Crossword 206: Who Let All These Men in Here?

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This puzzle, as its title implies, has men in it, and frankly I have some qualms about posting it.  I’m troubled not so much by the lack of gender-inclusiveness (for which I atone right away, in the answer to 1 Down) as I am by the presence of people of any kind.  For, regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, etc., people, in my experience, are annoying.  There are some exceptions—myself, for example, and my near relations, and my current friends—but most people, if they’re not doing something absolutely wrong, are at best getting in the way.  So please, as you solve this puzzle, do not take it as in any way an endorsement of humanity in general.  

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206 Who Let All These Men in Here?

Crossword 205: Just Wing It

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It’s time to test your etymological knowledge!  To which question might this puzzle’s title phrase, in its original meaning, have been an appropriate response?
A. “How do I make this blob of tofu look like a turkey?”
B. “A bird is attacking me—should I shoot to kill?”
C. “What’s a good slogan for a specialized chicken restaurant with no thighs, or breasts, or legs?”
D. “I forgot to learn the play I’m acting in this afternoon—what should I do?”
The answer may be found in the first letter of 2 Down in the attached puzzle.

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205 Just Wing It

Crossword 204: Afterthoughts

John William Godward, Idle Thoughts

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This week’s puzzle has a theme no one has ever tried before—at least so far as I know—in which added letters, and parsing, and synonyms, and puns, are all daringly combined in no fewer than six original nonsense phrases!  I’m a little worried that releasing it into the universe will result in the creation of a semantic black hole from which meaning can never escape, and that then nothing will ever make sense again.  But I’m going to chance it!

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204 Afterthoughts

Crossword 202: Aw, How Cute!

Charles Burton Barber, Girl with Dogs

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What makes my crosswords so exceptionally adorable?  It’s not their symmetrical features; most crosswords have those.  They aren’t rounded or fuzzy—on the contrary, they are geometrically rectilinear and semantically exact.  But their babbling delight in language, their wide-eyed, uncomplicated openness to life give them an infantile appeal very unlike the hard-edged affect of their adolescent meme-grubbing, slang-repeating, hipster-referencing competitors.

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202 Aw, How Cute!

Crossword 201: Pismo Batch

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I went to Pismo Beach once.  I was driving with friends from Los Angeles to San Francisco and saw the sign.  The beach itself was disappointing—sand, ocean, that sort of thing.  But I liked, and still like, the name, which to me suggests a combination of the exotic with the fun.  So I’m glad I went there, because I’m glad to say I went there, because I like to say, “Pismo Beach.”

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201 Pismo Batch

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

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Crossword 200: Something To See

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Here we are at Crossword 200, and it seems only yesterday that I was refusing to apologize for the obviousness of the theme of Crossword 100.  Anyway, as the puzzle below will show, I’ve learned nothing in the interim.  If I make it to Crossword 300, I might have to think up some other approach. 

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200 Something To See

Crossword 199: Breakers Ahead

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Ahoy! Avast! Clear the decks! Batten down the hatches! Trim the jib! Man the sheets! Belay the taffrails! Man the jib! Trim the sheets! Hoist up the John B. sail! See how the mainsail sets! Call for the captain ashore! I want to go home.

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199 Breakers Ahead

Crossword 198: Let's Have a Good Cry

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Lesbia Weeping over a Sparrow

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Taking my cue from the Victorian heroine who runs a risk of coming down with the brain fever if she doesn’t find a release in tears, I’ve been crying all week long, for myself, for the world, and for you, troubled solver, and I feel better now.  If you want to return the favor by crying for me, this week’s puzzle will get you started.

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198 Let’s Have a Good Cry

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A crossword of mine appears Tuesday, September 7, in Universal Crossword

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Crossword 197: Neither In Nor Out

John William Waterhouse, “I am half-sick of shadows, said the lady of Shalott”

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Today’s puzzle represents the equivocal position of the crossword-constructor vis-à-vis society: forced to draw upon it for words and phrases, and yet confined within a self-sufficient, cryptic world of numbered blocks and dark spaces from which there can be no escape.  It’s tragic, in a way, but oh so beautiful.

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197 Neither In Nor Out

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A crossword of mine will appear Thursday, September 2nd, in the Wall Street Journal.

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Crossword 194: A Do Or Die Situation

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Life is, of course, when you think about it, a do-and-die situation.  But this is just a crossword, and one of the great things about crosswords is that you don’t have to do them, that your doing or not doing a crossword will never matter to anybody in any way, will never lead to any extrinsic reward, or punishment, of any kind.  And doesn’t that make you want to do one right now?  

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194 A Do or Die Situation

Crossword 193: Identity Crisis

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I know many of you are wondering about my identity—my race, and gender, and age, and sexual orientation, and all that.  If you think my name implies something about some of these, you’re wrong:  “David Alfred Bywaters” has no more existence than Betty Crocker or Mr. Clean.  In fact these puzzles are made by a diverse collective of organically-fed artisans, working in a carbon-neutral environment with hand-crafted crosswording materials.  That’s why they’re so good for you!

