July 14: Ink In (Brooke Husic and Evan Kalish, USA Today). July 25: Something Different (Paolo Pasco, Grids These Days). July 30: Out of Left Field 18 (Jeffrey Harris, Out of Left Field). "Why will I want to do such a thing", you ask? In his spare time he can be seen banging on typewriters in the Boston Typewriter Orchestra. The grid uses 25 of 26 letters, missing X. Not enough to impress me crossword clue 6 letters. There are some things machines will easily beat humans at. Highlights in the clues are ["Truly Madly Deeply" trio] for ADVERBS and [One doing a vibe check? ] So it's hard for a themeless midi to impress me enough to earn a shoutout, but I really admire this one. 01 deposited in bank not long ago] for RECENTLY (which cleverly repurposes the word "bank"), and [Formal agreement for Elmer Fudd, a Looney Tunes character] for TWEETY. On top of that, the bottom right corner has two bonus themers, DICTATE and STATUTE. It's come to my attention that there's a Patrick Berry variety puzzle in Grids for Good!
Similar to the Paolo Pasco/Ria Dhull TOM NOOK puzzle from last month, this puzzle has an eye-catching grid where six countries, clued with respect to their flags, are "captured" by nook-shaped sections of the grid. That's it - the number of total answers in the grid. In fact, he's the sixth-most published constructor in The New York Times under Will Shortz's editorship.
His puzzles have been mentioned on episodes of "The Colbert Report, " "Jeopardy!, " and "Sunday Night Football. So the grid has a total of 3 + 29 (Biggest Across clue number) = 32 answer slots. Themeless) (Adam Aaronson). It has 0 words that debuted in this puzzle and were later reused: These 36 answer words are not legal Scrabble™ entries, which sometimes means they are interesting: |Scrabble Score: 1||2||3||4||5||8||10|. Add this to the biggest clue number on the ACROSS set of clues. Paolo's got a knack for conjuring up hilarious images with his clues, which he does here with clues like ["Congratulations, you just birthed 100 lawmakers! "] 39: The next two sections attempt to show how fresh the grid entries are. Not enough to impress me crossword clue free. He regularly contributes work to The AV Crossword Club, Bawdy Crosswords, Spirit Magazine, Visual Thesaurus, and The Weekly Dig. Matt's got his fingers in a lot of cruciverbal pies, so it's no surprise that I'm featuring puzzles of his from two different venues this month.
A Quick Way To Count The Answers. You want to do it because like any self-respecting crossword solver you obsess over pointless trivia. Not enough to impress me crossword clue quest. You find the clue-sheet unusually large and suspect it's because there are more words in the grid than average. In other Shortz Era puzzles. It has normal rotational symmetry. Lots of modern goodies in this grid, including I LOVE THAT FOR YOU, THE SQUAD, and NONAPOLOGY. Crosswords, but my favorite was this themeless, which has lovely representation (QUVENZHANE Wallis, WHEN THEY SEE US, BLACK PANTHER) and some devilish clues ([Taken control] for PLACEBO, [Something made to scale in a treehouse] for ROPE LADDER).
On the other hand, maybe the joy of Something Differents would wear off if I was solving them all the time... but on the third hand, no, these are just a blast. July 2: Freestyle 159 (Christopher Adams, arctan(x)words). The theme entries are all only seven letters long, so the rest plays like a themeless, with a bunch of good fill entries longer than the theme entries themselves: EXTREME BEER, DULCET TONES, NUDE PAINTING, SPEED READER, and TATTOO PARLOR. Not the theme I was expecting given the title (I was expecting last-to-first shifts like ASQUITH HAS QUIT or something), but a fun theme, in which the first letters of words are replaced with Z, the last letter of the alphabet. It has some truly elegant clues, including ["Community" character lying low] for ABED NADIR, [$0. No earth-shattering revelations so don't hold your breath, but a property of the crossword grid comes nicely into play there. For PROP UP, which ingeniously splits the PUP definition ("boxer's child") between two perfectly idiomatic phrases. Unique||1 other||2 others||3 others||4 others|. This one is small and easy enough that I just solved it in my head, but it's got a simple, yet delightful and elegant, payoff. Suppose you want to count the number of answers in the crossword grid.
He is the author of over thirty different books. That puts a lot of constraint on the fill, but Chris nevertheless fits lots of other good stuff in there, including BANH MI and SENSE OF PURPOSE. Instead of Kosman and Picciotto, we get a guest cryptic by Jeffrey Harris this week. Duplicate clues: Modicum.
39, Scrabble score: 384, Scrabble average: 1. At one point in time, Blender, Electronic Business, Paste Magazine, Quarterly Review of Wines, The Stranger, Time Out New York, and ran his work. He will be posting two puzzles a week — on Monday and Thursday. Colonel Gopinath, I'm pleased to find, has the same method as mine. We've got the intersecting theme entries MARGARET ATWOOD, ONE DAY AT A TIME, GRETA THUNBERG, and UPSTATE NEW YORK, all of which hide the word TAT (which, unusually for the USA Today, is in the grid as a revealer, nestled ingeniously between the theme entries). July 25: Saturday Midi (Amanda Rafkin, Brain Candy).
I'll update this post after a day (by Thursday evening), with links to ways you mention in the comments, and also write how I do it.