David Alfred Bywaters's Crossword Cavalcade & Fortnightly Victorian Novel Recommender. Every Saturday! Either a new language-torturing puzzle or an old novel by an unjustly neglected Victorian author. Why waste time on other amusements?

Crossword 340: Things Are Getting Tense

Cecil Gordon Lawson, Battle Scene Outside a Town
Cecil Gordon Lawson, Battle Scene Outside a Town

Things are getting tense here at David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade and Fortnightly Victorian Novel Recommender.  The homophone faction is no longer on speaking terms with the homonym faction, while the parsing faction is threatening to break off and start its own site.  Meanwhile, on the novel side, the female-novelist recommenders have made common cause against the male-novelist recommenders, each side rejecting out of hand my calls for mutual civility and reasoned debate, on the grounds that the bigotry motivating the other side deserves no consideration.  We have, in short, devolved into a state of hopeless partisan rancor.  How has this happened?  I blame social media, artificial intelligence, online pornography, capitalism, forever chemicals, digital currency, and food dyes.

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340-Things-Are-Getting-Tense.puz

340-Things-Are-Getting-Tense.pdf

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340 Things Are Getting Tense