Crossword 282: Oh, Why Bother?

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Why indeed?  Once we’ve met our basic needs, why bother to do anything?  Because the illusion of purpose, however ill-founded, is necessary to human contentment, that’s why.  We want to feel like we’re achieving  something.  We want to feel good about ourselves.  And if we don’t satisfy the impulse with something harmless, like the construction and solving of crosswords, we might be tempted to go around breaking things and hurting people.  If Genghis Khan, or Attila the Hun, had only had access to crosswords, what untold human suffering would the world have been spared!

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282-Oh,-Why-Bother?.puz

282-Oh,-Why-Bother?.pdf

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282 Oh, Why Bother?

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A crossword of mine will appear next Saturday, August 5, in The Wall Street Journal.

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Crossword 281: Bending Down

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Were you ever told, perhaps in a “physical education” class years ago, to bend down and touch your toes?  I was, and I still resent it: I found the operation not only painful but undignified; and it just didn’t seem worth doing—there are obviously much better ways of accessing one’s toes, if that’s what one wants to do.

Anyway, if you want for some reason to perform a “bending down” exercise but lack the strength, or the agility, or the will to do it with your body, this puzzle lets you do it, like a rational creature, with your mind.

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281-Bending-Down.puz

281-Bending-Down.pdf

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281 Bending Down

Crossword 279: Language Acquisition

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As I’ve said before, like all the best crossword constructors these days, I see my task as primarily one of social reform and human betterment.  And so, more than two years ago, in April 2020, I turned my attention to international affairs, with the purpose of promoting world peace (see Crossword 180).  But then I let the better part of a year go by without any further world-peace-promotion efforts, and in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine.  I ask myself now—why didn’t I do more? Am I not partly to blame?  So today I’m doubling down with a two-part crossword (replacing the multi-part series of years past) promoting the cause of international communication. I just hope I’m not too late!

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279a-Language-Acquisition, Part 1.puz

279a-Language-Acquisition, Part 1.pdf

279a-Language-Acquisition, Part 2.puz

279a-Language-Acquisition, Part 2.pdf

Solve this fortnight’s crosswords online:

279b Language Acquisition, Part 1

279b Language Acquisition, Part 2

Crossword 278: In Outer Space

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Two weeks ago, you’ll recall, I headed off for my native planet, from which, some years ago, I was sent in an effort to save the terrestrial crossword from becoming a dreary echo-chamber of self-congratulatory hipster citation, tribal signaling, and celebrity fandom.  My mission was to lead by example away from such folly.  I did my best, but I’m afraid I’ve failed. Someday maybe I’ll go back and try again. Meanwhile, here, via the interstellar internet, is another puzzle.

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278-In-Outer-Space.puz

278-In-Outer-Space.pdf

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278 In Outer Space

Crossword 277: Outer Space

Alfred Fowler Patten, The Child and the Star

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Had enough of this blighted ball, this suffering sphere, this ghastly globe?  Fly with me to outer space!  It’s time for me to confirm what you’ve long suspected.  How, you’ve asked yourselves and each other, could any mere earthling come up, fortnight after fortnight, with such brilliant puzzles?  In fact I come from the planet Lapnet—a happy place, where hipster slang, and euphemism, and jargon, and brand names, and paid athletes, and Hollywood celebrities, are unknown.

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277-Outer-Space.puz

277-Outer-Space.pdf

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277 In Outer Space

Crossword 276: Not Now

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Not now!  I’ll try to think up something to say about this week’s crossword eventually, but right now I’m just too busy.  It seems like everybody needs me all the time.  This person wants me to help with this thing, and that person wants my advice on that thing, and this other person hasn’t seen me in ages, and that other person thinks she may as well cancel the party if I don’t come.  People are counting on me, and I can’t let them down.  So I’m sorry—I’ve got to go right now; but I hope you like the puzzle anyway.

