.
• Improve the mobile experience. Yeah, our site works best with a mouse and keyboard. The crossword solver page and the Acrostics page both absolutely require them. Doing a great job for mobile is a lot of work and we’re unlikely to do this soon but it’s something we’ll consider. If you just want to check answers on your phone, www.xwordinfo.com/mobile/ works well.
• Link to Wiktionary or Wikipedia pages for Finder results. Another interesting idea. Did you notice that when you find a word or phrase in the Finder page, it links to a dictionary definition as well as to all the published clues for that word?
• More constructor photos! Solvers love to see what the constructors look like. If we’re missing yours, don’t be shy. Send something in. We can crop and edit and make you look your best.

We got so many responses that it’s going to take a while to sort through all the data, but those are the initial highlights. Most feedback was positive and many of the suggestions are helpful. One main learning is that we should have asked your opinion long ago. We wouldn't have spent so much time on features like pop-up grid tooltips when you hover over dates or Baseball Card views of constructors (nobody mentioned either in the survey) and concentrated more on Constructor features.

Thank you so much to everyone who participated.  Feel free to comment here, send us mail (link on home page) or if you prefer to be completely anonymous, you can still take the survey at www.xwordinfo.com/Survey.

Notable Puzzles of 2014

Every year I compile some observations about NYT puzzles from the past 12 months. As usual, I'll pick a Puzzle and Constructor of the Year, but not as usual, I'll end with some more wide-ranging general thoughts.

Note that all XWord Info links in blogs, including this one, bypass access checks so you can view all the pages I mention here whether or not you have an XWord Info account.

I begin each year with a list of puzzles that caught my eye.

Puzzles

Crossword people like all kinds of puzzles and this chopped-up grid by Alan Derkazarian was a trip down memory lane for anyone who ever played Clue.

Speaking of strange grids, Patrick Berry gave us one of the weirder looking ones I've seen in this outstanding crossword.

I was very taken with Lynn Lempel's ONE AND ALL grid.

Daniel A. Finan relied on the relative positions of answers in this clever puzzle. Later in the year, Mary Lou Guizzo and Jeff Chen went a different direction and crossed answers.

If you're old enough to remember Sgt. Pepper, the phrase "It was 50 years ago today" strikes a chord, and to play that chord, you need a guitar. Charles Deber provides one in this Beatles tribute.

Ruth Margolin added IST to common phrases in a way that made me laugh, and we haven't heard from her since that NYT debut.

Bruce Haight and Peter A. Collins told us to go fly a kite.

I really liked this parking lot full of cars from Liz Gorski. Jeff Chen and I had a big discussion about this puzzle which you can read about by clicking through and then expanding Jeff's notes. To most constructors, circles just highlight squares. To Liz, they're visual elements to exploit, in this case turning into wheels. She transformed them into bubbles back in 2009.

David Steinberg gave us a zesty grid shaped like a Z, and full of Zs.

Anna Schechtman constructed an Ode to the Octothorpe which absolutely delighted me. Plus, TWITTERHASHTAG is awesome.

This was a banner year for Acrostics with several I loved. Here's one to try if you're not caught up.

Patrick Berry came up with an original gimmick in this standout strikeout puzzle.

This questionable grid by Timothy Polin honored an old game show, but this Gorski Grid makes more cents.

In his comments here, Jeff Chen tries to quantify what makes Patrick Berry's puzzles so good.

I always appreciate musical crosswords and this one had me singing out loud, and in one of the best Aha! moments of the year, David Phillips invited us to PAINT IT BLACK.

Paula Gamache wrote my favorite diagramless of the year. I know, I know, you're too busy speed-solving to work these, but you really ought to try them. Worst case, open them up in Across Lite and solve them as regular crosswords.

Another great Aha! appeared shortly after. Mr. Polin was back, this time with a themed Saturday puzzle full of clues, none of which many any sense. This came close to being my Puzzle of the Year.

One of the best puzzles of September, this All-Encompassing crossword, didn't even get a Puzzle of the Week award. The lesson here is clear. If you want a POW, never ever collaborate with Jeff Chen. Those crosswords never win. This reduces the pool significantly because Jeff is becoming a big-time collaborator. Nearly half of his 35 NYT puzzles required help from someone else.

I like puns, so Celebrity Spoonerisms by Tony Orbach and Patrick Blindauer was a big winner for me.

Joe Krozel continues to amaze me. That man innovates in surprising new ways every time out. In this puzzle, the answer to 20 Down is spelled out in Morse Code. By reading the black squares! In a grid that still has the usual rotational crossword symmetry. Yikes. I loved his Fill-in-the-Blanks puzzle later in the year too.

We got a fun "uniclue" puzzle from Joel Fagliano. No more convenient Across and Down lists.

Patrick Blindauer created this year's contest, a six-part meta puzzle starting here. It was very satisfying when it all came together.

Non-square grids are becoming more common (there were 12 in 2014) but non-rectangular ones are rare in the NYT. David Woolf baked up a chocolate chip cookie.

Trip Payne helped us kill an extra Daylight Savings Time hour with this particularly tough 17x17 crossword.

Another of the best themeless puzzles of the year came from Peter Wentz. He is by far the Scrabbliest NYT constructor but you'd never guess from his smooth grids.

I like rhymes even more than puns. Surround Sound is an awesome title too.

Kevin G. Der and Ian Livengood combined to create this stellar themeless puzzle. As a bonus treat, Will Shortz chose this puzzle to do a clue-by-clue explanation of how he edits a crossword. If you ever want a submit a puzzle to the Times, this is worth careful reading.

