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Valentine Cameron Prinsep, The First Awakening of Eve
Well, here it is, the first day of the first month of a new year, and so, to keep you in the New-Year’s spirit, I have a puzzle for you with the word “first” in its title, and also a bit of advice, not just for this puzzle, but for any of life’s challenges: if at first you don’t succeed, try another crossword.
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John Callcott Horsley, Christmas Card
It’s Christmas! So here’s a little gift, just for you—a new crossword puzzle! I made it myself! As to the title—if you’re not fond of Christmas carols, don’t worry—remember how I let you off last year?
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John Everett Millais, Yes
Why is the English word signifying assent so ugly? “Si” sounds helpful, “oui” cute, “ja” endearingly goofy, but “yes,” with its growling short “e” and sibilant conclusion, seems just hostile. When people say it while making that ugly pulled-down-fist motion—often with the implication, “Yes, my enemies lie slaughtered before me!”—they’re only realizing the sound’s potential.
George Lance, Still Life with Fruits and Parrot
Some weeks ago (see Crossword 193) I was boasting of the wholesome food consumed by the skilled artisans here at David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade and Weekly Victorian Novel Recommender. This week, I’m afraid some of it got tangled up in the crossword-making machinery. We salvaged what we could.
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Edward John Poynter, The Ionian Dance: "Motus Doceri Gaudet Ionicos, Matura Virgo, Et Fingitur Artibus"
I was going to call this puzzle “The Unities,” but who cares nowadays about the rigid neoclassical critical standards applied to the drama of the 17th and 18th centuries? Nobody, sadly, but me—and perhaps you, learned solver. If so, I apologize for pandering instead to the degraded popular tastes of the age.
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Paul Sandby Munn, Bedlam Furnace, Madeley Dale, Shropshire
It’s time to get our economy up and running again! As a public-spirited American I’m happy to help out with some plant openings.
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A crossword of mine will appear tomorrow, November 21, in the Los Angeles Times.
James Jacques Joseph Tissot, Reading the News
I conclude this web site’s fourth year with a fourth “Cavalcade of Crosswordese” (see Crosswords 052, 104, 156). And this time, in order to ensure that I’m using only the freshest stale entries available, I’ve drawn them all from recent New York Times themeless puzzles, on the assumption that the most prestigious crossword venue in its most unconstrained format would surely allow only the very best crosswordese that can be had! It’s just another of my tireless labors on your behalf.
Grateful? All you have to do is click on that “Donate” button below and give me some money! (You may also donate through PayPal or Venmo using my email address.) $12 will get you a bonus 15 x 15 “Victorian” puzzle filled only with words in use before 1901; $13.50, a bonus 21 x 21 puzzle; $15, both of these; and $10,000,000, your name on the website.
Ungrateful? Oh well. I won’t bother you again until next year.
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208-Cavalcade-of-Crosswordese-IV.puz
208-Cavalcade-of-Crosswordese-IV.pdf
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A crossword of mine appears today in the Wall Street Journal.
Arthur Hughes, A Music Party
I stopped going to musical performances years ago, because the loud ones hurt my ears, and the soft ones were invariably spoiled by somebody in the row behind me elaborately unwrapping a piece of hard candy. And I’ve always wondered—did the people behind me at the loud performances also come equipped with plastic-wrapped pieces of hard candy, the unwrapping of which I was unable to hear over the music? Or do people only bring wrapped pieces of hard candy to soft musical performances—just as they generally wait for the quietest moments of those performances to do their best unwrapping? It’s a mystery.
But what isn’t a mystery is that this website is now concluding its fourth year, and I will mark the moment, as I did the conclusions of its first three years, with two 21 x 21 puzzles, and an opportunity for grateful solvers to make a donation. Are you a grateful solver? As in previous years, you may donate using the button below, or through PayPal or Venmo using my email address. There are four donation levels. Donate $12 and receive a 15 x 15 crossword which employs only words current during the Victorian era (and, of course, still current today). Donate $13.50 and receive a large, 21 x 21 crossword. 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, Mackenzie Scott, the name of the website will be “Mackenzie Scott Presents David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade and Weekly Victorian Novel Recommender.”
And speaking of Mackenzie Scott, this year I’m offering a discount to billionaire divorcees. Divorce can be hard, even for billionaires, and we at David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade and Weekly Victorian Novel Recommender understand that. So if you’re a divorcing billionaire (Jeff? Bill? Melinda?) I’ll rename the site in your honor for a mere $9,000,000. That’s a million-dollar discount! And just think how envious your ex will feel at the sight of your name on the most fabulous crossword site on (or off) the internet! Get there first!
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207-Dynamic-Range-Compression.puz
207-Dynamic-Range-Compression.pdf
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A crossword of mine will appear Friday, November 12, in the Los Angeles Times.
Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, Man Proposes, God Disposes
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?.puz
206-Who-Let-All-These-Men-in-Here?.pdf
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George Vicat Cole, Leaves are but the Wings on which the Summer Flies
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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John William Godward, Idle Thoughts
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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Charles Burton Barber, Girl with Dogs
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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Atkinson Grimshaw, Scarborough Beach
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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A crossword of mine appears today in the Wall Street Journal.
Henry Ryland, Two Classical Figures Reclining
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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George Willoughby Maynard, In Strange Seas
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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Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Lesbia Weeping over a Sparrow
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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A crossword of mine appears Tuesday, September 7, in Universal Crossword
John William Waterhouse, “I am half-sick of shadows, said the lady of Shalott”
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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A crossword of mine will appear Thursday, September 2nd, in the Wall Street Journal.
John William Godward, Dolce Far Niente
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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Henry Herbert La Thangue, Off to Work
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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James Holland, Interior, Milan Cathedral
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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