Your Custom Text Here
Lord Frederic Leighton, The Arts of Industry as Applied to Peace
In this puzzle I interrogate our society’s underlying structures of power, as part of my ongoing critique of post-modern, late-capitalist cultural hegemony.
Download this week’s crossword:
Solve this week’s crossword online:
A crossword of mine appeared last Thursday, January 28th, in the Wall Street Journal.
Evelyn de Morgan, Port After Stormy Seas
I encourage you, gentle solver, to admire the painting above and its title while you recall the reports of the past week (especially of Wednesday around noon), and only then, with a calm soul and clear head, to open this week’s puzzle—which, I am pleased to report, has nothing to do with anything.
Download this week’s crossword:
Solve this week’s crossword online:
Albert Goodwin, A Day’s End
Can this be the end? Is this the last puzzle I’ll post to this website? Have I finally turned in disgust from an ungrateful world, resolved never to cross words again? Or is this just another punning reference to my theme? Come back next week and find out!
(NB: The clue to 23 Across, once the weakest, now the strongest, of the puzzle’s theme clues, is in fact the inspiration of Canadian test-solver Kevin Walker.)
Download this week’s crossword:
Solve this week’s crossword online:
A crossword of mine appears today in the Wall Street Journal.
George Dunlop Leslie, Sweet Peas
Now and then, in the major crossword venues, one finds a puzzle in which the theme answers consist of common two-word phrases that start with the same one or two letters. POISONPILL PINGPONG PARCELPOST POLOPONY—voilà. That theme took me just sixty seconds to produce. No doubt a competent programmer with access to a phrase database could make a computer produce sixty such puzzles in sixty seconds. And they would be just as much fun to solve as they were to make.
Why is such a theme acceptable? Does anyone know? I don’t get it. Anyway, today’s puzzle represents my effort to improve on it.
Download this week’s crossword:
Solve this week’s crossword online:
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Comparisons
Does any artist in any field face such ruthless editorial tinkering as the poor crossword constructor? You shape and carve and etch and hone and polish your little gem till it shines and sparkles and glistens and glows, and (if you’re lucky enough to have it accepted) it appears in print lopped and maimed and marred and scratched and sullied. Your reference to a favorite musician has turned into a reference to a TV actor you’ve never heard of. Two of your answers have been tortured into a cross-referenced phrase. The wit of a favorite theme clue has evaporated in the unwelcoming atmosphere of somebody’s dubious assumptions. Now and then, to be sure, you find a real improvement—but that only wounds your authorial vanity all the more.
Well, here’s a puzzle where I made all the editorial changes my own self.
Download this week’s crossword:
Solve this week’s crossword online:
A crossword of mine appears on Wednesday, December 30, in the Wall Street Journal.
Henry John Yeend King,’Twas the Night Before Christmas
If you think this week’s puzzle involves Christmas carols—and are in consequence either thankful (you actually know what it is that King Wenceslas does after he looks out on the feast of Stephen!) or resentful (you can’t stand the damned things coming around every year!)—you haven’t been paying attention.
Download this week’s crossword:
Solve this week’s crossword online:
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, An Oleander
Have no fear: this puzzle has nothing to do with bullfighting, or soccer, or anything that requires you to watch people kill animals or run around on a rectangular surface. I put an accent over the "e" just for the look of the thing.
A crossword of mine appears tomorrow, December 13, in Universal Crossword
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Ask Me No More
So many of those other crossword constructors think they have all the answers! I, in contrast, retain the questioning mind of a curious child, open to experience, hungering insatiably for new knowledge. Someday I mean to make a puzzle filled only with open-ended answers, prompted by welcoming, non-restrictive clues like “Stuff” and “Thing.” Meanwhile here’s another one for which I do have all the answers—78 of them.
Download this week’s crossword:
158 Can-You-Reframe-the-Question?.puz
158 Can-You-Reframe-the-Question?.pdf
Solve this week’s crossword online:
A crossword of mine appears on Monday, November 30, in Universal Crossword, and another on Wednesday, December 2, in the Wall Street Journal.
John Atkinson Grimshaw, Moonlight on the Lake, Roundhay Park, Leeds
With this puzzle I embark on my fourth year of providing the world with a weekly crossword and a weekly Victorian novel recommendation. And I’m not going anywhere. I’m here for the duration (don’t ask me of what), grimly determined to see it through (whatever it might be). Nothing can shake my resolve!
Well, we’ll see how I feel tomorrow.