Notable accomplishments

Bernice Gordon had a couple of puzzles published in 2014, both constructed after she turned 100. The first one was a solo, and the second was a collaboration with young David Steinberg.

There were three single-quad-stack puzzles and three double-quads (thumbs) in 2014, all by Martin Ashwood-Smith. Two of the six were collaborations.

We got a new record for most Schrödinger puzzles in one year with three. Is it a thing now, or just a fad?

Caleb Emmons gets the record for shortest answer word in my database. The clue for 65-Across in this puzzle is "___-square". The answer is T.

Constructors

Congratulations to the 5 women and 22 men who made their NYT debut in 2014. In order, they are Andrew Chaikin, Jared Banta, Michael Hawkins, Jeff Stillman, Dick Shlakman, Matthew E. Paronto, Ruth B. Margolin, Douglas Taillon, John E. Bennett, Mary Lou Guizzo, Jim Modney, Brandon Hensley, Alex Bajcz, Dan Margolis, Kameron Austin Collins, Heather Valadez, Luke Vaughn, Matt Fuchs, Howard Barkin, David Phillips, Katie Livengood, Sam Buchbinder, Gerry Wildenberg, Eric Sydney Phillips, Evans Clinchy, Kacey Walker and Dennis Ryall.

Puzzle and Constructor of the Year

At a time when so much new talent is coming into the world of crosswords and young indie constructors are becoming rock stars (well, within certain circles) I find myself drawn to the people who surprise and delight me with new voices. Constructor of the Year Tom McCoy is a name I can't wait to see on more bylines and his Colorful Characters is my Puzzle of the Year. I like all kinds of puzzles and when crosswords expand to find new ways to twist their logic, I'm usually excited. This one delighted me from beginning to end.

I didn't think until after I settled on my choice that maybe I just like colors. My very first Puzzle of the Year went to Francis Heaney's ingenious Flag Day crossword.

Final Thoughts

This is the last one of these annual posts I'm going to do so here are some more wide-ranging opinions you can argue about.

The best constructor currently working: I know the general consensus is that nobody tops Patrick Berry, but remember, this is always a subjective question. There is no algorithm that can definitively answer such a question. The fact that I always look forward to seeing Paula Gamache or Joe Krozel in a byline represents my own personal opinions. The fact that Elizabeth Gorski and I have similar musical interests colors my solving experience. It's hard for me to separate the fact that I like Jeff Chen from the fact that I enjoy his puzzles. Still, I'll take the dangerous step of actually naming the constructor I consider to be the best. It's Patrick Berry.

My favorite constructor of all time: XWord Info came into being largely because I started noticing that many of my favorite crosswords were all written by the same person, the great Manny Nosowsky. Or, here's an even better link: go to my favorite page on XWord Info, Across Lite files sorted by constructor, click N, scroll down to Manny's name, and pick a few at random to solve.

My favorite crossword puzzle of all time: When Patrick Berry's 2011 "Cross Word" Contest wrapped up, I called it my favorite ever, and I haven't changed my mind since.

The most amazing constructor I know nothing about: At XWord Info, we try to carefully track stats by constructor. This is not so simple. Constructor names get represented in different ways, and sometimes they change completely, but we do our best. We also do our best to combine stats to include Shortz Era, pre-Shortz, and Variety puzzles. Putting all that together, we created the Baseball Cards -- Most prolific constructors page. So who are the most prolific NYT constructors? Manny Nosowsky is at the top, right? Well, no. Remember Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon crank out an acrostic every fortnight on top of their other occasional contributions, so they're tied for number one. Nobody else is close.

Including pre-Shortz puzzles drops Manny to number 4 behind William Lutwiniak. I've found no information at all about Mr. Lutwiniak but he was a crossword construction monster. Right now, I have his count at 295, well ahead of Manny's 254, but the true answer is surely much higher. I only have pre-Shortz data back to 1966 (more is coming!) so it drops off during Lutwiniak's prime. Plus, most puzzles from 1966 to 1973 are by constructor Unknown. Surely some, and probably many of these are by him.

Here's something we do know about him. He loved pangrams. I realize pangrams are currently unfashionable in some circles but Lutwiniak was a pangram master. Take a look at this chart. He gets credit for 70 pangrams, beat out only by, you got it, constructor Unknown. I'm sure we can guess the authorship of most of those.

Keep in touch

I will have some future observations about the Business of Crosswords, and that ties into another upcoming post you already know about if you were an early subscriber to the XWord Info mailing list. (Yes, we have a mailing list, it's free, we promise no spam.) Jeff Chen who now runs XWord Info has lots of ideas about how we can help puzzle makers create crosswords, and maybe even help them make more money. I know, I know, you do it for the sake of the art.

Notable Puzzles of 2013

Each December I take a look back at the most memorable NYT crosswords of the previous 12 months and name my Puzzle and Person of the Year. Crosswords, unlike novels and short stories, are journeys we actively participate in, so here’s my annual travelogue. As usual we’ll start with a few puzzles that caught my eye.

Note: XWord Info links work from any blog including this one, even if you don’t have a subscription.

Puzzles

Elizabeth C. Gorski provided a treat for math geeks everywhere with this puzzle that celebrates magic squares.

Kevan Choset's clever WH__L OF FORTUN_ grid required us to BUY AN E in order to finish the puzzle.

Milo Beckman implored us to MIND THE GAP in this clever grid.

This themeless from David Quarfoot introduced JESUSFISH, at 1 Across no less, but more importantly marked the 8,000th NYT puzzle edited by Will Shortz, including 1,000 Variety puzzles. That’s a remarkable accomplishment. Congratulations, Mr. Shortz!

