Crossword 257: Unqualified

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We’ve been having more labor trouble here at David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade and Weekly Victorian Novel Recommender.  The new hires are sadly unqualified.  One of them crossed the name of a little-known actor with the name of another little-known actor.  We had to “let him go.”  Another crossed a Star Wars character’s name with a Star Trek character’s name.  We fired her too.  But there’s only so much one scrappy little crossword maker can do.  The same kind of thing is happening everywhere. Standards throughout the industry have grown ever more lax, degrading the entire crossword labor pool.

And meanwhile, what about the millions of desperate solvers who have turned to crosswords as a last resort—to stave off dementia, or addiction, or trauma, or boredom?  We cannot fail them!  We need national standards, a system of certification and licensure, and a well-trained enforcement arm, and we need them now!

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257 Unqualified

Crossword 256: Think Ahead

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Think ahead!  Don’t be caught unawares—plan for every contingency!  What about tomorrow, next year, ten years from now?  In twenty years, you’ll be twenty years older.  In seventy years, you’ll be seventy years older—or, probably, dead!  In two hundred years you and everybody who remembers you will be dead!  In five billion years the earth will be an empty cinder!

Well maybe, instead of thinking ahead, you should just do this crossword.

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256 Think Ahead

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A crossword of mine appears Monday, October 17, in Universal Crossword; another appears Thursday, October 20, in the Los Angeles Times.

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Crossword 255: New Replacements

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Does the phrase “new replacements” seem redundant to you?  It doesn’t to us here at David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade and Weekly Victorian Novel Recommender!  A while ago some of our workers were threatening to form a union and bargain with us for a living wage.  We tried to explain that the annual earnings of the average crossword constructor wouldn’t keep a small dog alive through a mild winter—to no avail.  So of course we had to fire them all and hire replacements.  One of this new group did some research and discovered that we’d mentioned the NRA in some crosswords—not favorably, of course, but still.  They quit en masse, claiming they felt unsafe.  So now we’ve hired some new replacements.

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255 New Replacements

Crossword 254: Seeking Adventure

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Are you seeking adventure, daring solver?  You’ve come to the right place!  You’ll find it in the attached puzzle!—that is, if  you redefine the word “seeking” (dividing it into two parts and interpreting the first part as a homophone), and apply the result to common phrases so as to arrive at new phrases having to do with things like carpet installation and insurance.  And if that doesn’t sound like adventure to you, well, maybe you haven’t come to the right place after all.

Speaking of C-kings, that’s the future Charles II at the knee of Charles I in this week’s painting; and here’s a timely bonus question for you: who is Charles II’s brother’s daughter’s cousin’s cousin’s second-cousin’s son’s grandson’s son’s brother’s niece’s son’s son’s son’s brother’s daughter’s eldest son?

(This week’s crossword, and the post introducing it, have been much improved by generous solver Charles Montpetit. Any genealogical miscalculations are, however, my own.)

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254 Seeking Adventure

Crossword 253: Heart’s Ease

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Heart’s ease!  It’s a purple flower!  It’s an Elizabethan song!  It’s a Victorian novel! (Novel 003) And now, at last, it’s a crossword puzzle! As Shakespeare puts it:

When griping grief the heart doth toss,
And doleful dumps the mind oppress,
Then puzzles made of words that cross
With speedy help do lend redress.

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253 Heart’s Ease

Crossword 251: I Recycle

John William Godward, The Mirror

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That’s right!  I recycle!  I separate cans, bottles, and paper.  I break down the boxes and I tear the labels off the cans.  I even tear the little plastic windows off the business envelopes and the pasta boxes.  And, like other people who use yard signs, bumper stickers, banners, tee shirts, and other such means to announce their possession of basic virtues, I thought everybody would be glad to know this about me.  You are glad, aren’t you? Of course. So here’s a crossword for you, in my honor.