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276-Not Now.puz

276-Not Now.pdf

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276 Not Now

Crossword 275: Alien Invasion

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I pity the poverty of imagination that forces so many crossword constructors to draw on other people’s movies and television shows when they want to add to their puzzles some of the excitement of interstellar warfare.  Here, in the constraints of a 15 x 15 puzzle, with no outside assistance, I create my very  own science-fiction universe.  I expect an avalanche of Hollywood sequels, and commercial tie-ins, and fan-fiction sites, to follow in due course.

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275-Alien-Invasion.puz

275-Alien-Invasion.pdf

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275 Alien Invasion

Crossword 274: Specialists

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I am often asked, “Why are your crosswords so much better than other people’s crosswords?”  The answer—specialization!  As I’ve said before, “I” am (is?) not a single person, but a collective, diverse in age, and race, and gender, and everything else imaginable, including skills.  So there is a specialist for Down answers, and another, altogether different, specialist for Across answers; there are specialists for clues, for blocks, for partial phrases, for abbreviations.  An entire department, with its own vice-president, handles the crosswordese.  There is a letter-addition team and a letter-subtraction team, a punning team and a parsing team.  Doesn’t this cost a lot?  Sure it does!  But you the solver deserve the best, and here at David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade and Victorian Novel Recommender, the best is just what you always get.

Special thanks to test-solver Charles Montpetit for coming up with some of the theme material in today’s puzzle.

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274-Specialists.puz

274-Specialists.pdf

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274 Specialists

Crossword 273: Running Short

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What with supply-chain issues and some strategic downsizing, our store of words has been sadly depleted.  A long course of severe weather has shut down the mines from which we imported most of our homophones. And of course a small concern like ours can’t hope to compete with the big players while the global anagram shortage keeps driving up prices.  So for now we’re going to have to make do with fewer theme answers and smaller words, such as you’ll find in today’s puzzle.

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273-Running Short.puz

273-Running Short.pdf

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273 Running Short

Crossword 272: Out of the Past

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Have you seen “Out of the Past”—the 1947 movie directed by Jacques Tourneur, starring Robert MItchum, Jane Greer, and Kirk Douglas, adapted by Daniel Mainwaring from his 1946 novel?  If not, do so right away!  It’s one of the best movies ever made!  I had to watch it half a dozen times to figure out its plot (and there are still some points I’m not quite clear on), but I enjoyed it every time.  I’d have hired the same cast and director for this puzzle, if puzzles had casts and directors, and if they weren’t all dead.

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272-Out-of-the-Past.puz

272-Out-of-the-Past.pdf

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272 Out of the Past

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A crossword of mine appears Friday, March 17, in Universal Crossword

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Crossword 271: A Plus

William Powell Frith, A Dream of the Future

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Only after I gave this puzzle its title did I remember having already made a crossword called “A Minus” (Crossword 005). Someday soon I’ll construct a puzzle and find, to my horror, that it’s exactly the same puzzle—in theme, grid, fill, and clues—as the one I constructed last year, or month, or week.  And when that happens I’ll put an end to this website at last and turn to my other lifelong dream—mastering the accordion.

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271-A-Plus.puz

271-A-Plus.pdf

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271 A Plus

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A crossword of mine will appear Saturday, March 4, in the Wall Street Journal.

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Crossword 270: Me First

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Many advanced young crossword constructors pride themselves on making puzzles that, as they put it, “Look like me.”  I’m going them one better this week, with a puzzle that not only looks like me, but has me in it! I’m putting me first, for a change!  It’s me time!  It’s all about me!  Me!  I’ll let you solve this one; but I’m thinking about moving towards a system where I make puzzles only about me, exclusively for me.

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270-Me-First.puz

270-Me-First.pdf

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270 Me First

Crossword 269: Wild Animals

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We tried to set up a wildlife refuge here at David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade and Fortnightly Victorian Novel Recommender, out behind the smithy next to the organic garden.  But the deer kept eating the arugula, and the lions kept eating the deer, so we had to give it up.