Ian Livengood and J.A.S.A. Crossword Class gave us this punctuated crossword. It shared an answer with one of my favorite clues of the year, Letter A in this acrostic

I really enjoyed this inquisitive collaboration between Barry Franklin and Sara Kaplan.

Raymond C. Young became the first constructor to squeeze a quadruple pangram into a standard 15x15 grid.

Corey Rubin’s LARGE PRINT grid caused a lot of extra work for software programmers.

Derek Bowman became the first constructor to triple-stack 16s.

Brendan Emmett Quigley and Elizabeth Donovan had us scribble outside the box in this puzzle that was easier for Canadians because they’re more likely to know Pierre Trudeau’s middle name.

This grid by David Levinson Wilk had an innovative use of circles in the grid. Click to read my note.

This color-mixing puzzle by Elizabeth C. Gorski was one of my favorites. It was great fun animating the mix of red and blue, and then seeing the Color Purple emerge on its own.

A little later, I got to animate this grid by Mel Rosen to demonstrate the two equally-valid central answers.

When this puzzle was published on June 26, the two co-constructors were aged 16 and 99 – a difference of 83 years. Thanks to David Steinberg’s Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project, we can now see far more of Bernice Gordon’s contributions to crosswords.

Overlapping I and S or I and C is a neat visual gimmick I’ve never seen before. I’m not sure it was completely successful but the idea is cool.

Speaking of unique, I’ve never seen anything like Patrick Blindauer’s DOUBLE FEATURE grid before either.

Sarah Keller doesn’t get the press that some of the flashier constructors do, but this year she quietly accumulated her 50th published NYT puzzle. She’s a solid puzzle maker.

Jeff Chen’s phrases that describe letters in words concept was clever. I particularly recall feeling smug when I sussed out this theme.

Ian Livengood won the first ever XWord Info POW award, marking the date that Jeff Chen truly took over XWord Info and made it his own.

John Farmer continued his string of innovative grid ideas with his Persons of Note theme. It’s a rebus puzzle where numbers in the Down answers have to be interpreted as the names of people on the corresponding American banknotes for the Across answers.

Damon Gulczynski created the fifth Shortz-era Schrödinger puzzle. While perhaps not as memorable as some of its quantum predecessors, it’s still a remarkable accomplishment.

Another high-concept idea came from famous puzzle maker Mike Selinker in this year’s contest puzzle, Letterboxes. Letter O’s had to be interpreted as braille bumps to spell the secret phrase.

Kevin Christian crammed a huge amount of theme entries into this tribute to the movie E. T.

Tom Pepper and Victor Barocas hid the numbers on their clock face. Solvers had to supply them to make the entries around the outside border make sense.

This themeless from Byron Walden was one of my most satisfying solves of the year.

Toe Tags is an awesome name for what turned out to be a terrific puzzle.

Jeff Chen said constructing Taken to Task was harder than pushing a boulder up a hill. After all that work, he colored all the nicely symmetric theme entries so you’d be sure to appreciate them.

Jean O’Conor fit a PESTO recipe into a 15x15 grid. Delightful!

I really like this visual GAS GAUGE grid from Peter A. Collins. Note the two unchecked squares, E and F for Empty and Full, on opposite sides of the ninth row.

BACK IN BLACK was a nifty trick that required reinterpreting four squares we usually don’t have to write in.

Patrick Berry casually demonstrated his complete mastery of crosswords once again with Two Outs. Each theme clue described two answers, with and without two circled letters.

A different subtraction idea came from David Steinberg with his ERASE RS puzzle.

Jeff Chen struck again with A Cut Above the Rest. You had to color in the theme squares at the top to make sense of the vertical theme answers below.

Heavy bars separating answer words are common in some other venues but George Barany and Michael Shteyman introduced them to NYT daily puzzles this year. Across Lite can’t handle grids like this so XWord Info provided a web-based solver page for online solvers who wanted to try the puzzle as intended. That puzzle also has another of my favorite clues of 2013: “Two- or four-seater, maybe”.

Unusual grids and words

Joe Krozel constructed the puzzle with the fewest blocks this year, as well as the one with the most. I particularly like the latter. He also broke the record for lowest word count, albeit by using lots of blocks.

Andrea Carla Michaels had a Monday pangram for the third year in a row, this time co-written with Michael Blake.

Four puzzles had unchecked squares including Patrick Merrell’s HI MOM.

Looking at the Stacks page on XWord Info, there were two grids this year with double quad-stacks, both by Martin Ashwood-Smith. There were four grids with single quad stacks, all by Martin Ashwood-Smith. I have no idea how he does it but I enjoy tackling these huge seas of white.

Joe Krozel’s 18-block grid has four sets of double stacks, and this puzzle by Mr. Krozel tied the record for most grid-spanning 15-letter entries: twelve!

Year 2013 saw records broken for most H’s, I’s, M’s, and V’s in a 15x15 grid.

Words introduced this year included CRYPTOZOOLOGIST, PAUL RYAN, FRENEMY, COSMO GIRL, HUNGRY HUNGRY HIPPOS, BACKHANDED COMPLIMENTS, MANUAL TRANSMISSION, FACEBOOK STALKING, CRONYISM, SUCKS TO BE YOU, POGO STICK, BOOMERANG EFFECT, SODIUM PENTOTHAL, and these three all from the same puzzle: ASHKENAZI, CALVIN AND HOBBES, and  DJANGO UNCHAINED.