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251 I Recycle

Crossword 250: Ring of Ire

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Many people enjoy belonging to a group bound by a sense of grievance so that they can rage happily together, usually against some other similarly bound group that can rage in turn back at them.  This is fun in itself; it can also lead to solid personal gain, as one’s route to success is eased by one’s fellow enragees, who form a sort of mutually-supportive grievance collective, or ring of ire.  We here at David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade and Weekly Victorian Novel Recommender belong to no such ring; we’re happy with everybody and everything in this fortunate world, including other people and their rage, to which we here pay a small tribute.

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250 Ring of Ire

Crossword 248: Farmyard Echoes

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Short-sighted solvers might be inclined to scoff at 60 Across in this week’s puzzle.  But so did short-sighted critics scoff at Picasso’s cubes, at Rothko’s daubs, at Pollock’s drips—and who had the last laugh?  When crosswords cease to make any sense at all, solvers will look back at 60 Across, and its relative nearness to sense, with a kind of bitter nostalgia, while future cultural historians will hail its ground-breaking, boundary-smashing departure from the dull routine of sense-making that had previously held puzzledom in its thrall.  But go ahead and scoff—if you don’t mind the prospect of posterity’s scoffing at you.

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248 Farmyard Echoes

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A crossword of mine will appear August 24 in the Los Angeles Times.

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Crossword 247: Plus Sighs

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This is a sort of sequel to Puzzle 188, but even more likely to produce in the solver not only sighs, but rolls of the eyes, shrugs of the shoulders, and other activities that increase blood flow, oxygen absorption, and synaptic transmission. Studies have claimed to disprove the theory that regular crossword-solving can delay the onset of dementia, but those studies did not employ the crosswords available here at David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade and Weekly Victorian Novel Recommender.

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247 Plus Sighs

Crossword 246: That’s Just Preverted!

George Hayter, The Town Clerk of Brecon and His Family

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Don’t let the title worry you—you can solve this puzzle, as you can all my puzzles, with the whole family gathered admiringly around you—unless, that is, you want to protect your progeny, during their impressionable years, from witnessing serious violations of linguistic norms.

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246: That’s Just Preverted!

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A crossword of mine appears today in the Wall Street Journal.

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Crossword 245: Change of Pace

John Callcott Horsley, Critics on Costume, Fashions Change

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After five weeks of unrelenting cruciverbal depression, it’s time for a change of pace; and that’s exactly what this week’s puzzle provides. Of course, you’ll nonetheless find in it all the usual qualities of puzzles on this site:  norm-shattering formal innovation, the latest in culture, and a daring willingness to speak truth to power.  (Also some wordplay.)

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245 Change of Pace

Crossword 244: Down in the Mine

John William Godward, The Jewel Casket

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We at David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade and Weekly Victorian Novel Recommender aren’t satisfied with the gems of wordplay that can be purchased in the public marketplace.  We prefer to dig our own out of the bowels of the earth, braving darkness and damp, noxious vapors and the ever-present threat of semantic collapse—all so that you, the solver, can adorn your mental domicile at our expense, little suspecting the cost.  But we wouldn’t have it any other way.

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244 Down in the Mine

Crossword 243: Downplay

Edward Robert Hughes, Dream Idyll (A Valkyrie)

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I give you fair warning:  the Downs in this puzzle (at least the themed ones) are all Across.  Now that’s just the kind of startling, long-overdue innovation you’ve come to expect of my puzzles; but, like most wonderful things, it comes at some risk:  if you’re subject to vertigo, you might want to solve the puzzle while lying on your side.

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243 Downplay

Crossword 242: What a Downer!

Frederick Daniel Hardy, Sorrowful News 

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I meant this website to be a cheerful place, filled with smiles and sunshine, and look what’s happened!  Why, I wonder?  Maybe it’s the crossword genre itself, which necessarily makes us cross and takes us down.  As I’ve said before, I think the time is overdue for a radical reconceptualization of the form, one that ceases to valorize traditional numerical hierarchies (why should 2 always be greater than 1?), one that shatters the old boundaries imposed by binary grids of black squares and white squares, one that replaces the cross with the happy, the down with the up.  I’m working on it.  

