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Hearty Thanksgiving Greeting
Thursday was Thanksgiving. I was thankful for you; and you, I’m willing to suppose, were thankful for me. But now we have these turkey parts all over the place. Like so many of my puzzles, this week’s holds a mirror up to nature, showing the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
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A puzzle of mine will appear next Thursday, November 29, in The Wall Street Journal.
Henry Stacey Marks, ‘Hark, hark! / The dogs do bark. / The beggars are coming to town’
If you’ve done more than a few crosswords, you know that some relatively rare words and phrases appear in them with annoying frequency. The crossword constructor’s life is one long wearisome battle against these. “Does nothing fit here but Caesar’s last words crossed with the founder of Yale? Oh, why was I born to suffer?” asks the sorrowing crossword constructor. This week, however, I’m just giving up and letting them in. In fact, I’ve made an especially large 21 x 21 puzzle to accommodate them.
And so I conclude this website’s first year—with this puzzle, and with a second and final solicitation for support. Donate $12 and get a free bonus crossword: either a 15 x 15 puzzle made entirely of words and phrases current in the Victorian era, or a 21 x 21 puzzle made of the usual stuff. Donate $15 and get both. Just click this button:
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052-Crosswordese-Cavalcade.puz
052-Crosswordese-Cavalcade.pdf
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A puzzle of mine appears today in The Wall Street Journal.
John Collier, The Beggar Man
I’ve now given you fifty 15 x 15 crossword puzzles. Because I love you and want you to be happy, I will conclude my website’s first year by giving you two extra-large 21 x 21 puzzles. Are you wondering what to do with the overflowing sense of gratitude you can’t help but feel in response to all this? Wonder no longer—because now you can donate money to this site! Just click the button below and follow instructions. Donate $12, and I'll send you either another 21 x 21 puzzle, or a 15 x 15 Victorian crossword puzzle (that is, a puzzle that uses only words and phrases current in the Victorian era)! Donate $15 and I’ll send you both!
And that’s not all! I have a special bonus for the first person who donates $10,000,000 or more: not only will I send you both puzzles, but also I’ll rename this website in your honor! So if your name is, say, Bill Gates, after your donation the website will be known as "Bill Gates Presents David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade and Victorian Novel Recommender." But act fast—because, again, only the first donor at the $10,000,000 level will be eligible for this bonus.
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Frederick Daniel Hardy, Children Playing at Doctors
Most 15x15 crosswords have just four or five theme answers. This puzzle has ten theme answers! Ten!! That’s twice the usual complement!!! Are you grateful? Are you wondering how to let me know how grateful you are?? Watch this space!!!! Next week I’ll tell you how.
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Sir John Everett Millais, Speak! Speak!
Beware! On the outside you’ll find pleasant phrases about this and that (Biblical dogs, dairy farmers, Hibernian patriots, luxury homes, intoxicated birds) but oh! what lurks within? Your spine will tingle, your flesh will creep; it will be weeks before you again dare to work a crossword alone.
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Albert Joseph Moore, The Dreamers
This puzzle contains only 72 words. I think that’s fewer than any other on this site. It has 5 theme entries, which account for 51 of its 191 letters. 34 blocks take up the remainder of its 225 squares. I’ll leave you to calculate its merit on the basis of these statistics.
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Edward Wilkins Waite, Autumn
It seems only yesterday we were celebrating the spring with horrible puns; here we are already celebrating the fall with hidden words in nonsense phrases. Nothing makes time’s winged chariot hurry faster than Victorian novels and language-torturing crosswords.
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A puzzle of mine will appear Tuesday, October 16, on David Steinberg’s Puzzle Society Crossword site, and comments on his blog. And another puzzle of mine will appear Thursday, October 18, in The Wall Street Journal.
Frederick Daniel Hardy, Preparing for Dinner
This puzzle was inspired by 31 Across, which came to me as an airline ticket locator code. Was this the hand of a benevolent Providence reaching down to interfere directly in human affairs?
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Helen Allingham, Baking Bread
I once made a cd for a friend with 24 distinct recorded versions of the song on which this puzzle is based. He hasn’t spoken to me in years. Do you think there’s a connection?
The original title of this puzzle—which almost no one understood—was “Put on the Skillet! Put on the Lid!” The final, much superior, title was the inspiration of Ralph Bunker, who, along with a man who prefers to be called “Bob Kerfuffle,” has been test-solving my puzzles for months. I’ll take this occasion to express my profound gratitude to both. Would you also like to test-solve my puzzles? Send me an email! The qualifications are minimal: an unerring sense of which Roman numerals correspond to which Arabic numerals would do (I find myself surprisingly shaky on this subject). The compensation, however, is even more minimal: nothing whatsoever!