Constructors

Congratulations to the 6 women and 31 men who made their NYT debut in 2013. In order, they are Bruce Haight, Jim Peredo, David Ben-Merre, Jaime Hutchison, Bruce Sutphin, J. R. Leopold, Daniel Landman, Adam Prince, Michael Wiesenberg, Steve Blais, Peter Broda, Severin T. Nelson, John Lieb, Elizabeth Donovan, Jean O'Conor, Kevin Christian, Mark Bickham, Richard F. Mausser, Robert Seminara, Tracy Bennett, H. David Goering, Jacob McDermott, Sue Keefer, Mangesh Ghogre, long-time puzzle maker Mike Selinker, Evan Birnholz, Amy Johnson, Jason Flinn, D. Scott Nichols, Andy Kravis, Alan Derkazarian, Mike Doran, Tom McCoy, David Woolf, Loren Muse Smith, Greg Johnson, and Jacob Stulberg.

The most prolific constructors again this year were Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon who, as usual, had an Acrostic published every fortnight, along with two Cryptics. Fred Piscop was the Variety runner-up with four Diagramless puzzles. Looking at daily puzzles, David Steinberg led with 15. Others in double digits were Ian Livengood with 12, Patrick Berry with 11, and Elizabeth C. Gorski, Joel Fagliano, and Jeff Chen with 10.

Long time constructors who dropped off the NYT grid in 2013 include Nancy Salomon, Robert H. Wolfe, Mark Diehl, Mike Nothnagel, Nancy Kavanaugh, Tony Orbach, and Natan Last.

Personal notes

Before I get to the awards, a few personal observations.

My post earlier this month on the state of crossword blogging struck a note with many readers. It generated about 30 insightful comments before the open comment period ended, and it also inspired more private correspondence than anything else I’ve ever written. Passionate mail flooded my inbox, some agreeing with me and some not. I’ve encouraged the best writers on all sides to consider publishing their thoughts. I don’t know if any will. Writing a daily blog is incredibly hard work. NYT crosswords are lucky to have so many points of view being expressed every day.

I may have mentioned this already but I have to once again thank Jeff Chen for taking over XWord Info. He not only kept it alive, he turned it into a must-visit site for crossword enthusiasts with his daily commentary.

Also, thank you to the NYT Puzzle Staff who continue to go out of their way to help both XWord Info and the Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project. None of this would be possible without ongoing help from Will Shortz, Ellen Ripstein, Deb Amlen, and the rest.

Ok, on to the awards!

Puzzle of the Year

This choice is often hard for me but this year, there’s one puzzle that clearly stands out. It’s the one that gave me the most pure Aha! joy when I solved it, the one I keep coming back to, the one I tell all my friends about. It’s more than a puzzle; it’s a magic trick published, appropriately, on Halloween.

The constructor David Kwong is a professional magician whose signature puzzle performance trick is mind blowing.

If you somehow missed it, try solving this crossword in Across Lite, or you can go straight to the Solution.

By the way, I’m not sure how many people noticed this but Mr. Kwong’s other puzzle this year included a reference to his amazing trick.

Constructor of the Year

There was also a clear 2013 winner for me in this category. I’ve been a fan of Elizabeth C. Gorski for a while but this year, she outdid herself. She’s my Constructor of the Year.

Her ten puzzles include the fantastic Magic Squares, the chocolate-themed My Treat, the beautifully clever Color Purple, the POOR to RICH word ladder for the lucky INSTANT WINNER, the ambitious Edginess (similar themes have been tried before but never on a big Sunday grid), her Lincoln Highway centennial tribute, the beautifully executed Alexander Pope quote, and a challenging themeless that introduced HARAJUKU GIRLS.

Even better, there were a couple of connect-the-dots puzzles, and they’re both lovely. In December we got to draw an angel in Good One! Note how the slight asymmetry gives an impression of fluttering motion in the wings. I like Fast One from June even more. There’s plenty of theme action and the final drawing is a thing of beauty. It might be the most successful connect-the-dots puzzle ever.

If you’re a fan too, there are plenty more Elizabeth Gorski NYT puzzles available for NYT Premium Puzzle subscribers to download in Across Lite format here. Click the G box and scroll down until you see her name.

Even better, check out her blog Crossword Nation where you can get a weekly subscription to brand new crosswords sent by email.

Notable Puzzles of 2012

Every December I compile some observations on the past year of NYT puzzles. Normally, I include my Puzzle of the Year. This time, it’s a group of puzzles, and a special Person of the Year.

Puzzles

Let’s start with some of the puzzles that caught my eye.

Dan Schmiedeler’s Three Musketeers puzzle confused many solvers. The Editors of the Kansas City Star were so befuddled that they published an apology for incorrect clues, not realizing they had to substitute ALL for ONE and ONE for ALL.

A very strong contender for puzzle of the year was State Annexation by Charles M. Deber. That crossword is also notable for having a seemingly trivial but serious enough error to require a published correction.

Lynn Lempel, whose SCUMBAG in 2006 caused much ado, goosed the crossword community again with her cheeky MID-ASS TOUCH this year. The sensitive souls at The New Yorker were scandalized.

Matt Ginsberg hid a BBC One television drama in this grid. Will Shortz included a note to indicate the presence of an Easter egg but it was still tricky to spot.

Jeff Chen really gets around. At least in this grid.

In-nuendos by Daniel A. Finan tripped people up but it’s a clever idea once you understand it.

I particularly like this Paula Gamache puzzle. The symmetry of the CROSS words is not pointed out anywhere but the attention to detail to pull it off was worth noting so I highlighted it on my site.

Another very strong puzzle-of-the-year candidate is this near-pangram by Patrick Berry. Every letter except the most common can be found in the grid.

Byron Walden’s State Quarters was so ambitious that experts from LitSoft (the Across Lite company) had to be called in to create the electronic version of the puzzle.