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269-Wild-Animals.puz

269-Wild-Animals.pdf

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269 Wild Animals

Crossword 267: Happy New Year!

Frank Cadogan Cowper, Vanity

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For more than five years I’ve been providing the world with a weekly Victorian novel recommendation and a weekly crossword puzzle. I thought that by now I’d be universally known and beloved. But I’m not, it seems. No one, on hearing my name at a retail outlet or on a customer-service line, has ever exclaimed, “What! No! Not the David Alfred Bywaters!” No street, however short or obscure, has been renamed in my honor. I haven’t been given a Nobel prize; I haven’t been given even a MacArthur “genius” grant, or an honorary degree.

I think that maybe I’ve been too generous, that I’ve made the world ungrateful by kinder treatment than it merits. So I’ve decided, with the new year, to post weekly not both a new crossword and a new Victorian novel recommendation, but either a new crossword or a new Victorian novel recommendation. Next Saturday, then, you’ll find on this site a novel recommendation, and the Saturday after that a new crossword, and so on and on, until my vanity is gratified, or until I grow tired of the whole business altogether.

Meanwhile, happy new year!

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267-Happy-New-Year!.puz

267-Happy-New-Year!.pdf

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267 Happy New Year!

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A crossword of mine will appear Wednesday, January 4, in the Wall Street Journal, and another Sunday, January 8, in the Los Angeles Times.

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Crossword 266: Be Jolly!

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Hey, lads and lasses, the old year passes!  Deck those halls!  See that blazing yule!  Don that gay apparel!  Troll that ancient carol!  Maybe you struggle to remember that ancient carol?  Well, I used to have that problem too.  “Boughs of holly . . . what?  what comes after ‘holly’?  what’s the next line?,” I’d find myself wondering, again and again, while the merry measure went on without me.  Then I hit on a mnemonic that has never failed me since.  I enshrine it in this week’s crossword, as my gift to you.

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266-Be-Jolly!.puz

266-Be-Jolly!.pdf

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266 Be Jolly!

Crossword 264: Where Did You Go?

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Where did you go?  You didn’t fall for the blandishments of those other crossword constructors, did you?  Well, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if you did.  Since this website’s inception many years ago (Obama was still president!) thousands of new constructors have appeared on the internet; in fact, every thirty seconds someone puts a new crossword online; and if current trends continue, by the year 2025 fully 50% of all internet words will originate in crossword puzzle clues or answers.  Meanwhile, the number of crossword solvers has fallen precipitously: already constructors outnumber solvers by a ratio of three to one.  So, if you didn’t go, don’t! I need you!

Today’s puzzle is a kind of sequel of my Los Angeles Times puzzle of November 18 (available for the time being in the LAT puzzle archive at www.cruciverb.com)—in case you were wondering how that came out.  If you didn’t happen to see that puzzle, however, don’t worry; this one is sufficient unto itself.

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264-Where-Did-You-Go?.puz

264-Where-Did-You-Go?.pdf

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264 Where Did You Go?

Crossword 263: Teaser Rates

Augustus Leopold Egg, A Teasing Riddle

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I confess that when I applied the title “Teaser Rates” to this puzzle, I wasn’t sure exactly of the phrase’s meaning.  Was it a sibling-behavior phenomenon studied by child psychologists?  Was it a metric for hair salon workers whose compensation is based in part on the size of their tonsorial creations?  It turns out that, like the title of Crossword 144, it’s just another dubious financial practice.  So it sounds more fun than it is—like so many things in life. But not like this puzzle!

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263-Teaser-Rates.puz

263-Teaser-Rates.pdf

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263 Teaser Rates

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A crossword of mine appears Thursday, December 8, in the Los Angeles Times.

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Novel 263: Lady Georgiana Fullerton, Ellen Middleton (1844)

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A bad man manipulates a weak, fearful woman.

