I feel like procrastinating right now. I'm a quarter of the way through a hellish 3 days of 4 exams, but I feel good about tomorrow's Combinatorics, because the class is largely a bad joke. I've decided I want to continue this blog, even though it was a travel blog and I'm no longer traveling. A recent NPR study say bloggers are happier and I could use a cheer lift. If you're seeing this for the first time from the link on my Facebook page, which apparently still happens, then you can find blogs about my time in China from June to August of 2008. I'd like to call that section "Tanked in Tiananmen." Posts about studying abroad and traveling in Europe go from September to January 2008, and I've called that section "From East to West and nowhere in between" but I'm sure I could think of a more clever name. Something like "Pinting Away" or...I actually really can't come up with much, open to suggestions?
So this blog will cover whatever pertinent thoughts I have, although I'll try not to bore anyone with personal stuff. I'll write about sports, observations, philosophy, whatever but I really wanted to put up a site for my crosswords and talk about that a little bit. There are a fair amount of crossword blogs out there, including an official New York Times one: http://wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com/ There is always a lot of stuff to discuss in crosswords and I find it a shame that sometimes the cleverer aspects of crosswords go undiscovered.
By the way, I don't know if I ever mentioned this on the blog, but one of my hobbies/activities is writing crosswords. The technical term is cruciverbalism, which is really pretentious but clever (Latin cross + word). It's a weird and totally random hobby and I get asked a lot how I got into making them. I generally say I got interested in solving crosswords after watching the movie "Word Play" (which I highly recommend) after graduating high school, which inspired me to aspire to solving crosswords at a very fast level. Well I still haven't really accomplished that - some people are surprised to learn that I am not that good at solving them. I can do a NYTimes Monday and Tuesday with relative ease, but a Wednesday requires arduous effort and I'd be lucky to get halfway through a Thursday. However, it seems I may have been meant to be a writer all along. I really began fiddling around with my own grid freshman year and by the end of the year I had finished a 13x13 puzzle where the theme answers were VILLAGECWEST and SEVENTHFLOOR, my freshman year home. I did that puzzle entirely by hand, drawing a grid and erasing so many times the paper nearly broke. It wasn't great but it took a lot of effort, and convinced me that I should buy a crossword formatting program and do this for real next year. I saw puzzles in the Georgetown Voice and occasionally did them - they weren't symmetrical and I really thought I could do better.
However, I've realized this year that the process started much earlier. In 3rd grade, we learned vocabulary through "crossword puzzles," which were really more like glorified fill in the blanks. You know those puzzles where each word might have one or two or at most three words intersecting it? Well even then I remember trying to create one of my own one day, and trying to make as many intersections as possible. Then as a senior in high school, before I could really solve them or knew that they were symmetrical, I tried messing around with a grid. None of those efforts ever amounted to anything but I think I've always had an inclination towards cruciverablism. I don't know anyone else who ever doodled like that.
Last year I made a bunch of puzzles and I was so proud to get a grid together where just about every word was "legit" that I didn't spend much time on clues. As a result, just about all of the puzzles from last year are really easy and only marginally clever. This year, after not thinking about puzzles from May to January, I've come with a renewed dedicaiton to them. Having been sidelined from Ultimate with ankle tendinitis (that's what the ankle sprain evolved into), crossword writing has become my main activity. After spending around 7 hours a week on them last year, I'm generally pushing 10 this year, and attempting the NYTimes daily. It's kinda sad, because most collegiate extracurricular activities are either socially-oriented or community service, and this is neither. It's solitary and seemingly useless. But I enjoy it and I know that people around campus enjoy them, even if I only get acknowledgement once in a blue moon. I've also sent 2 to the NYTimes in hopes that they'll get published. I haven't heard back yet so wish me luck.
These are those two by the way:
http://www.MyCrosswords.com/237/ChristopherLee/MissionImpossible.htmlhttp://www.mycrosswords.com/237/ChristopherLee/Teetotaller.htmlI love them both and they're easily the best crosswords I've ever done. I won't discuss them now though, as I'd like to describe my most recent one.
You can find the link to it here:
http://www.MyCrosswords.com/237/ChristopherLee/HomeAddress.html I'll also post the grid and the answers below. If you don't want spoilers, avert your eyes!
