The Next Best Thing Officially Goes Interactive. Have At It.
Morning routine: en route to favorite coffee place where they use the steamed milk to draw fern leaves right into your latte, stop off at Homer’s Variety to pick up—what, no Times?
Nice lady behind counter: “There’s only one distributor for the whole area. You’d have to go to Hartford to get one.”
Can she tell by looking at my face that I’m considering doing just that?
“It’s a Monday anyway. It’d be too easy.”
I know, but you don’t understand. Just because it’s too easy doesn’t exempt me from having to do it.
“You could go to the library and do it online.”
No, that’s the thing. I already pay the $34.95 per year for the online puzzle, even though I prefer to solve it on newsprint. For that luxury I pay a dollar a day Monday through Saturday, plus $3.50 on Sundays, so that’s—WHAT?—$494 a year just for the fucking Times puzzle? Let’s see what the Berkshire Eagle has to offer.
Oh right. This is why I shell out the dough.
To be honest, I haven’t done enough crosswords syndicated by the Chicago Tribune to know if today’s is a representative sample or not, but this was just so—perfunctory.
The single Ah! Moment (not to be confused with an Aha! moment) came with 43A: “Sink” or “swim” = VERB—although I'd like to think the Times would have had the courage to leave out the scare quotes.
It makes you realize that constructing a good puzzle requires a whole lot more than just saying, “Oh look, here is a collection of words that fit together.”
Which brings me to a question that has nagged me for a long time: just exactly what is it that makes the New York Times puzzle so superior? This is not a rhetorical question. I really want to know.
Let me get you started by saying what I think is a small part of the answer: it’s smart, it’s fresh, and often has what people in the biz call “lively fill.” But is that all it takes to make a crossword good? Let me also say that, for me, anyway, it's rarely the theme that makes a puzzle satisfying. There's usually something else going on. Something mysterious. Tell me what it is.
Nice lady behind counter: “There’s only one distributor for the whole area. You’d have to go to Hartford to get one.”
Can she tell by looking at my face that I’m considering doing just that?
“It’s a Monday anyway. It’d be too easy.”
I know, but you don’t understand. Just because it’s too easy doesn’t exempt me from having to do it.
“You could go to the library and do it online.”
No, that’s the thing. I already pay the $34.95 per year for the online puzzle, even though I prefer to solve it on newsprint. For that luxury I pay a dollar a day Monday through Saturday, plus $3.50 on Sundays, so that’s—WHAT?—$494 a year just for the fucking Times puzzle? Let’s see what the Berkshire Eagle has to offer.
Oh right. This is why I shell out the dough.
To be honest, I haven’t done enough crosswords syndicated by the Chicago Tribune to know if today’s is a representative sample or not, but this was just so—perfunctory.
The single Ah! Moment (not to be confused with an Aha! moment) came with 43A: “Sink” or “swim” = VERB—although I'd like to think the Times would have had the courage to leave out the scare quotes.
It makes you realize that constructing a good puzzle requires a whole lot more than just saying, “Oh look, here is a collection of words that fit together.”
Which brings me to a question that has nagged me for a long time: just exactly what is it that makes the New York Times puzzle so superior? This is not a rhetorical question. I really want to know.
Let me get you started by saying what I think is a small part of the answer: it’s smart, it’s fresh, and often has what people in the biz call “lively fill.” But is that all it takes to make a crossword good? Let me also say that, for me, anyway, it's rarely the theme that makes a puzzle satisfying. There's usually something else going on. Something mysterious. Tell me what it is.
posted by DO at 9:39 AM
2 Comments:
The Times receives many, many more puzzles than it can print, and the top constructors normally submit to the Times first. With so many good puzzles to choose from, Will can pick the very best for the Times, with the most interesting themes, lively fills, etc. Finding these puzzles among the slush is partially a gut reaction of which puzzles excite him and which are ho-hum. Once accepted, the editing can also liven up an otherwise ordinary puzzle.
I guess this still doesn't explain WHAT in these selectively chosen puzzles is better than other puzzles.
Now, you know that I only like to do the puzzle with someone else, but FWIW, I think the biggest thing is that a fun puzzle has an underlying sense of humor, a certain winking prankishness. Which is why Sudoko leaves me cold. How can there be humor in that?
I only know what I enjoy, which is the mental origami that happens when you have to fold the clue to make the answer work. Or fold the answer to make the clue work? I'm not sure which is the chicken and which the egg.
I also like unusual words (natch), I like multiword/phrasal answers, I like funny names, and I especially like being able to fill in the ones you don't know (that would be the hard part). That's pretty much all I got.
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