Come party on a Saturday with Kameron Austin Collins.
SATURDAY PUZZLE — This is quite a sophisticated venture, this latest offering from Kameron Austin Collins, who is blossoming as a regular themeless contributor. Regular solvers know to expect film references and linguistically fun debuts. (We have one in this puzzle that fits both bills.) I found the toughest challenge in the varied trivia topics today, but the only entry that completely stumped me was a weird little term with a long crossword pedigree.
Puzzling Things to Do While You Are Home
The Indie 500 Crossword Tournament is noncompetitive this year, and the organizers will send you the puzzle pack that was intended for use at the 2020 tournament in exchange for a donation to a selection of charities.
Tricky Clues
My sticking point was REVET, which is from French, which I really should have pieced together (“strengthen” leads to reinforce, or add material to, I guess, which makes sense if you know that French for clothing is “vetement”). I had to look it up to believe it, even with all of its crossings in place, which happens sometimes. Mr. Collins’s more modern references went pretty easy on us — NSFW and DEETS stand out.
I tried too hard to be cool and thought that the pun clue — “Listing near a club?” — had to be LIT, which I always think means drunk but now also means hoppin’ (or fresh, as we’d say way back when). I related it to LITT, which was a couple of clues away, and thought it was a flourish until I realized that the “club” was a sandwich, on a menu, near a BLT. There are a couple of little deets like that today, like “token” in a clue near TOKE (and maybe HELEN near the MARINER? Her face did launch 1,000 ships).
14A: How’s this for a factoid? You may know that the famous advice columnists, Ann Landers and Dear Abby, were identical twins; you might also know that their given names are surprisingly similar — Ann was born Esther Pauline Friedman, and went by EPPIE, and Abby was Pauline Esther Friedman. But did you know that they were born 17 minutes apart on July 4, 1918? That would have made for a tough clue.
48A: The fact that this is the first time that ROY COHN has appeared in a Times puzzle is startling — finding him wasn’t terribly difficult for this ignoramus, not because I remember him among the rapid-fire references in the Billy Joel song, but because I don’t know too many “McCarthyites” outside of Joe McCarthy himself and Mr. Cohn (who appears at the 1-minute-25-second-mark in the video below’). I’ll bet that Roy Cohn over ZIRCONIA is intentional.
21D: I love this clue for a poem by an O.G. hipster goth, Edgar Allan Poe. He wrote it in admiration of Jane Stanard, the mother of a close friend, who reminded him of Helen of Troy.
27D: This isn’t a new entry, but it hasn’t been in a puzzle since the 1980s, and it’s a great phrase that I still hear all of the time for something that hardly comes around — its rarer than HENS TEETH. The contrarian will say that birds do have an egg tooth or a gizzard or some other technicality, but it’s more interesting to me that it’s taken such a long time to posit why birds don’t have teeth, since they’re modern dinosaurs. A paper from 2018 theorizes that birds evolved to incubate ever more quickly for their improved survival, and removing teeth from the equation allowed an embryo in an egg to mature after days instead of months.
Constructor Notes
I like this puzzle. Sorry: “I like all of my puzzles.” (They can hear me.) (I like this one more than most, though.) But the idea is that we get better over time, right? And my pandemic-era approach to making puzzles has definitely been a period of improvement for me. I changed my way of evaluating my puzzles quite a bit — most notably, I now save screenshots of completed grids on my phone, in a special album, where I let them sit around for awhile, along with screenshots of versions featuring the many (many, many) alternative options of specific corners I amass over hours and hours of construction, so that I can bring a fresh eye to every nook of the puzzle every so often. Sometimes they languish there for a year!
(Blocked out the answers, of course, but just to show you what I mean. 77! Which accounts for maybe 35 puzzles total and al-l-l of their variations.)
