Doug Mills/The New York TimesPresident Obama talks with families at the White House.Administrivial NOTEPAD Alert!: There is a notepad in today’s Across Lite version of the puzzle that says: “Some of the black squares in this puzzle’s grid provide a hint to the four longest Down answers.” Now that you have the hint, proceed in an orderly fashion through the puzzle and upon finishing, please wait until this post has come to a full and complete stop to exit the blog.
THURSDAY’S PUZZLE — Maybe it’s just me, but I have trouble making out some of the black square graphics that constructors hide in their grids. I do fine with the Sundays, like this amazing one by Liz Gorski of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, but it’s especially tough to do it clearly in a 15×15 puzzle. Not to worry, though; I finally figured out today’s pattern. It wasn’t anything a little old-fashioned staring at the paper for a really, really long time couldn’t fix.
So it turns out that I actually did this backwards (not the first time in my life I’ve done things that way.) According to the Notepad (you did read the Notepad, right?), the graphic is supposed to be a hint to the long Down entries. Instead, I started filling in the long Down entries based on the crossings, and after getting two of them, looked at the graphic again and said, “Ooooooohhhhh.” Did you get it as well? I’m going to leave it to you to figure out, but I’ll give you a few extra hints on the non-theme entries, and maybe you’ll back into the meaning behind the graphic, too. On the other hand, maybe you did it the way it was meant to be solved.
I’m always mesmerized by the art of ORIGAMI, and “Paper tiger, e.g.” is a very clever clue.
Where Joel Fagliano was thinking mineral deposits or OXIDE for “Lime, e.g.”, I was thinking MARGARITA GARNISH, but of course that didn’t fit. Maybe next time.
It’s been at least a few years since I took the SATs, so I had forgotten it had ten sections.
I’M MAD is a perfectly nice entry for a crossword puzzle, but I never would have guessed that >:( conveys being ticked off. Satan, maybe.
We’ve got REEFER madness in the puzzle! “One getting hit on at a party” is a brilliant clue. I especially liked the fact that SMOKE was right on top of it.
Finally, as a pure coincidence, following on the heels of one of the biggest news stories in recent history — the assassination of Osama bin Laden by U.S. forces — we have BARACK and U. S. OF A. at 46 and 57 Down respectively. I read somewhere that the fact that President Obama was wearing golf shoes in the Oval Office the day of the strike was a tip-off to some that something big was about to happen. Normally, the president returns to his residence after hitting the links and changes into work clothes, but that day he went straight to work. So our lesson for the day is this: If you see President Obama strolling around in his golf shoes, run like heck.
Your thoughts?
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.
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.
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.