Xword Junkie

This puzzle's theme was MAGNI(F)ICENT. . . . . . . . . . (random EMU reference here) . . . . . . . FINAWESOME!

For folks struggling with the clever theme today. Imagine a deck of "cards" with just eight cards. Let's just use a typographical symbol to represent each card in the deck, say ! @ # $ % ^ & * The riffle shuffling in this puzzle refers to a very specific method of shuffling (called "out-shuffling") the eight-card deck. To complete such a riffle shuffle, the deck is first cut into two groups of four, and then these two groups are recombined by *perfectly interleaving the cards*. Here's a model: ! @ # $ % ^ & * <--- original deck, from top to bottom, say ! @ # $ % ^ & * <--- Now cut into two halves. ! % @ ^ # & $ * <--- After interleaving; riffle is done. Now imagine a deck of cards using letters as symbols. Then C O N S O L E S C O N S O L E S C O O L N E S S So, with one perfect riffle shuffle, CONSOLES becomes COOLNESS. And STONEPIT becomes SETPOINT. And GOOFOFFS ... stays GOOFOFFS, which is why it appear both before and after. Hope this helps. Based on the comments, a lot of folks seem clueless about the theme. And the NSA folks have largely outed themselves by being demonstrably non-clueless. ;-)

Brilliant! Thursday "Puzzle of the Year" material. Loved it. Not a theme I've seen before, as far as I can recall. Got it with no assistance, but took almost 30 minutes. Many presidents have been born outside the continental U.S. For example, Michael Higgins, the current Irish president, was born in Limerick. It's a big world, after all. ;-)

Solved this one unaided in about three quarters of an hour, hating almost every minute of the experience. Let's stop there.

A theme that (only?) a mathematician or a card mechanic could love. I'm guessing that GOOFOFFS is the *only* word in English that works here, i.e., is invariant under a perfect out-shuffle of 8 letters. The second, third and fifth letters in the word must be the same, and similarly for the fourth, sixth and seventh letters. Given the constraints imposed by the theme, the fill was pretty darned good. A perfect out-shuffle of 8 letters is a permutation of order three. That is, three of these shuffles in succession returns the original word: CONSOLES --> COOLNESS --> CNOEOSLS --> CONSOLES. Is there a starting word such that *each* word produced by such shuffling is a valid word in English? (Other than GOOFOFFS ;-) ) Really liked this one ... but I'm a mathematician.

A morass of arcane trivia and bad fill, which I managed to solve unaided in about 40 minutes. Hope others liked this one a lot more than I did. Beep! Beep!

Kudos to whoever chose "You’ll need all of your powers of perception to get through Brandon Koppy’s latest Sunday puzzle" as the column's subtitle. The Doors took their name from The Doors of Perception, an Aldous Huxley title itself taken from Blake's "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite". Apparently, mescaline played a role in all of this.

Don't think I've ever seen the word NOWISE in my life, but it's right there in the dictionary. This, and my certainty that a "Motivator, of a sort" was a CUDGEL, almost led to my downfall today. But since an "L" seemed extremely unlikely in a Japanese place name, I thought more carefully and went with the truly horrific NUDGER. Just awful. Sorry, but NOWISE/NUDGER should have led to this one being binned. That *two* constructors were comfortable with this pairing is quite surprising to me. Got the theme easily enough, and solved the puzzle correctly in about 20 minutes. Perhaps my least favorite weekday solving experience this year. (Can't wait to see what REX has to say about this one.) Did anyone else think that the grid pattern didn't look like a soccer ball?

Well, someone has likely posted a better version already, but ... Waiting for Godot / Death of a Salesman

You know you are getting old when ... the caption for a photo of Laurel and Hardy needs to include "a comedy duo".

ELEVENTY appears, quite unfacetiously, at the very start of Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring: Chapter 1: A Long-Expected Party When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/19/books/chapters/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-fellowship-of-the-ring.html" target="_blank">https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/19/books/chapters/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-fellowship-of-the-ring.html</a>

Solved this unaided, but quite a workout. Took me almost twice as long as yesterday's puzzle. Perhaps the two most challenging back-to-back puzzles in a long time. Much appreciated! As a mathematician, I got SCALENE quickly. But was then completely misdirected by "Combinations with numbers and sets" for BANDS. Well played there. Excellent Saturday puzzle!

Very solid puzzle. Thank goodness BABUR filled itself in, since that was an unknown for me. COSEC is typically just CSC nowadays, but the former is still used. Liked "Gathering of moles" for INTEL. Better than average Sunday puzzle.