My goal is never “perfect” puzzles. Crosswords are pretty much the only place you can see a hospital, a rapper, an Edgar Allan Poe poem, a “recall” pun referring to a stomach bug, OMELETTEs and their pans, McCarthyism and its discontents, all knocking about in the same 15x15 patch of land. That’s what I love about them. That, for me, is what distinguishes them from other puzzles and games.
Normally I’d save remarks like these for my statement on Xwordinfo.com. But my differences of puzzle philosophy with that site have left me feeling a little unwelcome there. Whereas Wordplay has always been a great crowd, and has also become more of a hub for talking about how to make puzzles. I thought I’d give some insight into my process, accordingly. I see the puzzle process in much more holistic terms than other people, I think. It’s a lot less about tallying up flaws and shouting out the flashiest entries, much less a matter of eyeing unusual entries (or names) with suspicion; much less limited evaluating other peoples’ puzzles based on my own wheelhouse; and far more dependent on treating every puzzle like a full meal, with as many flavors and textures as possible all hanging out together in the same pot. A word that comes up on that site is divisive; it was used this week, in fact, to describe a puzzle about an ’80s song. Let’s just say I’m not crazy about that language — and find the idea of that puzzle, in particular, being “divisive” pretty suspicious. What’s divisive, to me, is the accusation.
Besides, I want to give solvers a little more credit. I’m much less quick to make assumptions about what solvers don’t know (based on what I, myself, don’t know) and a lot more interested in threading together a puzzle that’s broad enough in its worldview that it plays to as many of the diverse community of solvers’ strengths as possible. And that’s not even for solvers’ sake! I love a silky-smooth straightforward themeless as much as the next person. But what I love even more, as a solver, are puzzles that feel like they were born here, on planet Earth, which is full of fascinations, histories, beautiful bits of language (and not just in English); I want puns, I want people, I want reminders that the U.S.A. — territory populated by immigrants, colored by a history that ranges from Indigenous peoples to French and Spanish occupation, to God knows what else — is an amalgam of so many languages, people, things. If an extra abbreviation lets that happen, who cares? I mean, pause, think about it: How much is a handful of “flaws” worth complaining about in an otherwise pleasurable puzzle? Some people want to treat it like math. What can I say? I just don’t see it that way.
And I don’t see these gestures, this style of puzzle, as “divisive.” And I don’t see them as “forcing people to learn”: I don’t assume, on solvers’ behalf, that they don’t know things, and I’m even less keen on assuming that they’re actively antagonistic to what they don’t know, or that this antagonism should be what guides my work as a constructor. I find that logic deeply silly — and I wish certain people in our community would abandon it.
What I do assume is that Saturday, where I tend to land, is where solvers should expect to be asked to flex every muscle available to them. That, to me, is what “Saturday” means: not just hard knowledge, but an eagle eye for hidden wordplay, a working knowledge of the news, a willingness to work their brains, make educated guesses based on words they maybe can’t event define but have simply seen at one point or another. That’s what the best puzzles do to me: Rather than seeing it as being forced to learn — which, for the record, even wordplay can do, because it depends on knowing and identifying the multiple meanings and essences of words in ways that can be fairly sophisticated — I see it as encouraging me, as a solver, to emerge from a puzzle realizing that I know more than I thought I did.
So I look at my own grids, on my phone, over and over, with that in mind. With the grids captive on my phone, I can access them whenever I want and do all kinds of evaluation on them, using the highlighter tool to highlight the entries in the grid different colors, with the colors meaning different things. I look at them over and over and over until I can say, You know what? I like this. Green highlights are for entries that I think bring a special flavor to the puzzle (as distinct from “assets,” as another commentator calls them). What I’m looking for, in this case, aren’t just the flashiest marquee entries, but also entries that are aesthetically pleasing as words, or contribute a new kind of culture or knowledge not seen elsewhere in the puzzle, or which appeal to me for reasons that I can’t explain. It’s an instinct thing. It can be because I already have a fun clue in mind. It can be for silly reasons! GOFER gets a green highlight because I like playful colloquialisms, especially if they’re short fill — but FIR is also green, simply for crossing -FER, which makes me laugh. That’s not the kind of thing you’ll see someone list as an “asset”; it’s more in the charm category, a little less easy to measure.