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045-No-Matter-How-You-Slice-It.puz
045-No-Matter-How-You-Slice-It.pdf
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A puzzle of mine appears today, and another will appear Thursday, October 4, in The Wall Street Journal.
John Atkinson Grimshaw, Shipping on the Clyde
The great John Atkinson Grimshaw and the famous Paul Cézanne were almost exact contemporaries. I would wager that anyone uncorrupted by a course of art history or a habit of gallery visiting would prefer the moodily atmospheric genius of Grimshaw to the blotchy dullness of Cézanne, if presented with samples of each. Yet Cézanne is celebrated, Grimshaw obscure. It’s rigged no doubt—but by whom, and for what purpose?
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Lord Frederic Leighton, The Return of Persephone
Wait! Come back! Not you!—the “L.” Everybody’s welcome here at David Alfred Bywaters’s Weekly Crossword Cavalcade—even you. As so often before, we at “The Cavalcade” have taken something unpleasant, a phrase that may perhaps evoke bitter memories, and made it—fun! (By “we” I mean, of course, “I.”)
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A puzzle of mine appears today in The Wall Street Journal.
Francis Danby, The Deluge
30 Down is based on a very old, very bad joke, one I must have heard, and should have got over, in early childhood.
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A puzzle of mine appeared yesterday in The Los Angeles Times (and The Chicago Tribune, The Houston Chronicle, The San Francisco Chronicle, etc.)
Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, Dignity and Impudence
In is out! That's the kind of upside-down, through-the-looking-glass sort of a wonderland world this bold new puzzle creates. And just so you don’t get too comfortable, at least one in . . . is still in! You won’t find that feature in many other puzzles.
The above painting refers to a subtheme, daringly embedded in baffling cross-references.
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Edward Burne-Jones, The Mirror of Venus
I try, as much as possible (given my other aims) to avoid product names in my crosswords, because I want my crosswords to continue to provide enjoyment centuries hence, when all those products will be forgotten. And I especially dislike “fashion labels,” which encourage us to act from combined motives of personal vanity, financial recklessness, and mindless herd conformity. When this puzzle, however, insisted on one designer-label name, I figured I might as well “double down.” Solvers of the future will infer them from the crossings.
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Evelyn De Morgan, Hope in the Prison of Despair
Feeling anxious? Why spend a fortune on talking cures or psychotropic drugs, when you have access on this website, free of charge, to cruciverbal-behavioral therapy (CBT)? Work this puzzle, and you’ll find yourself growing reconciled at last to life’s enduring misery and your own congenital inadequacies!
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039-Shedding-Anxieties--Literally.puz
039-Shedding-Anxieties--Literally.pdf
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Albert Joseph Moore, A Garden
When I wrote the clues for this puzzle, the temptation to cross-reference was particularly difficult to resist. 10 Down, 33 Down, and 19 Across all refer to an activity that may be performed on 4 Down, 6 Down, 12 Down, 14 Across, 60 Across, and in fact anything 47 Down. But for your sake, gentle solver, resist I did.
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James Charles, On a Sussex Farm
This puzzle is based on my experience of farm life, which is drawn almost entirely from children's books with animal sounds.
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John William Waterhouse, Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus
Do you worry that online media are creating illusory bonds and instilling obsessive habits that rob you of your authentic self? Of course you do! But not this website: on the contrary, I’m here to put you on your guard.
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A puzzle of mine will appear this Wednesday, August 1, in the Wall Street Journal.
Edwin Longsden Long, Spanish Girls
I’ve always been annoyed by the saying that this puzzle is built on; maybe after you solve it, you will be too. By the way—this puzzle is a pangram: every letter of the alphabet is represented. I don’t usually care about such things, but when I found I was only one very famous basketball star away, I thought—“why not?” Don't worry—he’s so very famous even I have heard of him, and I confess I’ve never sat through a whole basketball game live or televised. I have nothing against the sport particularly, but I can’t endure the sound of those squeaking shoes.
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Richard Doyle, Under the Dock Leaves
We’ve come to my 6th and final magic-spell-based puzzle. I made a 7th, featuring “Mythballs” (legendary dances) and “Doctor Why” (pointless British sci-fi series)—but I’ve decided to spare you the pain and myself the embarrassment. An 8th, with the revealer “ibex,” never got past the early planning stages.
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A puzzle of mine will appear next Wednesday, July 18, in the Wall Street Journal.