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Here is another novel by Fullerton (see Novel 019), again featuring a woman helplessly enmeshed in impossible dilemmas.

“It is . . . finely natural, discriminating in tracing the movements of the human heart, affording admirable contrasts, and being touchingly pathetic. . . .  The . . . author . . . passionately unfolds the wretchedness of a soul in mortal agony through doubt, uncertainty, crushing oppression, and irresistible despair.  It is, indeed, a tale of woe, with little or no relief; and all who do not shun the luxury of tears over the pictures of fiction will hasten to their delineation here by a pencil of the deepest interest and potent effect.  The finale is most affecting; and what precedes and makes it inevitable is yet more forcible.” Literary Gazette, May 11, 1844

Fullerton “has shown a depth of observation surprising in so young a writer; the power of sustaining a strong and simple interest; a taste for homely portraiture; and a wholesome contempt of the trival follies of what are called fashionable subjects.” Examiner, June 1, 1844

A contrasting view:

“This novel is the work of a clever and accomplished writer, possessed of considerable skill in the conduct of a story and the management of dialogue; and as such it cannot be read without some gratification.  Its grand defect is the almost unmitigated monotony of wretchedness pervading the tale of misery.  Its wearisome painfulness is not lessened by the purely constructive woes of its heroine; neither do the artful ingenuity and verisimilitude of the details hide the improbability of the main circumstances or the inconsistency of conduct in the principal persons. . . .  The vein of religious sentiment running through the work is out of place in a fiction not involving matters of creed and opinion. . . . The pathos is of a morbid larmoyante kind—disagreeable without being exciting.” Spectator, May 18, 1844

Download this week’s novel:

v.1 https://archive.org/details/ellenmiddletonta01full

v.2 https://archive.org/details/ellenmiddletonta02full

v.3 https://archive.org/details/ellenmiddletonta03full

Crossword 262: Remedial Reading

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We’ve mentioned before the benefits this website is designed to confer on elderly solvers, whose incipient dementia will be held at bay by the mental gymnastics it requires.  We haven’t, however, dwelt as much on its benefits for very young solvers, whose struggles at reading will be eased by the insight it provides into the inner workings of language and meaning.  In fact, every puzzle is subjected to intense review by two focus groups, one of 80-year-olds, one of 8-year-olds, and carefully shaped in response to their experience.  And that’s why four out of five geriatricians and nine out of ten pediatricians recommend this website.

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262-Remedial-Reading.puz

262-Remedial-Reading.pdf

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262 Remedial Reading

Crossword 261: An Alphabetical Cavalcade of Crosswordese

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We conclude this website’s fifth year as we have concluded the other four—with a 21 x 21 “Cavalcade of Crosswordese” (see Crosswords 052, 104, 156, 208): a puzzle featuring words overused in crosswords because of their convenience to constructors, combined into hilariously unexpected phrases.  As if this weren’t enough to satisfy the most demanding solver (and of course it is), this year we’ve alphabetized the words in each phrase, and the phrases overall in the puzzle, a service that we alone, of all crossword constructors, have ever, to our knowledge, provided.

Maybe, grateful as you are for yet another year of puzzles and Victorian novel recommendations, you feel a sort of an urge to do something, but you just don’t know what. Well, here’s an idea!  Click the “Donate” button below and give us a trifling sum of money (you may also donate through PayPal or Venmo using our 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.

Now mind—whether you give us anything or not, we’ll just go right on making crosswords and Victorian novel recommendations till we feel we’ve made enough. It’s entirely a matter between you and your conscience, assuming you’re troubled by such a thing at all.   

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Donate

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261-Alphabetical-Cavalcade-of-Crosswordese.puz

261-Alphabetical-Cavalcade-of-Crosswordese.pdf

261-Alphabetical-Cavalcade-of-Crosswordese (2 pages).pdf

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261 Alphabetical Cavalcade of Crosswordese