Red highlights are for errors or the no-gos that sometimes sneak up on you; they mean automatic revision. “Pink is for Propers”: and not just “people’s names,” which is so often what that phrase seems to mean in crossworld, but every actual proper noun: organizations (even if abbreviated), species names — all of it. This helps visualize where they all are, where they cross, and accordingly, lets me ask what’s fair (on a Saturday) and adjust clues or grid accordingly. Orange highlights are for “trouble” sections: fill that I maybe don’t like but can probably live with, pending the puzzle, or crossings that give me pause on solver’s behalf. LITT — originally clued as the R.E.M. producer Scott Litt (who produced their great six-album run which included “Automatic for the People”), got an orange highlight; the pileup of pink highlights in that quadrant maybe explains why that is not the clue you see today. The EPPIE/MARIST/FISA crossing also got an orange, to encourage me to think about how much I was demanding of solvers. I thought about it for a long time. Ultimately, I left it to the editors to decide whether that was too tough; I thought it was, for a Saturday solver, solvable. Given the very low acceptance rate for themelesses, puzzles are easy to reject over even minor questions like these. You’re solving the puzzle — on a Saturday — so I guess that question has been answered for us both.
Why do I like this grid? Well — I find curving black-square patterns really pleasing, visually. I love big fat white chunks of grid. And the range of material excited me — and, in the email accepting the puzzle, Will said he found it exciting, too. Chaka Khan, Poe, ROY COHN, The Thing (fantastic movie; so is the 1951 original “The Thing From Another World”), gossip sessions, cats (I have two), Billy Joel, spy courts, food, Flo RIDA: These are all little glints into the hamster wheel I call a brain.
TL; DR: I want themeless puzzles to feel like a slice of life, and not only my own life. I don’t even like OMELETTEs!!! Final thoughts, drawn from my life this time:
— ROY COHN: I don’t love the man — at all — but I love the entry (and this clue is mine — thanks team!), because how and whether you know about Roy feels generational. Some solvers were around at the height of his power and influence, and I almost envy them that. Some know him as a sniveling, suggestively effeminate stereotype in movies like “JFK” (belatedly, Happy Pride!). And some, of course, landed there by way of Billy Joel. Me? Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” — one of the most important pieces of art I encountered as a teen, dear to me to this day. It’s also where I first got hip to Ethel Rosenberg.
— MARINER: My instant word association for MARINER isn’t the football team, but rather “The Rime of the Ancient …” — which really does sum me up in a nutshell. What’s that? It’s baseball? I’ll take your word for it.
— The rapper Flo RIDA is, indeed, from Florida! I almost wanted “Southern” to be added to the start of the clue in hopes that attentive solvers might notice the playfulness of the sobriquet, with its multiple meanings. There’s the Florida aspect, of course, but also flow. Great flow — agile rhymes and wordplay, deft references, unpredictable rhythms made entirely out of speech — is the hallmark of many of the best rappers; it’s certainly true of my favorites. It’s really too bad that rap has so often gotten a bad rap in crossword circles, as the best rap is rife — bursting! overflowing! — with surprising, galvanizing wordplay. No other genre of American music is so linguistically flexible.
— TO HELEN: as in, Helen of Troy, mythologized as the most beautiful woman in the world, so this is quite an ode. But it’s not romantic, to my mind. The poem was written about Jane Stith Stanard, mother of a childhood friend of Poe’s and also something of a mother figure for Poe himself, whose own mom died when he was young. Stanard encouraged Poe to write poetry. I’m glad that she did. She died when Poe was only 15 years old.
On that happy note! Enough from me. I leave you with this: Tom Hanks, in the Coen brothers’ not-especially-beloved “The Ladykillers,” reciting “To Helen” — twice:
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