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Edwin Longsden Long, The Chosen Five
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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A crossword of mine appears today in the Wall Street Journal.
Edmund George Warren, Crossing the Brook
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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A crossword of mine will appear tomorrow, May 29, in the Los Angeles Times.
George Bernard O'Neill, “Cheer up!”
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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John Everett Millais, Hearts are Trumps
Are you one of those good-natured solvers who claims to be “glad to learn about” some proper name or obscure fact that made some crossword difficult or impossible for you to complete? As a solver myself, I don’t share this gladness: I am never glad to learn, for example, that the actor who portrayed a character I’ve never heard of on a TV show I’ve never wanted to watch has such-and-such a first name. But as a constructor, I am, like all constructors, in debt to such solvers: and whenever I’m attacked for obscure crossword fill, I’m happy to claim that I’m just telling people things that they are, or should be, “glad to learn about.”
If you’re one of these easily gladdened solvers, I apologize for what may seem a certain lack of educational fill in this puzzle. There’s a writer at 67 Across and a Spanish word at 46 Across, but both are pretty well known. I’ll make up for this lack, however, right now, by telling you four things about “aces” I just learned myself from the internet.
1. The University of Illinois calls its College of Agricultural, Consumer & Enviornmental Sciences “ACES.”
2. A military airplane pilot qualifies as an “ace” only after destroying at least five enemy airplanes.
3. Some psychologists refer to adverse childhood experiences as “ACEs.”
4. Ace Hardware was founded in Chicago in 1924 by Richard Hesse, E. Gunnard Lindquist, Frank Burke, Oscar Fisher, and William Stauber.
Are you glad to have learned about these things? Well, I confess that I am not—but I am glad that there are people in the world who are.
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David Bates, An Oasis in the Desert
As we trudge down life’s weary way, our point of origin forgotten, our destination unknown, the sun beating down on us, sand in our eyes, sores on our feet, oppressed alternately by boredom and by dread—isn’t it nice to have a new crossword every week?
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A crossword of mine will appear Monday, May 9, in the Los Angeles Times.
John Everett Millais, Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind
We all got together without even telling you, much less inviting you, and decided that, for the future, you weren’t ever going to be invited again. A few suggested that maybe, out of pity, you might be allowed just to watch every now and then, when nothing very important was going on, but they were quickly and easily talked down. Sorry.
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James Sant, Self-Portrait
Success in any worldly endeavor—art, literature, law, dentistry, even crossword-constructing—depends on two things: a talent for self-promotion, and blind luck. To be sure, it doesn’t hurt—may even, in some cases, help—to do well the thing that you profess to do. But if you don’t know the right people, or if, knowing them, you don’t know how to persuade them of your ability, actually possessing that ability will avail you nothing; whereas if you do know these things, you don’t need actually to know anything else—even how to paint, write, litigate, fix teeth, or make crosswords. We here at David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade and Victorian Novel Recommender have no ambition for success in anything but living well and doing good. But maybe you crave more solid rewards; if so, here’s a crossword that will give you some practice in self-promotion.
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George Cole, At the End of the Day
Rear ends have always been funny (see Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale” for an early example in English), but rear-enders haven’t—until now! This week’s puzzle is one more installment in my effort to make everything funny. Next week: mildew!
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A crossword of mine appears Thursday, April 21, in the Wall Street Journal.
William Powell Frith, Ramsgate Sands
There certainly is a lot going on in this week’s crossword, much of which will, I fear, escape the superficial observer. Like all my puzzles, of course, this one shapes society by including things I recommend (like garden statuary) and excluding things I deplore (like nuclear waste). But beyond that, it initiates several conversations we all need to be having these days—about the commercial appropriation of our wetlands, about big tech, about political polarization. I hope you’ll give it the close attention it deserves, even if it challenges some of your most deeply held habits and beliefs. Only through such ruthless self-interrogation can you hope to grow, not just as a solver, but as a human being.
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William Dyce, The Descent of Venus
Do you ever get the impression that people aren’t being entirely honest with you—that their stories are fabricated, their professions hollow, their affection feigned? Do you ever wonder whether in fact everybody else in the world is just a cleverly designed automaton, part of an experiment of which you, the only real person, are the subject? It would explain so much, wouldn’t it? Well, stop thinking this way—it isn’t healthy! We have a nice little crossword puzzle for you. Solve it; you’ll feel better.
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A crossword of mine will appear tomorrow, April 3, in the Los Angeles Times.
Alfred Elmore, The Origin of the Combing Machine
What did the aging man use to hide his bald spot? A replacement part! Get it? With the clue “comb-over consequence?” I’m going to put that phrase in a funny hairstyles-themed crossword, as soon as I think up three more funny-hairstyle puns of symmetrical length. Meanwhile the phrase will do, in the plural, as a title for today’s puzzle.