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242 What a Downer

Crossword 241: Downspout

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Last week’s puzzle was called “Tossing It Down.” This week’s is called “Downspout.” The alert solver will suspect a pattern. In fact this puzzle is the second of this year’s summer series on David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade and Weekly Victorian Novel Recommender, the fifth in a series of such serieses. It’s all about downness, explored from various points of view. Are you “down with that,” as the hipsters would say? Then it’s time to “get down,” as the hipsters would say.

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241 Downspout

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A crossword of mine appears Tuesday, July 5, in Universal Crossword; another appears Thursday, July 7, in the Wall Street Journal.

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Crossword 240: Tossing It Down

John Melhuish Strudwick, Oh Swallow, Swallow

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When we at David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade and Weekly Victorian Novel Recommender indulge in an occasional flagon of mead or snifter of usquebaugh, we like to savor it slowly, meanwhile discussing the issues of the day in an incisive but nuanced manner.  However, we have no interest in confining ourselves to making only crosswords that “look like us.”  We hope to cater to all tastes and types.  So if you are one of those people whose approach to liquor, or to life, is to “toss it down,” here’s one that looks like you.

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240 Tossing It Down

Crossword 238: Etail Discounts

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I’ve thought of converting this website to an “etail” enterprise—charging a dollar apiece for the crosswords, fifty cents per volume for the novel recommendations, and offering for sale an array of t-shirts, coffee mugs, and tote bags with my logo.  I’m pretty sure I’d get rich quick.  But I don’t do it.  Why?  Because I care about you, inadequately compensated solver.  It would be simply wrong to tempt you into squandering on crosswords what you might spend on winter fuel or shoes for the children.  I just can’t do it, and I won’t.

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238 Etail Discounts

Crossword 237: Alternating Biconsonantal Pentads

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You can find alternating pentads in lots of places, and the same is true of biconsonantal pentads—but where else but here, at David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade and Weekly Victorian Novel Recommender, can you find alternating biconsonantal pentads?

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237 Alternating Biconsonantal Pentads

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A crossword of mine appears today in the Wall Street Journal.

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Crossword 236: Cross Out

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I’ve mentioned before my ambition of taking my art form to a new level heretofore undreamed of, one from which I and my disciples can look down on our rivals and predecessors with scorn—as abstract painters long ago learned to do at representational ones, or atonal at tonal composers.  I think I’ve hit at last on a promising idea—crosswords in which the words don’t cross.  Such post-crosswords will allow me to break through the limits by which other constructors are sadly constrained, forced as they are to think up words that share letters with other words at certain crucial points, and to free myself to achieve—what exactly?  I haven’t quite decided, but certainly something incomprehensible to those hidebound traditionalists who continue to think that crossing words is the whole point of crosswords.  If you are yourself such a traditionalist, I pity you; meanwhile, however, here is what may be one of my last works you’ll understand, though its title hints at the coming transition.

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236 Cross Out

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A crossword of mine will appear tomorrow, May 29, in the Los Angeles Times.

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Crossword 235: Ten-Four

George Bernard O'Neill, “Cheer up!”

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I’ve already posted a puzzle entitled “Yes” (Crossword 213); here’s another that celebrates this best of all possible worlds with a hearty cry of joyous affirmation, this time in radio jargon.  Next, “You Betcha!”—a puzzle in which “you” is replaced by “tcha.”  So far I’ve got LAT CHAT (“Shop-talk between physical trainers”); I’m sure three or four more will occur to me eventually.

(Clues to 25 Across and 50 Across were provided by test-solver Kevin Walker, whose clue-writing genius I’ve drawn on more than once already.)

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235 Ten-Four