Tom B.

How’s this for serendipity? Waiting for my wife to finish some work so we could do the puzzle today, I jumped into the archives and alit on the Saturday from December 21, 2013. It turns out to be a clever tribute by Todd Gross and David Steinberg for the 100th anniversary of what is believed to be the first published modern crossword puzzle, by the young Brit Arthur Wynne in the New York World. <a href="https://www.niagara-gazette.com/archives/happy-100th-to-the-crossword-puzzle/article_735f7d42-1c4f-51bd-bdaa-27f4659bb157.html" target="_blank">https://www.niagara-gazette.com/archives/happy-100th-to-the-crossword-puzzle/article_735f7d42-1c4f-51bd-bdaa-27f4659bb157.html</a> Curious about this history, I looked up the first NYT crossword, from 1942. Scanning the clues, I noticed 126A was “Anguillid”. Could this be the first sighting of our now-old friend, EEL? It was. A quick dive into the Wiki rabbit hole, identified eels as “catadromous”, a word I never heard of, but immediately loved. And, just an hour later, “catadromous”, shows up at 4D! “Oh, the places you’ll go” in crossword land!

Clever theme. We got the switching letters pretty quickly. And noticed the acrosses could be correct and the downs could be correct, but not a the same time. Hmmm. But we did like “Academic achievements” to be DOGBEDS. So we decided made all the downs correct (i.e., match the clues). No music, but we did notice the grey squares twisted back and forth to made real words, but saw no theme there. Using crosses, we guessed the correct revealer was BOXBRAIDS, but weren’t sure. We knew the movie, and how JJ looked, but did not know the name of her hairstyle. So we learned that (Yay!). But still couldn’t see what the trick was. Bumbling on, we made the crosses correct (i.e., match the clues), leaving the downs incorrect, but showing real words. Cue the happy music! But what the heck was the trick? Oh, the correct down answers twisted down. Like….oh [expletive deleted], like BRAIDS! We initially felt really dumb, but then smiled and laughed at how clever this puzzle was. A classic gotcha. Well done!

What a lovely Monday! And that was before we did the puzzle together on the day of our 35th anniversary. Like others, we both initially said, “Hmm, what’s with all the SETs”. Then quickly, “How fun!” Could have been fun if they also fit in a faux-Latin plural SETI. Perhaps clued as “Group with motto “We really hope there’s something smarter out there”?

Working backwards through the archives, I arrived at a devilishly trickyThursday (9/11/2014) by Patrick Blindauer. If you haven’t done it and don’t mind a good fight, give it a try. I imagine it was well argued over at the time. As one Wordplay commenter hilariously said “Not my cup of tea. Or I need more whiskey.”

Loved this fun, breezy Friday. Some bright clues/answers (GAMIFY, TART, UBERIZE), one completely new to me (FIENDING) and one odd-sounding too me (NUNHOOD, ironically under ITSODD). To add to the 8D GOD discussion, boygenius (the all-women supergroup, itself cool to see), has a hit, Grammy winning song called Not Strong Enough. It’s chorus speaks to use of “god” for all genders. Great song! <a href="https://www.hercampus.com/culture/boygenius-not-strong-enough-meaning-explained" target="_blank">https://www.hercampus.com/culture/boygenius-not-strong-enough-meaning-explained</a>/

Loved the cute theme! And some clever clueing (16A and 61A), too. A lot of the rest was an unusual mixture of new-to-me (yay) words (ARTICS, MILKSOP and that EDGAR dude), and many common crossword fills (ODS, OPERA, MIATA, ORE, URN, TNT, CELS, TSK, GTOS, AGRA, SUES, RAY, OGRE, ODES, etc.). I really wanted 1A to be WELLIES and figured 1A doomsday preppers might stock pile WOOD. Alas, no. But for a hoot, check out Billy Connolly’s classic, The Welly Boot Song. <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6OxwuGI6NBA" target="_blank">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6OxwuGI6NBA</a>

Loved the meta-dad theme and the clever clue/answer combos! Great fun for us empty nesters. A quick, non-spoiler Connections question. Have there ever been multi-word clues? Certainly, compound words are common, but I don’t recall phrases like today.