Perhaps this has been noted already, but AS OF last week I have experienced a noticeable delay between my filling the last box in the puzzle and the acknowledgement that I've correctly completed the puzzle. The delay is long enough that I find myself scanning the grid looking for some box I've forgotten to fill. I solve online using Chrome. About the puzzle---it seemed fine for a Monday. I solved in 6:39 +/- 0:02.

Why all the whining? Solved this one without help using only the prime-numbered horizontal clues. Took me four minutes and change … and I was solving on my watch. And the app crashed eleven times. Seriously, this was an amazing puzzle.

Late to post, since this puzzle nearly killed me. You solved a Friday Crossword in 1:47:19. Finally got it on my own, but the triple of THATTRACKS, IOWEYOUONE and BLANKETHOG almost did me in. Had to take a break and return, and still I needed to spend more time on that one portion of the grid than the rest combined. Thanks, Evan and Joel, for an excellent workout!

Haven't posted since two of my posts were removed several weeks ago. Returning simply to say---I got Wordle on the first try today!

The seven long, punny themers were cute, but tightly constrained the rest of the grid, forcing a lot of three-letter entries. Of these, KIL and GDS were pretty bad. Is KIL supposed to be an abbreviation for kilometer? "Embarassing mistake?" for TYPO was cute, with the intentional misspelling of embarrassing. PICKACARD and OLIVETREE were nice, symmetrically placed, long entries, as were COASTAL and DURANGO.

Took me almost 30 minutes, which made it especially challenging for a Wednesday. Unusual theme, to say the least. SEEPY/BELLLAP took quite some time for me to see. Given the constraints of the complex theme, the fill was OK---though OPERAARIA and SEEPY seemed a bit desperate.

Disappointing offering for a Saturday. Seemed very straightforward, with a lot of dull fill and clunky (or much too direct) cluing ("Roquefort, e.g."). Hard to enjoy stuff like ISAID, IHEARIT ("You're not just imagining that tone"), IHADNOIDEA, RARESTAMP. "Shortening for a city that omits 'onto'" for TOR. C'mon. A rare day when I felt the editorial team dropped the ball.

A very fine puzzle, reminiscent of Wednesday (not Thursday) puzzles from days past. The theme is multilayered and yet handled perfectly. Was not familiar with ambit (though its Latin ancestry was clear enough), but a GOLFRANGE is indeed a g-ambit. The non-thematic fill is also excellent---that NE corner with HARVARD, OPHELIA and PTOLEMY is just glorious. One of the finer puzzle of the year. Solved it without assistance, but took about 27 minutes. ALPHA, CHARLIE and SIERRA came to mind easily enough, but remembering GOLF for G took a bit of time. OLE! and thanks to Mr. Woodford (who even got his given name into a clue.)

A spanner: Once common dashboard feature, to an ancient Roman? FOURHUNDREDSLOT

Found this one somewhat easier than yesterday's, but still a solid weekend puzzle. Solved it without assistance in about twenty-five minutes. Highlight for me was ONION RINGo vertically near the center. Didn't know BRENDA, RENEE, HONG, SEADRAGON, DORIS or SOL (as clued). Also didn't know the precise locations of CAPRI or Rijeka. (So much trivia! ;-) ) But all of these were easy to get from the crosses and a bit of commonsense reasoning. Was slowed down by having GEEKALERT before NERDALERT, and by the lack of Hebrew words in the grid. Arboretums also made me wince, but just a little.

Brutal! "You solved a Saturday Crossword in 1:22:51." Without assistance. Feel exhausted, but didn't think I'd manage this one at all. Most challenging Saturday puzzle (for me) in a very long time---so, nice work Byron and Joel!

Interesting that the author's name and the titles of her first six novels accommodate the symmetry required in the grid. JAZZ pairs with SULA, THEBLUESTEYE pairs with TONIMORRISON, TARBABY pairs with BELOVED, and SONGOFSOLOMON has thirteen letters, allowing it to "pair with itself" as a central thematic entry. Given the constraints imposed by the thematic entries, the remaining fill is a bit bland, though LANAI, MARTYR and MISHAP are interesting words. Congrats on the debut!

Tried, but couldn't muster much ARDENCY for this puzzle. Solved it without help, but felt that the theme offered little bang for the buck. HITON, OSH, NOTSO, ADOUT, ADREP, SOFTA, TONOW, SONOF are pretty unfortunate. At least KNURL and ASYLA are *words*, and SLIER is a variant. I suppose SITREPS are things, though my first guess was SITREVS (which I took to mean "situation reviews"). Sorry, but not a fan of this one. The pictorial element didn't compensate for a middling theme and some awful fill. Hope others enjoyed this.

