Katie Orlinsky for The New York Times John Douglas Thompson as Othello and Juliet Rylance as Desdemona in “Othello” at the Duke Theatre on Broadway.TUESDAY’S PUZZLE — We have a very funny guest today, so I’m going to keep my own comments brief.
This is a very cool puzzle. The theme goes deeper than the ordinary horizontal, long entry theme. There are those, too, of course, but they all add to the pattern of circles that traipse across the grid. When you’re finished, you might feel like humming. Or tickling the ivories. Providing the ivories don’t mind.
In nontheme entry news, I found the southwest particularly entertaining, with the crossing of SEEDY and SCUZZ. I also liked seeing SIC ‘EM BOY in the grid, although good luck trying to command Rex Parker to do anything, Mr. Newton. Oh, sorry. I think he meant it to be a canine command.
Merrill Markoe is a very funny writer, and she has accomplished so much that it is hard to know what to highlight. You’ve read her books, seen her on television and listened to her on radio. She has won Emmy awards for, among other things, Late Night with David Letterman, and she was an on-air reporter for Michael Moore’s TV Nation and Not Necessarily the News. Merrill’s partner, Andy Prieboy, is a talented musician (he is a former member of the group Wall of Voodoo) and an author, having co-written The Psycho Ex Game with Merrill for Random House.
Merrill Markoe’s Solving Notes:
The only reason I can think of to explain why I am not usually a regular at the crossword puzzle party is that as a writer I spend my days locked in a catacomb, hiding from a horde of angry, incomplete sentences of my own design. Also, I am way behind on my YouTube videos of people feeding capybaras.
But I was so looking forward to doing this puzzle that the moment it arrived Tuesday evening at about 6 I invited my partner, singer-songwriter Andy Prieboy, to spend some time helping me solve it. I imagined a rousing back and forth, since we both work with words for a living. We would conquer it quickly, then feel smart, important and smug.
That lasted until I read the first nine Across clues out loud and learned that the only one we knew for sure was the name of an actress.
“Come on!” I said to Andy, “You know war stuff. Who or what is a five-letter “Sioux Adversary?”
“Look it up online” he replied, sounding edgy.
“I don’t think we’re allowed to use the Internet,” I said.
“Who’s going to know?” he shot back, ”This reminds me of homework. Let’s just do whatever it takes and get it over with.”
In a few short minutes, we had both reverted to our eighth-grade personalities. I was afraid of getting a bad grade and he had become surly. So I did a quick Google search, hoping it wasn’t considered cheating, only to find that some actual eighth grader had entered “The Krawdjasndjgnfg” under ‘Sioux adversary’ on Answer.com.
“My brain doesn’t work this way,” Andy fumed, heading back to his war video games. “I’m going to land on Normandy Beach. Have fun finding a seven-letter word for composite board.”
After he left, and I quickly identified a Pulitzer Prize winner, a writer and a volleyball champion, my optimism returned and I became obsessed with finishing the rest of the puzzle. The more I accomplished, the more obsessed I became.
By 10 that night, when Andy wandered back in, high from a few hours of virtual bloodshed, I was about 75 percent done. “But I still don’t understand the clues inside these circles,” I complained, “I can see an alphabetical pattern but I don’t get how it works.”
Andy stood staring down at the puzzle over my shoulder for a few seconds, then laughed out loud, pointed to the letters and began to sing what he saw. In that moment, he also unlocked the solution to a couple of other clues that had me completely stumped. And now that the puzzle wanted to play with Andy, it had also become his friend. By about 11:30, he had filled in all the rest of the blanks.
And thus did we end our evening as I had hoped: feeling smart and important, if not very smug. Though I’m still kind of proud we only used the Internet once.
Thanks for playing, Merrill and Andy!
Your thoughts?
You can now download and print the popular variety puzzles from the Sunday magazine free online. Look below for links to this week’s puzzle as well as answers to last week’s.
Deb Amlen is a humorist and puzzle constructor whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and other mainstream media. The puzzles she creates for The Onion and Bust Magazine, however, would never fly at The New York Times. Sorry, Mom.
Numberplay is a puzzle suite that will be presented in Wordplay every Monday. The puzzles, which are created by Pradeep Mutalik and made their debut on TierneyLab, are generally mathematical or logical problems, with occasional forays into physics and other branches of science. Every post also includes a word challenge. 