Xan Vongsathon’s Getting Around was the puzzle that generated the most confused email to me. People didn’t get it. Or they did and got to feel smug.

This special puzzle for math geeks included all 12 pentominoes hiding in the black squares.

The Yiddish answers in this grid are, appropriately, read right to left. We’re learning from the Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project that reversal gimmicks were very popular in the Maleska era.

Ben Pall's very non-standard grid caused the most work for me in XWord Info in order to display it properly.

This year’s contest, Bypassing Security, may not have been as spectacular as last year’s but it was a fun challenge.

I liked Joe DiPietro’s Bywords for its clever visual wordplay.

Constructors

Congratulations to the 4 women and 34 men who debuted as constructors this year. In order, they are Dan Schmiedeler, Michael Dewey, Francesco Trogu, Stu Ockman, Tom Pepper, James F. C. Burns, Dave Sarpola, Steven Riley, Gregory Philip Butler, Sean Dobbin, Michael David, Susan L. Stanislawski, Neville Fogarty, Guy Tabachnick, Jules P. Markey, Kevin Adamick, Kyle T. Dolan, Eric Williams, Derik Moore, John R. O'Brien, Caleb Emmons, Pawel Fludzinski, Jim Horne, Sam Ezersky, Rosemarie Dolan, Christopher Geach, Amanda Yesnowitz, Lou Borenstein, Kenneth Leeser, Barry Haldiman, Andrew Reynolds, John Guzzetta, Peter Koetters, Erik Agard, George Fitzgerald, Zhouqin Burnikel, Don Gagliardo, and Steve Savoy.

The most prolific constructor again this year was Patrick Berry whose 15 new puzzles brings his lifetime total to 169 NYT crosswords. One I especially liked was this Clintonian parsing of what the word IT means. Peter A. Collins had an even dozen, including this cute football grid, and Joe Krozel and Barry C. Silk were close behind with 11 each. Long-time constructors we didn’t see all year include two super-solvers: Trip Payne and Tyler Hinman.

Records

I can’t help it. I have a crossword database so I keep track of these things. Andrea Carla Michaels had a Monday pangram for the second year in a row. A record four grids had unchecked squares. Five, if you count this monstrous one by Ian Livengood. These three grids have no three-letter answers. Stu Ockman had the most eggs ever in one grid. An amazing 22 grids this year weren’t square. Seven puzzles were what I call nonlinear – answers go backwards or turn corners or do other odd tricks.

Constructors were hungry this year. The most popular answer word was ATE with EAT tied for second. Nearly 3,000 new words entered the database including ELIMANNING, OBAMACARE, and the recent Microsoft acquisition SKYPE, each of which has already been reused twice. Steve Riley blew away the old record for most Os in a grid.

It’s time to talk about Joe

The discussion of records so far has an obvious omission. Joe Krozel is not my Person of the Year but he could be. Let’s look at what he’s accomplished.

The most famous record in crosswords is the block (black square) count, and Joe set a new record with 17. In another puzzle, Joe tied Frank Longo's record for fewest answer words in a grid with 52.

Then there are the stacks. Three puzzles this year had quadruple-stacks of 15-letter words: one by Martin Ashwood-Smith, one by Joe, and then another by Martin.

And then, on December 29, the nearly unthinkable happened. The world’s first published quintuple stack appeared, created by Joe Krozel.

Every constructor tries to be creative. Everyone wants to push the limits. Joe does it like nobody else. Take a look at this collection of wacky grids. Like many pioneers, he’s largely unappreciated. He gets no love from the bloggers and many solvers dismiss his prowess as cheap tricks. He’s just showing off. (Guess what. That crossword I built with Jeff Chen? I was showing off.) Those asymmetric grids are cheating! (A concept, I confess, I just don’t understand.) He breaks all the rules. (That’s a bad thing? Besides, I have news. Crosswords are like jazz. There are no rules, only what editors think will delight.)

My favorite Joe Krozel puzzle this year was a rule breaker of a different sort. You’ve heard the one about I before E except after C, right? Not always. Joe fit in eight counter-examples with perfect symmetry.

Puzzles of the Year

I usually name a puzzle of the year but this time, like Joe, I’m cheating. It doesn’t happen every week but once again this year, my favorite solving experiences were often in the NYT Variety Puzzles. I love the Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon acrostics, and you get one every fortnight! You can try the most recent one here, even if you don’t have an XWord Info membership. It's a good one.

I’m not sure why the Cryptic puzzles in particular aren’t more popular. They’re full of the kinds of clues bloggers often comment on. Diagramless puzzles combine wordplay with logic in a way I find especially satisfying.

Why don’t they get the same attention as the daily puzzles when they’re often more fun? I suspect it has something to do with not being conducive to speed solving, but I’m not confident that theory is valid.

Seriously, give these a chance. If you have a NYT subscription, you already have access to hundreds of them. This page on XWord Info lists them in a nicely organized way. Click on the Across Lite links, print a few out, and solve them on paper. Acrostics are listed here or dig around the NYT archives if you don’t have an XWord Info membership.

Person of the Year

I’m trying something new this year. I want to recognize remarkable contributors to crosswords. To be clear, and fair, NYT employees or people who work for them aren’t eligible.

Crosswords don’t have a long history but it’s mostly a forgotten one. What’s more ephemeral than a puzzle printed on cheap newsprint that you solve once and then throw away? As with many art forms, the genius and effort and creativity are noticed later, after much of the work is lost.