I cannot truly express how much I disliked this puzzle. The "theme" was awful, and the puzzle was full of obscure dreck. How on earth this got published is beyond my comprehension. I almost solved this unaided. When I filled in the M in SMOOVE (whatever that is), I was informed that something was amiss. Turned out that I had typed CASH instead of CAST, although at that point I really no longer cared.

Who uses a nail to hold up a poster? Not someone I'd SUBLEASE to. Nice theme, but this didn't feel like a Monday puzzle to me. Just a few too many Tuesday-ish elements: URDU, SATEEN, EFFACE, MISO, BALI, ASUS, IPSO, SQIN, HAIFA, OSSO, BESO, UMAMI. Then again, the theme---once you see it---basically fills in 24 squares for free. Congrats on the debut!

This one made me work! Especially the SW corner, since I couldn't recall the completion of ALOO___. The entry DOTOAT just looks so odd, but fits the clue perfectly. And, as a mathematician, I'm embarrassed to admit how long it took me to get NONREAL from "Like i, say". Not familiar with THREENAGER, STRUGGLEBUS or RENTROLL, but all seemed sensible enough from the clues. "Place for a mind or a ball" was a clever clue for GUTTER. (I wonder if "Where a mind or a ball shouldn't go" would have been a bit better.) "Ride arranged on one's own" for KITCAR was also very clever, as was "Producer of black-and-white footage?" for PANDACAM. Really enjoyed this one. Took more than 45 minutes, but solved it without help. Terrific Saturday puzzle.

My first reaction was hopelessness, since none of the proper nouns were clicking and I don’t allow myself any lookups. But, in the end, I solved this one unaided, though it took about 45 minutes. INDUS and OCEANIA popped into my head, and soon the NW was done. ADASTRA and YORICK got me going, and soon the SE fell too. But it took me a long time to get started with the SW-center-NE portion of the grid. NUMETAL and its clue echoed a very recent Connections. Had it not, that entry would have been yet another unknown. But with that one in place, things started to yield, including all the names that were ciphers before. Didn’t know GALBA, and PANTSED is certainly odd, but the crosses led me to both. A very challenging puzzle for me, which is what I expect on a Saturday.

Didn't know SPITSGAME, REIKI, SHAKSHUKA or HADNOCHILL, but, LETSFACEIT, THATSONME. Nonetheless, solved this puzzle unaided---but only because I (think I) recalled TAKI from earlier this year. This one seemed like an appropriately challenging puzzle for a Saturday. It also seemed quite fair, given that I was able to use crosses to cover for my ignorance of some of the fill. Never had an ELKHOUND, but when my beagle mix got the ZOOMIES, he was certainly thinking "[Get out of my way!]"

This puzzle must have been *very* challenging to construct. That said, I didn't enjoy solving it and found the theme rather underwhelming. Random three letter creatures "attached" to one another with horseshoe magnets, symbolizing ANIMALMAGNETISM. Too little bang for my buck. Especially with fill like TINGS, STEERTO, DOAJIG, LEDTO---and all those short entries needed to accommodate the theme. Solved it unaided, but then spent more (and more enjoyable) time trying to create a thematic entry of my own. Likely I'll find a better one already in the comments, but here goes: "Like Updike's Rabbit tetralogy" --- FOURVOLUME. Stick that in your 18D! (The EMUs better like this comment.)

Well, I suppose DOS + FIRE + OTTO + SEIZE is indeed a (finite, geometric) series (since the ratio of consecutive terms is constant). So the theme and revealer at least make good sense to this mathematician. Lots of nice fill here, and I found this one ABIT challenging for a Wednesday puzzle. And we have both FUSION and FISSION in the same grid!

Found this one rather challenging, in part due to the many proper nouns that I didn't know, especially in the western portion of the grid. That said, I was able to solve the puzzle unaided, with the help of crossings and with assistance from the theme itself to get PUMPUPTHEJAM---since I knew the grunge group. Some interesting *words* today: ASSAY, ELECTOR (cleverly clued), DOJO (also cleverly clued), SOPOR, IRKSOME, MAYHEM, DESPOT. LOUDOUTS is new to me, despite having followed baseball for about half a century. Quite a nice term, just not one I recall having heard. Very fine construction, though perhaps a bit too heavy on the proper nouns.