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193 Identity Crisis

Crossword 192: Inner Sancta

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This puzzle should properly appear in 2023, the next year in which July 15 falls on a Saturday—but by then I may be gone, or you may be gone, or some competing constructor may have given the theme an inferior treatment.  So here it is now: just make a note to yourself to solve it again in 721 days.

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192 Inner Sancta

Crossword 191: Ha Ha

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Today’s crossword concludes this year’s series. The final entry presents a mirror-image counterpart of the first—just one of the more obvious manifestations of the intricate structure of meaning that informs this web site; and a good point of entry for scholars hoping to tease out its multiple, richly interwoven strands of semiotic implication.

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191 Ha Ha

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A crossword of mine will appear Thursday, July 22th, in the Wall Street Journal.

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Crossword 190: Hoo Ha

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Hoo boy it was hard to find theme answers for this puzzle, especially since Sutton Hoo was ineligible, because of its association with offensive weaponry and violent death, two of the many things I’m trying to stamp out by not putting them in crossword puzzles (another is “medical malpractice,” which, along with “Woody Allen,” and “bisphenol-A,” I’ve managed to keep out of all my puzzles to date).

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190 Hoo Ha

Crossword 189: Yee Ha

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At the beginning of every summer I’ve featured on this website a ground-breaking, norm-shattering series of crosswords.  Three years ago I engaged in a six-part existential meditation-in-crosswords on the nature of being (Crosswords 029-034).  Next, in a four-part series (Crosswords 081-084), I examined the deep syntactic structures that underlie our language, determining not just how we make meaning, but what we can mean.  Last year I sounded a warning in three puzzles against the encroachment of decadence in our society (Crosswords 135-137).  And last week I embarked on an exploration, which continues today, of the essence of comedy—illustrated with paintings by John Atkinson GrimsHAw whose titles also contain the consecutive letters HA.  Interspersed with these will be recommendations for the nine volumes of Frances Trollope’s laughter-inducing Widow Barnaby trilogy, illustrated with paintings by Frederick Daniel HArdy.

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189 Yee Ha

Crossword 188: Ah Ha

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One of the great satisfactions of the crossword—the sense of understanding something that has confused or mystified us—is provided as well by the conventional Victorian novel.  And this is so satisfying a satisfaction because it’s what life itself so often, so implacably denies us.  Where did this go?  Why did that happen?  What’s the point of everything?  We don’t ever get to figure it out.  But we do get to figure out that the governess was actually the evil baronet’s daughter by his first wife, and that 49 Down is GMBH.

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188 Ah Ha

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A crossword of mine appears Friday, July 2, in Universal Crossword

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Crossword 187: Irregular Armies

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Here’s a joke!  Q: “What do you give irregular armies?”—A: “PX-Lax”  Get it?  Ha ha! I just thought that one up.  Funny, huh?  No?  Well, don’t worry, it has nothing whatever to do with the puzzle below.

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187 Irregular Armies

Crossword 186: In Group

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Every human endeavor attracts an in-group: people who know what’s up, and who’s who, and how to signal to each other over the heads of the ignorant crowd.  So it is with crosswords. And are you wondering who sits at the center of the crossword world, posing smugly as the arbiter of cruciverbal fashion, setting trends, attracting unearned admiration, inspiring fear of unearned contempt?  Well, I’ll tell you:  it’s me!  I’m so far in that most solvers barely know about me; only the cognoscenti truly appreciate me.  Maybe you’re one of them?  If so, enjoy the attached puzzle, and sneer confidently at those dull-witted, commonplace solvers who still think the New York Times is cool.

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186 In Group

Crossword 185: Taking the Easy Way Out

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Yes, we’re taking the easy way out again.  Someday I’ll stuff my puzzles full of things you’ll feel bad about not knowing.  Someday I’ll make my theme answers turn corners, and double back on themselves, and run outside the grid, and use the black squares in odd ways, and otherwise require all sorts of reinterpretation, so that, though they look like random assemblages of letters in the grid, they turn out (once you’ve discovered the trick) to be the names of celebrities you ought to admire.  Someday.  But not today.

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185 Taking the Easy Way Out

Crossword 184: On End

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Did you ever have to read Moby Dick?  It was justly panned by discriminating contemporaries (an “ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact . . . disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English,” said the Athenaeum; “the soliloquies and dialogues of Ahab, in which the author attempts delineating the wild imaginings of monomania, and exhibiting some profoundly speculative views of things in general, induce weariness or skipping,” said the Spectator). But then some misguided cabal of English professors, at some point in the 20th century, contrived to make it required reading, and generations of students have paid a heavy price.  53 Across is a terse comment on the incalculable suffering induced by ill-judged curricular decisions.

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184 On End