Trying to pull together new electronic versions of all the New York Times crosswords going back to their beginning in 1942 would be completely insane. Who would be crazy enough to even attempt such a thing, knowing the data are incredibly hard to retrieve, the fidelity of the information you get is often questionable, and the vastness of the project would require organizing an army of crossword-savvy volunteers? The answer is crossword constructor and historian David Steinberg, my Person of the Year.

I’ve been a fan and supporter of The Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project since it started but I thought their likelihood of success, at least in my lifetime, was small. And yet, as of today, they’re about 38% of the way to their goal. Awesome.

David has created crosswords for several publications, he’s now the crossword editor at The Orange County Register, he writes a blog, oh, and he just turned 16. It’s possible he has a bright future.

Correction

The original version of this post said that, along with his new record for fewest blocks and his ground-breaking quintuple stack, Joe Krozel also broke the record for fewest words. In fact, he tied that record of 52 set in 2005 by Frank Longo.

The JimHBlog regrets the error.

What makes a crossword memorable?

That’s a personal question, of course, but I have a scientific way of determining which crosswords are memorable to me, and I’ve been thinking about what that means for the art form.

I’ve been solving crosswords for years but until recently, I wasn’t a particularly careful observer. Puzzles came and went, I could complete them or not, they were blasé, satisfying, or delightful. It wasn’t until five years ago when I wrote XWord Info that I started examining them more closely. As I added more and more to my database, starting from present time and working backwards, it was a chance to relive the crossword part of my life in Benjamin Button order. I was an archeologist going backwards through time as I dug through the strata of grids and clues.

Now and then I’d hit a puzzle that gave me a flash of excitement, a rush of reminiscence. That was a fun one. I remember that one! By definition, that one was memorable.

I started noticing patterns. The first was that so many of the ones I particularly recalled were by Manny Noswosky. That caused me to look more closely at those constructor names and I soon discovered several more with more than their fair share in the “memorable” pile. Elizabeth C. Gorski’s year-end Sundays were a treat I looked forward to rediscovering. I had memorized the poem in Green Eggs and Hamlet and it became a kind of party trick.

There are many recent crosswords I’m sure I’ll long remember too: Picture This delighted me because I love the story behind that painting. (Maybe I just like art because Ahead of the Curve also stands out.) Joe Krozel’s LIES, and especially his mirror grid thrilled me. I’ll remember the snappy surprising answers from so many Paula Gamache or Karen M. Tracey puzzles, the beautiful grids of Frank Longo or my friend Jeff Chen, and many more for a long time. I’ve called Patrick Berry’s “Cross” word contest the best word puzzle I’ve ever done.

What these have in common is an adventurous and surprising spirit. They make me wonder how someone thought of it. They expand my idea of what is possible to accomplish in a crossword.

There’s something that these puzzles don’t have, though. Most are missing the single ingredient that most crossword commentary (including emails I get) focuses on. They’re lacking in, for want of a better word, flawlessness. (I’ll admit Mr. Berry’s comes close.)

I’ve fallen behind in my blog reading but these are the kinds of puzzles that generally are not well reviewed. I remember commenters on Wordplay often targeted what they perceived to be the weak spot, an answer perceived to be inelegant, and disdainfully proclaimed that the whole experience was wrecked. I’ve accepted the facts that 1) I’ll never understand this, and 2) I’m in a tiny minority of people whose endorphin levels are much more highly calibrated to the ingeniousness of the breakthrough idea. Aim for the stars and if you get most of the way there, I’m a fan. A perfect jewel-box of a traditional puzzle can be satisfying but it’s not nearly the same kick. In particular, I won’t remember it years later. Give me the Thursday craziness, the fold spindle and mutilate, the thinking outside the box. Surprise me.

Thanks to the Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project, I’m continuing to retreat further in time, back to 1990 now. The April 1 puzzle that year, “Please Think Twice!” was by Bert H. Kruse, a frequent contributor in those days, and I remember it. That’s way before NYT began making Across Lite versions of puzzles but you can try solving it online here. Maybe, like me, you’ll remember it, or at least you’ll see why it’s memorable. It’s not easy, mostly because the clues are both non-contemporary and Maleska-style (thank-you-MAAM is a road bump), but perhaps you can at least get through enough to find the Aha Moment. If you’re impatient, you can skip to the answers.

The most common NYT crossword clues

I recently posed the question, what are the most common clues Will Shortz has used in NYT crosswords? Jeffrey Krasnick and joon pahk quickly came up with “Jai ____” which, sure enough, is #1. ALAI is a convenient combination of letters (75% vowels) and there aren’t a lot of good ways to clue it. That’s the secret sauce for rising up the Clues We’ve Seen Before list.

Here are the top twenty:

1. Jai ___
2. “Dies ___”
3. Architect Saarinen
4. ___ Lingus
5. ___-Magnon
6. Mauna ___
7. ___ Lanka
8. Alley ___
9. From ___ Z
10. ___ avis
11. Inter ___
12. Pro ___
13. Coach Parseghian
14. ___ Na Na
15. Otherwise
16. "... ___ saw Elba"
17. Singer Sumac
18. Part of Q.E.D.
19. Actress Thurman
20. Rap's Dr. ___

Other interesting clues near the top are Director Kazan, Actor Morales, Sault ___ Marie, Actress Gardner, ___-majesté, Singer Guthrie, and Nobelist Wiesel. I find it interesting that ___'acte and ___ nous (clues for ENTR and ENTRE) are tied with 35 occurrences each.

Most are fill-in-the-blank clues or names. Several are non-English including a few Latin words.

So, should constructors avoid these clues? I suppose so, in as much as they should avoid overusing ALAI and IRAE and EERO and AER at all, but there’s something comforting for new solvers when they finally get enough experience to slap those answers in with certainty.