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John Atkinson Grimshaw, The Last Gleam
Have you duly considered, mortal solver, that everything you now see will someday disappear? That the sun, by the light of which you see everything, will itself disappear? Of course, by the time that happens you will have ceased either to see or to be seen—and have you thought about that lately, solver, really thought about it? Would you like to think about it? Or would you rather do a crossword puzzle?
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A crossword of mine appears Wednesday, March 16, in the Wall Street Journal.
Jessica Hayllar, House Cleaning
This puzzle contains some of the filthiest puns ever to appear in any crossword! They affront the finer feelings! They set good taste at defiance! In fact, you probably shouldn’t even open this puzzle!
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Frederick Walker, Old Letters
I feel sad for the double space, the typographical equivalent of the horse-drawn carriage, of the dial telephone, of the compact disc, of the former planet Pluto, once so very important to anyone who cared about transportation, or telephones, or music, or planets, and now in a fair way of being utterly forgotten. So here’s a tribute, for those who remember how, in a world of fixed-width type, the double space used to follow humbly but honestly after the period, the question mark, and the exclamation point.
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James Collinson, Organ Grinder with Dog
I had this really great idea for a crossword that would offer a radically new template for social change based on string theory filtered through a Zen understanding of human subjectivity—but then that dog downstairs started barking again.
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Philip Calderon, Home After Victory
I was feeling a little low recently, when the thought struck me—maybe I hadn’t been spending enough time and energy on self-congratulation! It’s a main theme of my remarks on this web site, of course, and I don’t stint on it during my daily routine, assuring myself, as I read the news especially, that my impulses are purer, my thoughts nobler, my opinions more righteous, than most anybody else’s. But lately that just hasn’t been enough. So I began this week’s puzzle with a self-congratulatory title, and then, with every theme answer I devised (having imposed stricter limits on myself than other constructors, and having arrived nonetheless at cleverer answers), with every word I added to the fill (having given due attention to deserving people and resolutely ignored their undeserving counterparts), with every clue I wrote (having alluded to many things that the average solver will feel uncool for not knowing), I shouted, “Ta da!” I invite you to join me in this exercise, and shout “Ta da!” (in your heart, if you aren’t alone) with every word you solve. We’ll all feel better about ourselves, and that’s what crosswords are for.
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Edward John Poynter, Cave of the Storm Nymphs
The inspiration for this puzzle, at 17 Across, was an actual true-life experience that really happened to me! It’s another example of this uncanny ability I have to elevate the sordid miseries of the human condition into the realm of transcendent art.
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James Jacques Joseph Tissot, The Captain and the Mate
This puzzle speaks for itself; so I’ll devote this space not to praising my own work, but attacking that of other constructors—specifically those constructors who don’t exercise reasonable restraint in fill related to “Star Wars.” LEIA is fine, I suppose, and HAN, though I prefer the Chinese dynasty. ARTOO is useful, but a casual watcher of only the first two movies (me, for example) will remember the name as R2D2. “There is no try,” commonly used in YODA clues, is maybe the stupidest, most annoyingly meaningless adage ever fobbed off as wisdom by anyone anywhere. But what really infuriates me is WOOKIEE. Everybody in “Star Wars” speaks English, though that is presumably not the language of the galaxy far, far away in which the series is set. That language is, one must suppose, being translated, and—since its speakers presumably did not coincidentally invent the Roman alphabet—transliterated as well, into English. But what possible rule of transliteration would explain the soundless extra E at the end of WOOKIEE? It doesn’t make any sense. Why torment the solver with it? Let’s everybody stop.
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Edwin Longsden Long, An Egyptian Feast
This was going to begin a series of puzzles featuring the major Egyptian deities, but nobody understood the other one I made, “Isis,” an experimental crossword in which “is” just is—that is, in which phrases containing the word “is” continue to contain the word “is” and so are not altered in any way. It was to be the crossword equivalent of Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, or John Cage’s 4'33''. Oh well, it will remain among my unpublished works, to be appreciated when posterity has at last begun to make up for the incomprehension of my contemporaries.
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Lord Frederic Leighton, Greek Girls Playing at Ball
So I filled 1 Down shamelessly with slang I made up myself for the purpose of completing this crossword’s theme. What of it? Why shouldn’t I make up my own slang, so long as it’s inferable? In fact, as a solver I would rather have inferable made-up slang than the real but abstruse “modern slang” that seems ever more common in crosswords—slang current exclusively in some subculture that savvy solvers congratulate themselves for appreciating while the rest of us scratch our poor heads.
Nothing seems to me more likely to kill the fun of crosswords than this new idea, which I’ve seen in more than one place where crosswords are discussed, that the pleasure of crossword-solving comes mainly from the recognition of allusions in the grid to the interests of one’s particular in-group. In fact, the specialized you-know-it-or-you-don’t trivia one encounters in crosswords—whether botanical species or brand names, Russian rivers or social media fads, learned arcana or celebrity gossip—is not a merit but a blemish imposed by the constraints of the form and the limits of the language. Let’s all start being properly ashamed of it again.
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