So I now try to have a 3 week progression of crosswords - Easy, Medium, Hard. This one's the Hard one, which means I try to make it as difficult as I possibly can, and the end result is a level somewhere around Wednesday or Thursday. The theme here is a Barack Obama quote from his inaugural address, broken into 4 parts of 14 letters. 14 letter words are generally not great for themes, because they require leaving 1 black space on the side. Note the black spot after YOURPEOPLEWILL. Now that one black square is almost always connected to a block of black squares either above or below, necessitated by the rule that a word's minimum length is 3 letters. If I didn't have those 3 black spots below it, then you can't have any black squares on 13th or 14th columns until the 8th row, where the L's from MLLE currently are. That would mean the 13th and 14th column would both need 7 letter words. So this is because if you have a black square on any row or colum 3 squares away from the edge, the two squares connecting it to the edge need to black. If they weren't, you'd have a two letter word. Also, the 14 letter clues could not be on the 3rd row, because then there would be a black square on the 3rd row...which means you'd have a streak of three black squares on the corner, and that's just unsightly. I hope this is making sense. Basically, 14 letter clues really constrict your placement. I basically needed to put them on the 4th and 12th rows (symmetry constraints).
When I begin constructing a grid, I put the theme in and then play around with black squares and see if I can create something feasible. Usually I have to rearrange it a few times before I can actually start working. On this puzzle, I actually rearranged it like 8 times. I started the puzzle several weeks ago, and abandoned it, thinking it was impossible. I picked it up again last week and tried a different arrangement and was able to get going, but I literally spent 2 hours just setting it up. No matter what I did, I was finding a lot of words ending with U, or O or starting with U or J. Look right in the middle of the puzzle, ORYOU. That was a problematic spot, because originally I was working with O_ _ _ U. Not much you can do with that. OneAcross.com, a tool I use a lot, gives me Otaru, OnYou, OrYou and OhioU for that. I had no idea what Otaru is, but apparently it's a city in Japan. Really not legit. OhioU is also not a good clue cause it doesn't 't even really refer to Ohio State. So I chose OrYou, clued it as "It's Either Me__" and hoped for the best. The words connecting those middle 2 14 letter phrases were pretty troublesome, note JUMBO and ULURU. These are originally J _ _ _ O and U _ _ _ U and had just a handful of options apiece. OneAcross.com didn't have Uluru as an option, but I know it as the Aboriginal name for Ayer's Rock, a place in Australia I'd really like to go to someday. I went with that, and tried out all the possible words for J _ _ _ O, initially liking Jello, Julio and JackO but I really wasn't able to find much. The word that ended up being NBR was very problematic. With Jello and Jacko, that would have been _LR and _KR and there's not much to work with there. NBR wasn't a good answer, but it does stand for the National Bureau Review of Motion Pictures so it's semi-legit.
I was very apprehensive about using TSUP for 7 down, but I think most people in our generation will understand that at least, if not wholeheartedly approve. I gave a shout out to my Dublin go-to, Guinness with my clue for BREWING, and I enjoyed using two sexual slangs, SLAY and SHAG, to start off my puzzle, without alluding to their euphemisms at all. I enjoyed subtly poking fun at congressional page scandals with my clue for 21 down, but "House employee" might have been too ambiguous and I'm not sure how many people got it. Perhaps I should have made that a question mark. I was very happy with my clue for HOBO - Depression byproduct? Its a clue appropriate for the times. I spent a lot of time thinking of a difficult clue for SILL but "Where snow might accumulate against a window" didn't come out that tricky. "Pressed a button near a door" was a very long drawn out clue for RANG and seemed to fool people. The most difficult section was the bottom though, where I had to make up "IMDEAD" and "MOUSEEATER" both of which were not from OneAcross. Also, most crossword puzzles have 38 black squares. With all the 14 letter clues, I had to settle for 40 in this puzzle. Originally I was working with 38, but I needed to add a square under GOER (4 down) because I wasn't able to work with that setup. Otherwise the rest of the puzzle was pretty straightforward.
I hope this was a decent read and somewhat comprehensible. Oh by the way, don't you like the quote? "Your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy." Props to Frank Kanin for pointing that quote out to me (and solving this puzzle) and to President Obama for saying it. By the way, this is my first "Quotes" puzzle, where you have part I of a quote, part II etc. I always have a really hard time solving those and had been wanting to make one for a while. It's not always possible because not all quotes can be broken into symmetrical segments.
and getting the word as ERIE. SNOT was the grossest answer and NYMET the most unusual. But my favorite two answers were STFU and FML (Shut the fuck up and Fuck my life). STFU was not intended but I was having a really tough time in that top middle section, partly because I needed a 4 letter word that ended in U. Then I had a revelation and finished that section well, although I thought that I could find some sort of legit clue for Cass. FML has been a word I've been trying to get in for a while, and after I got STFU in, I figured I might go for a mini-theme and get FML in too. I actually did the whole bottom 3 sections by hand in theology class. Cody remarked that while he dislikes my "Artsy and European clues" such as MOMA, EURO and LYRES, he owns the sports ones. Oh and lastly, I really enjoyed the self-promotional 1 down MATH (My major).