Support the Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project

All donations to XWord Info made during the month of August will go to David Steinberg and the Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project.

With help from Barry Haldiman and several others, David Steinberg is on a mission to amass digitized versions of published NYT puzzles from before Will Shortz became editor. XWord Info will host these puzzles as each full year becomes available so they can be analyzed or even solved online. You can see 1993 grids now and 1992 is coming soon with many more years arriving later.

Mr. Steinberg has just finished ninth grade but he already has five published NYT puzzles as well as crosswords in several other venues. Somehow he has enough time to be a cruciverbal archeologist too.

Opinions about pre-Shortz puzzles seem to fall into two buckets. Either you long for the days before all those recent shenanigans like circles and Rap singers and wacky wordplay, or you make fun of all the archaic restrictions that prevented, for example, OREO from being clued as anything other than “Mountain: Comb.form.”

The truth is more complicated, of course. Yes, the infamous Celebes ox raises his head from time to time, J, Q, X and Z are rare, and there are enough complex Roman Numeral math problems to make Peter Gordon blush (I actually like those clues) but there is an amazing amount of creative ingenuity as well. I was going to write a long blog post about some of my favorites but it turns out there already is a blog dedicated to these older puzzles. It’s written by (you’ll never guess) David Steinberg. I highly recommend it: www.preshortzianpuzzleproject.com. Check out the various tabs.

Remember, every penny donated in August goes to David and his project. How will he spend this windfall? He’s too young for college so I guess it goes to collecting comic books or hustling pool or whatever 15-year-olds do these days. New XWord Info accounts get you full access to the site for a year. If you already have an account, you can still donate. I don’t have “renew” wired up yet so send me mail and I’ll extend your subscription for a year. For now, all the pre-Shortz puzzles are outside the paywall (i.e., they’re free) and, as always, direct links to any XWord Info page from crossword blogs pass through unchecked.

Click here to donate now.

Acrostics vs. Electric Cars

Which is harder to create from scratch?

At the New York Times, acrostics are those rectangular Second Sunday puzzles that appear on alternate weeks in the magazine. Most crossword solvers summarily ignore them but acrostics have a loyal, even fanatical following. The passion and, yes, smugness of the fans reminds me of those annoying people who drive electric cars. That naturally raises the question, which is harder to construct?

At first, building an electric car sounds difficult, but Elon Musk proved it’s a piece of cake. With exactly as much background in the automobile business as I have, he was able to put together a little roadster that some hail as the beginning of the end of the ICE age. ICE, as in Internal Combustion Engine. Here’s how he did it. Follow these same simple steps for your own electric vehicle.

Elon noticed right away that batteries are heavy so everything else had better be light. No problem. He found a French company willing to build some carbon fiber body panels that weigh next to nothing. Next, he convinced an English company to slap them together to make a car body, add some details like seats and a steering wheel, and then ship that shell (car nuts call it a glider) to California. Now all he needed were the bits to make the machine actually go – a battery and a motor. He had to build his motor himself, but how hard could that be? Make one about the size and shape of a watermelon and wrap it around the rear axel. Easy. There are about 10,000 parts found in normal cars that you don’t need.

The battery seems hard because there’s all that chemistry and stuff but stuff turns out to be the answer. Build a box and stick it right behind the seats. Then jam it full with 6,000 laptop batteries. That’s it. Finis. I have no idea what to do with all those battery-less laptops but perhaps you can sell them on Craig’s List. This video contains a few more details.

How do you know your car works? Jump into the driver’s seat, switch on the flux capacitor, and press the gas pedal. Hmm, we better call it the accelerator pedal. Take note of how long it takes you to reach 60 mph. If your stopwatch says 3.7 seconds, you’ve built a Roadster rival.

(I’m skipping over the part where you finance it all by starting PayPal first and then selling that for hundreds of millions of dollars.)

Making an acrostic

Acrostics, on the other hand, require a little more imagination. In case you’re not up on the art form, let me explain how it works. Each puzzle has up to 26 crossword-like clues. Maybe they’re more like cryptic crosswords clues. Most, I have to say, are hard. On the first pass through, you might only get one or two of them but don’t worry, that’s by design.

Each letter in each answer word maps to a specific location on a 8 by 27 grid that, when filled in, will contain a quote from a book. It’s laid out in such a way that you can see the word breaks but not the punctuation. (Hyphens are the exception, you see those.) You don’t even know where sentences end.

In a normal crossword, you can make progress two ways; by looking at Across clues or Down clues. That’s what puzzle insiders mean when they say that each square is checked – it’s part of two clues. Acrostic squares are checked too. There’s the 26 or so clues, but there’s also the quote. You make progress either by solving clues, or by looking at the quote and using sentence logic to guess likely letters. Lone squares are probably A or I, since those are the only one-letter words in English. (Careful, though, the quote might be designed to trick you!) T followed by H followed by one more letter is probably THE. And so on. The usual experience is that it’s a big struggle until you get a few consecutive quote words and then the puzzle tends to fall rather quickly after that.

So far all this sounds like an unusual but not necessarily magical experience. Ah, but here’s the kicker. There’s yet another check on some squares. If you read the first letters of each answer in order, it spells the author and name of the book the quote is from. Now we’ve gone from moderately impressive to completely amazing.

Can you see the problems for the acrostic constructor? First, you need a quote that’s the right length, close to but not exceeding 216 squares, including spaces. Not just any quote, though. It needs to be one that includes all the letters used to spell the author and title. This constraint alone means that most quotes you’d like to use are simply impossible. Then you need to scramble all the letters into words, each one starting with one of those author or title letters. (Remember, no more than 26 of them!) Then you need to come up with a set of brilliant clues.