Download this week’s crossword:
Solve this week’s crossword online:
A crossword of mine appears on Thursday, November 26, in Universal Crossword
Thomas Francis Dicksee, Ophelia
I conclude this website’s third year with a third cavalcade of crosswordese—a puzzle that combines the tiredest crossword fill I can find into the groanworthiest answer phrases I can imagine. Its purpose is to arouse in the solver the emotions of morphological pity and alphabetic fear, thereby inducing a catharsis of those emotions (see Aristotle’s Poetics).
Once cleansed, you’ll find yourself in a mood to donate to the site; so I’ve made that easy for you with the button below. Donate $10 and you’ll get a crossword filled only with words and phrases current in the Victorian era (and still current today, of course). Donate $13.50 and you’ll get a 21 x 21 crossword. Donate $15 and you’ll get both. Donate $10,000,000 and the site will be renamed in your honor.
DONATION UPDATE:
I can also receive donations through PayPal and Venmo, at my email address.
Download this week’s crossword:
156-Yet-Another-Cavalcade-of-Crosswordese.puz
156-Yet-Another-Cavalcade-of-Crosswordese.pdf
Solve this week’s crossword online:
Robert Alexander Hillingford, Gifts for the War Chest
I conclude this website’s third year, as I did previous years, by providing you, first, with large 21x21 puzzles, and, second, with an opportunity to donate. Not that I need the money—but you, gentle solver, need an outlet for those impulses of gratitude that fill your generous soul, and I am willing to provide one.
As usual, there are four donation levels. Donate $12 and receive a 15x15 crossword which employs only words current during the Victorian era (and, of course, still current today), and which refers nostalgically to a simpler era of food packaging. Donate $13.50 and receive a large, 21x21 crossword, a sequel to last week’s puzzle with an added twist. Donate $15 and receive both. Be the first to donate $10,000,000 and the website will be renamed in your honor, so that if your name is, say, Jeff Bezos, the name of the website will be “Jeff Bezos Presents David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade and Weekly Victorian Novel Recommender.”
(By the way, careful solvers will notice that this puzzle’s 6 Down makes a return appearance after its debut as 16 Across in Crossword 039—but with an even more hilarious clue!)
Download this week’s puzzle:
155-Pull-Out-All-the-Stops.puz
155-Pull-Out-All-the-Stops.pdf
Solve this week’s puzzle online:
A crossword of mine appears today in the Wall Street Journal.
John Atkinson Grimshaw, A Moonlit Lane
Today’s puzzle has a sequel, involving a further twist, which I’ll make available next week as a bonus. Meanwhile, here’s another painting by the great Atkinson Grimshaw, this one suitable for Halloweens with full moons.
Download this week’s puzzle:
Solve this week’s puzzle online:
A crossword of mine appears today, and another on Thursday, November 5, in Universal Crossword
Helen Allingham, The Clothes Line
It strikes me that this is my third attire-related theme this month. Should I try for a fourth? “Dressing Up,” maybe, where words like CROSS and RANCH and WINDOW and SURGICAL might be found backwards, from down to up, within phrases that seem funny from up to down? Let’s see, CROSS gives us HOLINESS ORCHIDS: “Megachurch’s incense substitutes?”—great! RANCH gives us SWITCH NARCOTICS: “Give up heroin for fentanyl?”—hilarious! But WINDOW? What about TWO-D NIWA? The Niwa clan, as Wikipedia tells us, was a “retainer clan of the Oda clan during the Sengoku period of Japan.” So “Flattened Sengoku-period clan member”—Get it? Hmm. And SURGICAL?—GUERRILLA CIG RUSE: “That old trick in which the irregular military opponents of an occupying power distract enemy attention with a tobacco product, informally”? Oh never mind.
Download this week’s crossword:
Solve this week’s crossword online:
John William Godward, Mischief and Repose
So many of the crossword themes in the best, or anyway the best-paying, crossword venues seem to me, well, boring. “Here are some common phrases with words that can join another word to make other common phrases!” “Here are some common phrases that hide words in a certain category!” “Here are some names of celebrities that happen to share a linguistic feature!” “ Here are some common phrases that share some pattern or other!” “Here are some common phrases placed on the grid in some pattern or other!” “Here are some common phrases consisting of two words each of which starts with the same two letters!” “Here are some celebrities whose first and last names each start with the same two letters!” “Here are some celebrities who all wrote the same kind of book!” “Here are some words and phrases that actually mean the same thing!”
I don’t understand the appeal. But who am I to fight a prevailing trend? I can’t beat ’em, so darn it, I’m going to join ’em. Today’s crossword has the most boring theme ever to appear in any crossword anywhere. It’s going to put me on the map!
