Here’s another crossword title that would do for any crossword whatsoever. It’s the second in a groundbreaking series I began withCrossword 113: “Can You Fill This Out?” I’m planning several sequels, including “Numbered Clues with Corresponding Answers,” “Across and Down,” and “It's Puzzling!” And all these titles are, of course, available for use with my blessing to novice constructors. It’s my way of making a contribution to the common good.
William Holbrook Beard, The Bulls and Bears in the Market
Bankers! If a dollar is worth a ducat, and I have dollars and want ducats, and I give a banker 1,000, or 1,000,000, dollars, the banker gives me, maybe, 970, or 970,000 ducats, pocketing the odd 30, or 30,000. And what has the banker done to earn 30,000 dollars, or even 30? A dollar (or a ducat) or two might cover the banker’s costs—a little time, some storage expenses, some postage maybe—but why this per-dollar assessment?
It’s a firm rule—one that some economist surely must have formalized somewhere—that in any system with money, the people who handle the money end up with the greatest share. Business executives, college administrators, bankers—they pocket the cash, while others make the widgets, and teach the classes, and construct the crosswords.
If this troubles you sometimes, if you’re a crossword-solving banker with an uneasy conscience, why not see whether generous donations to crossword-making non-bankers doesn’t have a soothing effect?
I’ve had it with the New York Times crossword! Also with the Wall Street Journal crossword, and the LA Times, and Universal, and all the independent little web-site crosswords, and in fact everybody’s crosswords but my own!
Why? I find that other people’s crosswords show a troubling disregard for my tastes, and preferences, and interests, and opinions, and areas of expertise. And this, I suspect, is because these crosswords are made by people other than me—or, if made by me, yet edited by people other than me.
So what’s to be done? I thought of writing an article, or even a daily blog, scolding these various crossword purveyors for their non-me-friendly content. But then I hit on a simpler solution: from now on, I’ll just do my own crosswords and nobody else’s. And I recommend that you, gentle solver, take the same principled course: give up those other crosswords and just do mine; cancel your crossword subscriptions and donate the money to me. Me.
When I started making crosswords, I tried to base them on knowledge and experience widely shared by potential solvers. But lately, influenced by trendsetters in the field, I’ve come to understand that my purpose ought rather to be to explore and celebrate myself, my own inner and essential identity. Now I wish that self were more—I don’t know—trendy, I guess—but what can I do? I was born this way.
Today’s puzzle, then, is a heartfelt expression of my self—as a reader of novels and a sometime resident of various Midwestern states. If you prefer short stories and come from the South, or poetry and live on the coast, well, too bad. Go make your own crossword.
Here’s another crossword which, though made like all my crosswords to endure forever, is nonetheless at the same time keenly focused on the present moment. A few weeks ago I made a puzzle on the topic of the general retreat (by those who can afford it) from the pandemic onto the internet; now here’s another, on that trend’s darker emotional consequences.
Are you indignant at the obscurity of this crossword’s base phrases? at the randomness of its substitutions? Are you tempted to compose an angry complaint? There’s no need! This crossword includes within itself its own outraged response! The 15 letters involved in its substitutions (either as replacing or replaced) can be anagrammatically rearranged into the terse but telling phrase, “Hate E Emotion Gag!”
The 70’s! Are you nostalgic for leisure suits? Pet rocks? Beanbag chairs? Disco dancing? Are you nostalgic for a time when bad presidents had to resign, and Covid-19 was unknown? Sorry; the title is just a pun. It’s 2020. Let us sob and solve together.
In the face of the pandemic, many of us are migrating, socially and professionally, to the internet. So here’s a crossword on that very topic, as fresh as this morning’s headlines!
And that’s not all! There are thirteen—count' em!—thirteen (13!) theme entries in this puzzle. Are you kicking yourself for paying other constructors actual money for crosswords that only have four or five or six theme entries? Or are you consoling yourself with some plausible story about theme entries not being everything, about the joy of trendy fill, or open grids, or whatever? Well, if so, I won’t interfere. Delude yourself if it makes you feel better. It’s all the same to me.
Speaking of auctions, I am offering the movie idea of 17 Across to the highest bidder. And hey! the movie idea I put on the market last September (seeCrossword 94) is still unclaimed. What’s wrong with you people?
Well, anyway, I hope you’re avoiding the contagion. If “social distancing” has you confined at home, there’s never been a better time to start in on the hundred and twenty one Victorian novels recommended elsewhere on this site—that is, after you’ve done all hundred and twenty one crosswords.
I’ve got a thirty-eight special, and a Colt forty-five, and a thirty-two-twenty, and a Winchester seventy-three, and a hard-shooting pistol just as long as my right arm, but, I don’t know, somehow I just don’t feel safe. . . .
Actually——that’s a joke! I’ve never used a gun. All right, I admit it, I’ve used STEN and UZI once or twice in a puzzle, and I used NRA (asWill Nedigerpoints out) just last week. But if any of you solvers out there have purchased a submachine gun, or joined the NRA, because you found these things mentioned in my puzzles, please, for your own sake as well as mine, return the gun, cancel the membership, and—why not?—donate the refund, or your next round of dues, to this website!
Guns bother me. They’re useful neither for self-protection (since the proverbial “bad guy with a gun” always enjoys the crucial advantage of surprise) nor for restraining undue government power (the US military has us all outgunned). So, as part of my world-improvement program (and a sort of sequel toCrossword 116) I’ve here turned them (or anyway the letters that compose their names) to more benign uses.
Here's a riddle: What Pakistani president's first name is a catchphrase used by Alicia Silverstone's character in the 1995 film Clueless? The answer is in this week’s puzzle's revealer!
“A miss is as good as a mile”—what an odd expression! “Miss” and “mile” are grammatically but not conceptually parallel. “Good” actually means “bad.” It’s a triumph of sound over sense, and therefore well suited to this web site.
My late foray into gritty realism seems not to have paid off: ad revenue is flat (at $0.00), circulation has not increased—and in fact I’ve decided to abandon the whole idea and return to my old sunshiny ways. So in today’s puzzle I turn again to my longstanding goal of bringing peace to a troubled world.
Two weeks ago I pushed this web site in a daring new direction, challenging aesthetic norms in order to engage with the gritty underside of the human condition. The critical plaudits I expected, however, have not arrived, at least not yet; so it’s time to double down, to go all in, to—what’s another tough-sounding idiom like that? I don’t know. Anyway, if you’re a complacent member of the bourgeoisie, prepare to be shocked!
Hey all you fledgling crossword constructors—are you stuck for a title? Well, no need to hunt up an online mentor to help you create one—just use mine! It fits my new crossword pretty well, but it has the virtue of also fitting any crossword whatsoever! I may use it again myself!
In various of my crosswords (for example, Nos.039,043,058) I have tried to brighten my little corner of the Internet by taking up unpleasant phrases and infusing them with harmless mirth. And where has it got me? I’ve heard nothing from the Nobel Committee. The MacArthur Foundation has been silent. Clearly my website needs an edge. So here goes!
In the scary world of the future, when everything is done by video, will literacy be necessary, or even useful? And what then will become of the Victorian novel recommendation? And what then will become of the crossword puzzle? Well, let’s enjoy them while we can.
So you’ve lived in the South all your life, and you don't talk this way, and you don’t know anybody who talks this way, and nothing annoys you so much as linguistic inaccuracy in sound-replacement crosswords, and in fact you’re still fuming aboutCrossword 054? Well, that’s too bad.