If that isn’t amazing enough, there’s yet one more level to this magic trick. Often, many of those answer words or clues are related somehow to the theme of the quote.

Yikes. You’re better off trying to build an electric car.

How can I try one?

If you mean how can you try an electric car, they’re now easy to find. Everybody is making them now. Ask for a test drive.

If you mean acrostics, I can help you there. The downside of acrostics is that the paper-and-pencil method of transferring letters between answers and the quote grid is error-prone and, well, boring. Computers make it fun. The NYT website lets you do them online. My XWord Info site always lets you solve the most recent NYT acrostic here. Each Times acrostic is constructed by the brilliant team of Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon.

It turns out Hex, as they’re collectively known (for reasons that escape me) aren’t the only regular acrostic constructors. I also urge you to check out American Acrostics by Cynthia Morris. Click on “This Week’s Puzzle” to try one. The setup and constraints are slightly different but the central idea is identical. The over-arching theme is American History. That sounds like yet another big constraint but since Americans keep making more history, she’s unlikely to run out of material any time soon.

Viewer mail

I no longer work for the New York Times but I’m often asked, ok I’m sometimes asked, ok I’ve been asked three times, if I’m still going to write my annual year-end wrap up of notable crossword achievements. Uh. Ok. Sure. Coming soon.

The NYT Crossword Crisis

I used to write about crosswords for The New York Times at a blog called Wordplay. That job ended today so, of course, it’s not too soon for my first tell-all exposé that will blow the lid off that whole operation. Here’s the key question:

How early did I get access to the puzzles?

NYT Crosswords are typically published at 10pm Eastern time and Wordplay posts go live moments later. How is that possible? Some of the more clever commenters have suggested that I must get early access and I’m often asked, '”How early?” The full explanation is more bizarre than you can imagine. The surprising answer, and I swear this is true, is that the posts are written two to three months ahead of time, well before the crosswords themselves are constructed. Let me explain.

Budget cutbacks

Times at the Times were particularly tough in 2008 when Will Shortz got hauled in front of NYT’s Supreme Budget Committee to hear the bad news. The lavish “puzzle lifestyle” was over. Costs had to be slashed immediately and the first cuts were to be in the admittedly well-padded construction budget. One of the junior accountants, a kid named Bumfry, had downloaded a demo version of the Crossword Compiler software with the Grid Generator plug-in. He noticed a button called “Auto-fill” and asked the obvious question: “Why can’t we just use that?” Shortz was taken off guard. He tried to argue using vague concepts like “quality” and “innovation” but made little progress until he blurted out, “What if I could come up with a solution that would slash costs but actually improve the puzzles? I have a radical notion but I need two weeks to pull it together.” He was given three days. The race was on.

The free-market solution

Most people know that Shortz did graduate work at Indiana University on Machiavelli and Adam Smith, but few also know he co-owns three key eBay patents and one more that underpins Google’s auction-based adwords business. If only there were some way to apply that same thinking to crosswords.

Then he got an idea. An awful idea. The Shortz got a wonderful, awful idea! My phone rang immediately. Was I in? The concept was so wild, so crazy, so utterly insane, that I immediately agreed.

Constructor competition

Here’s how it worked. I wrote my posts describing each crossword and those descriptions were electronically distributed to constructors through a secret network code-named CRUCIVERB-L. Each post was attached to an interactive web page where constructors bid on how cheaply they could produce a puzzle that exactly fit those specs. It was brilliant.

So, for example, when budgets were particularly tight, I would write something along these lines: “This Tuesday puzzle has only three theme answers and displays little cleverness in the surrounding fill.” Veteran constructors would pass right over that one, knowing that competitive bids would drive the price down to just a few dollars. It was a godsend for newbies, though, who could try their hand at finally getting published without having to compete with Patrick Berry on the same day.

That saved enough money that, from time to time, I could be a little more creative. Sometimes, I admit, I was even cruel, using phrases like: “seven theme answers” or “every answer in this grid contains at least one B” or, in one particularly nasty case, “quadruple pangram.” It was great fun watching constructors struggle with how low they could bid on that one.

Reaction from puzzle authors

Immediate reaction from the constructor community was negative. Hostile, even. When I emailed Will Shortz to tell him the constructors were revolting, his quick response was, “Aren’t they, though!” I should have seen that one coming, I suppose. Many constructors dropped out in protest.

Those who stayed on came to appreciate the new system. Art thrives within constraints and crosswords had never been so thoroughly constrained. Although the average payment was substantially lower than before, pay for some of the more ambitious grids actually increased.

I sometimes got accused of playing favorites, particularly with visual elements in the grid. Descriptions like “connecting the circles in alphabetical order generates a reasonably recognizable portrait of Beethoven” became known as “Gorski Gimmees” because nobody but she even bothered to compete. Liz made out like a bandit on those ones. Quadruple stacks and record-low block counts weren’t nearly as lucrative, since Kevin Der and Joe Krozel kept outbidding each other. In other words, the system worked!

Puzzle of the year

There’s a particularly funny story about the crossword that I eventually named my 2010 Puzzle of the Year (Across Lite, XWord Info solution, Wordplay.) Francis Heaney apparently misread my blog description and, thinking it was a more straightforward normal rebus, opened the bidding at a ridiculously low $1,000. Of course, nobody else would touch it and he was on the hook to somehow put it all together.

The fact that it worked and ended up being such a wonderful puzzle completely validates the Shortz Strategy, as it has come to be known. Once again, free-market capitalism proves to be the answer to every question.