Download this week’s crossword:
Solve this week’s crossword online:
Richard Buckner, Emily Lady Isham
This puzzle is modeled on the upper-class Victorian habit of changing into special clothes at dinner-time—not, as you might expect, special food-repellant clothes, that might be difficult to stain and easy to clean—but extra-fancy clothes.
The process of adapting this custom to the crossword form required a good deal of punning. Now, the ability to enjoy unlikely puns is something you’re born with or not. No doubt it results from a long-ago genetic mutation; probably it confers some survival advantage—though it also exposes its carrier to unique risks. Anyway, if you don’t have such an ability, you might want to spare yourself this week’s puzzle.
Download this week’s crossword:
Solve this week’s crossword online:
William Etty, Preparing for a Fancy Dress Ball
Some people seem to think that, just because they never leave the house anymore, they need take no trouble about their dress—that they can sit around all day in sweatpants and t-shirts, or other sartorial atrocities named for bodily fluids or letters of the alphabet, and suffer no debilitating moral effects in consequence.
Not I! When I made this puzzle, I wore a three-piece Oxford-gray vicuna-wool suit trimmed in gold thread, a hand-stitched mulberry-silk shirt of deepest burgundy, a powder-blue diamond-plated necktie, and Belgian linen underwear lined with mink. I trust that when you solve it you also will array yourself no less richly.
Download this week’s crossword:
Solve this week’s crossword online:
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Venus Verticordia
This is a crossword version of one of those eerie paintings the eyes of which follow you around wherever you go.
Download this week’s crossword:
Solve this week’s crossword online:
A crossword of mine will appear Thursday, September 24, in Universal Crossword.
John Bagnold Burgess, The Meeting of East and West
Everybody in the world seems to be misperceiving everybody else of late, with predictably rageful consequences. Why should I miss out on the fun? Here’s my own contribution to the global confusion.
Download this week’s crossword:
147-International-Misunderstanding.puz
147-International-Misunderstanding.pdf
Solve this week’s crossword online:
A crossword of mine will appear tomorrow, September 13, and another Monday, September 14, in Universal Crossword.
George Dunlop Leslie, Pot-Pourri
Since I intend my puzzles to last forever, I will add an explanation of this one, for the benefit of the solver of the future.
PPO, then, future solver, once stood for “Preferred Provider Organization.” Years ago, health care was arranged rather to maximize the profits of private industry than to promote public health. If you expected ever to need health care, you were advised to buy “insurance” from a private entity: you would pay this entity a monthly fee, and in return it would pay a percentage of your doctor’s fees—over a certain fixed “deductible” amount.
So say you paid this entity $2000/month, in exchange for which it agreed to cover 80% of your medical costs after a $1000 annual deductible. Say that, after 30 years of this, you got a disease and had to go to the hospital for a week. And say the hospital charged you $101,000 for your treatment. Lucky you!—you paid only $21,000 (your deductible plus 20% of your costs); your insurer covered the remaining $80,0000! And lucky insurer—having collected $720,000 from you over your 30 years of participation, it still got to keep $640,000! It seems a little crazy now, future solver, but the theory was that everybody benefited. The hospital got lots of money, the insurer got lots of money, and you didn’t die.
But there was a further little hitch, or snag, in the process. Most insurers agreed to pay 80% of your fees only if you paid them to certain selected doctors, who had previously made a deal with those insurers. Otherwise the insurers would pay only 60%, or 40% of your costs, or maybe even nothing at all. These selected doctors were collectively known as a “Preferred Provider Organization” or PPO.
So, future solver, however bleak things may seem at the moment, don’t forget to remind yourself—at least it’s not 2020.
Edward John Poynter, Andromeda
There seems to be a trend nowadays of including more proper names in crosswords, on the theory that it’s fun to allude to cool stuff that fun, cool people like us like. I haven’t joined this trend, possibly for selfish reasons: my favorite Victorian novelists almost never show up in crosswords, whereas every other puzzle seems to include at least one Star Wars reference, however gratuitous: THE, for example, clued “Jabba ___ Hutt” or “Use ___ force, Luke!”
So I try to keep proper names out of my fill and also, especially, my themes. I sigh, more in sorrow than in anger, when I encounter yet another puzzle where the theme turns out to be a set of actors whose last names are also the names of dog breeds, or whatever.
This time, however, I’ve compromised my standards: half the theme answers contain proper names. But at least they’re reasonably passé proper names—a vice-president whose term ended in 2000, a children’s cartoon that premiered the same year, and a 1939 movie based on a 1900 novel.
Download this week’s crossword:
Solve this week’s crossword online:
