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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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204-Afterthoughts.puz

204-Afterthoughts.pdf

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204 Afterthoughts

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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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202-Aw,-How-Cute!.puz

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202 Aw, How Cute!

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I went to Pismo Beach once.  I was driving with friends from San Francisco to Los Angeles 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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201-Pismo-Batch.puz

201-Pismo-Batch.pdf

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201 Pismo Batch

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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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200-Something-To-See.puz

200-Something-To-See.pdf

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200 Something To See

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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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199-Breakers-Ahead.puz

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199 Breakers Ahead

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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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198-Let's-Have-a-Good-Cry.puz

198-Let's-Have-a-Good-Cry.pdf

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198 Let’s Have a Good Cry

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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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197-Neither-In-Nor-Out.puz

197-Neither-In-Nor-Out.pdf

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197 Neither In Nor Out

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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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194 A-Do-or-Die-Situation.puz

194 A-Do-or-Die-Situation.pdf

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194 A Do or Die Situation

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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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193-Identity-Crisis.puz

193-Identity-Crisis.pdf

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193 Identity Crisis

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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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192-Inner-Sancta.puz

192-Inner-Sancta.pdf

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192 Inner Sancta

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Today’s crossword concludes this year’s series. The final entry presents a mirror-image counterpart of the first—just one of the more obvious manifestations of the intricate structure of meaning that informs this web site; and a good point of entry for scholars hoping to tease out its multiple, richly interwoven strands of semiotic implication.

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191-Ha-Ha.puz

191-Ha-Ha.pdf

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191 Ha Ha

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Hoo boy it was hard to find theme answers for this puzzle, especially since Sutton Hoo was ineligible, because of its association with offensive weaponry and violent death, two of the many things I’m trying to stamp out by not putting them in crossword puzzles (another is “medical malpractice,” which, along with “Woody Allen,” and “bisphenol-A,” I’ve managed to keep out of all my puzzles to date).

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190-Hoo-Ha.puz

190-Hoo-Ha.pdf

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190 Hoo Ha

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At the beginning of every summer I’ve featured on this website a ground-breaking, norm-shattering series of crosswords.  Three years ago I engaged in a six-part existential meditation-in-crosswords on the nature of being (Crosswords 029-034).  Next, in a four-part series (Crosswords 081-084), I examined the deep syntactic structures that underlie our language, determining not just how we make meaning, but what we can mean.  Last year I sounded a warning in three puzzles against the encroachment of decadence in our society (Crosswords 135-137).  And last week I embarked on an exploration, which continues today, of the essence of comedy—illustrated with paintings by John Atkinson GrimsHAw whose titles also contain the consecutive letters HA.  Interspersed with these will be recommendations for the nine volumes of Frances Trollope’s laughter-inducing Widow Barnaby trilogy, illustrated with paintings by Frederick Daniel HArdy.

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189-Yee-Ha.puz

189-Yee-Ha.pdf

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189 Yee Ha

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One of the great satisfactions of the crossword—the sense of understanding something that has confused or mystified us—is provided as well by the conventional Victorian novel.  And this is so satisfying a satisfaction because it’s what life itself so often, so implacably denies us.  Where did this go?  Why did that happen?  What’s the point of everything?  We don’t ever get to figure it out.  But we do get to figure out that the governess was actually the evil baronet’s daughter by his first wife, and that 49 Down is GMBH.

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188-Ah-Ha.puz

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188 Ah Ha

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Here’s a joke!  Q: “What do you give irregular armies?”—A: “PX-Lax”  Get it?  Ha ha! I just thought that one up.  Funny, huh?  No?  Well, don’t worry, it has nothing whatever to do with the puzzle below.

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187-Irregular-Armies.puz

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187 Irregular Armies

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Every human endeavor attracts an in-group:  people who know what’s up, and who’s who, and how to signal to each other over the heads of the ignorant crowd.  So it is with  crosswords.  And are you wondering who sits at the center of the crossword world, posing smugly as the arbiter of cruciverbal fashion, setting trends, attracting unearned admiration, inspiring fear of unearned contempt?  Well, I’ll tell you:  it’s me!  I’m so far in that most solvers barely know about me;  only the cognoscenti truly  appreciate me.  Maybe you’re one of them?  If so, enjoy the attached puzzle, and sneer confidently at those dull-witted, commonplace solvers who still think the New York Times is cool.

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186-In-Group.puz

186-In-Group.pdf

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186 In Group

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Yes, we’re taking the easy way out again.  Someday I’ll stuff my puzzles full of things you’ll feel bad about not knowing.  Someday I’ll make my theme answers turn corners, and double back on themselves, and run outside the grid, and use the black squares in odd ways, and otherwise require all sorts of reinterpretation, so that, though they look like random assemblages of letters in the grid, they turn out (once you’ve discovered the trick) to be the names of celebrities you ought to admire.  Someday.  But not today.

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185-Taking-the-Easy-Way-Out.puz

185-Taking-the-Easy-Way-Out.pdf

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185 Taking the Easy Way Out

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Did you ever have to read Moby Dick?  It was justly panned by discriminating contemporaries (an “ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact . . . disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English,” said the Athenaeum; “the soliloquies and dialogues of Ahab, in which the author attempts delineating the wild imaginings of monomania, and exhibiting some profoundly speculative views of things in general, induce weariness or skipping,” said the Spectator).  But then some misguided cabal of English professors, at some point in the 20th century, contrived to make it required reading, and generations of students have paid a heavy price.  53 Across is a terse comment on the incalculable suffering induced by ill-judged curricular decisions.

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184-On-End.puz

184-On-End.pdf

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184 On End

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Henry Stacey Marks, Where Is It?

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I don’t know. . . .  I’m completely at a loss. . . .  I’m pretty sure I was about to say something—something pretty important, too—but I just can’t remember what it was.

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183-Um....puz

183-Um....pdf

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183 Um…

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Charles Robert Leslie, Children Playing at Coach and Horses

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Why can’t we all just get along?  What’s wrong with people, that they’re always fighting about one thing or another?  I blame irresponsible crossword constructors.  How many times have you, gentle solver, awakened in the morning full of warm, happy feelings about the entire human race, and then, in the course of solving your daily crosswords, encountered some word that made you hate everybody?  I can’t be sure I haven’t included such a word in the puzzle below (it’s hard to predict just what might set a person off—for me, it’s “alii”), but if I have, I hope to have counteracted the effect with my theme, which fosters a whole new kind of cooperation.

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182-Extraordinary-Cooperation.puz

182-Extraordinary-Cooperation.pdf

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182 Extraordinary Cooperation