Joon mentioned on a Kaidoku a while back that getting the Q and the E right away didn’t actually help him very much. Well, I gotta tell you, I had pretty much the exact same experience with this one. The Q and the E jumped right out at me but it took me a while to get anything else right. Once I got it, though? No problem. How was your solving experience? Similar? Totally different? Let us know in the comments.
Today’s video has nothing to do with the puzzle but it’s something I loved in high school and hadn’t seen since. Oh, YouTube. Will you marry me?
UPDATE 9:30 AM PT – The puzzle originally contained a non-word; it’s been fixed.
Do you live in the Boston area? Do you know the difference between an oryx and an onyx? Then you might be interested in checking out the Boston Crossword Puzzle Tournament coming up in a little over a month. Some famous crossword guy is going to be there in person, and I hear he doesn’t mind if you ask to have your photo taken with him. Joon was an organizer last year; I assume he’ll be able to fill us in with more details as the event approaches.
Sometimes your dictionary will contain a word you’ve heard, but didn’t think was a real word. What do you do? Why, you use it in a Kaidoku of course! (Edit – that word is gone. Not because it wasn’t a word, but because I had to remove it to make room for other stuff. If you’re curious, the word was ZILLIONAIRE.) Enjoy – Matt’s back on Monday.
It seems to me that having a good URL is key to having a successful website. Preferably it would be something short, memorable, and related to the site’s content. http://alleyoop.com/ is a good example. Also lostpedia.com. Sometimes it’s enough for the name to be memorable, even if it has little to do with the site’s content, like Amazon, Yahoo, Dogpile, Google, etc. And some URLs are great in other ways … can you guess where these links will take you?
ACPT wrap-up? But Alex, you didn’t go! Right, I didn’t, but there are a few things I’d like to say about it. First of all, congrats to Dan Feyer, who won the whole shebang. (Side note: bonus points to the first crossword constructor who clues SHEBANG as #!) Dan is a very fast solver of crosswords as evidenced by … um … his victory at the ACPT … and he’s a friend of the show as well, as he was one of the first people to link to my site. However, he claims Kaidoku are too hard for him! So if you’ve been doing these, you can claim to be a better (variety) crossword solver than he is. (Side note #2: if he started doing these, he would pwn all of us. So don’t get too smug)
Further congrats go to friend of the show Joon Pahk, who in his first ever ACPT won the B division championship and finished 16th overall! And to further friends of the show Ryan Hecht and Brian Cimmet for finishing first and third in the E and D divisions, respectively. (They don’t hang around here a lot, but they have linked here, which I appreciate) And friend of the show Brendan Quigley constructed the tournament’s hardest puzzle – a process he details here.
[Edit - how could I forget to congratulate frequent guest Howard Barkin on his second-place finish? No shame in finishing second this year -- by all accounts, Dan was not to be stopped. In case I forgot any other frequent guests of this blog, congrats to all of you! That should cover it.]
Overall, the event sounded like a lot of fun. I’ve never been … it’s really far … and expensive … but I will be at the upcoming Crosswords LA Tournament if you want to drop by and say “hi”!
Today’s puzzle made me hungry while I was making it. Ooh, now I’m hungry right now. I’ll go have a bite to eat. Enjoy!
As with all XKCD-type comics, don’t forget to mouse over for the title text.
This was a fun little thing to create. Hey, you know what else is fun? Today’s puzzle by Matt! (How’s that for a segue?) But seriously, this puzzle is another beauty. Try a Q-hunt if you get stuck.
Going to the ACPT this weekend? How are you getting there – plane, train, bus, subway, car, or some combination thereof? Well, print out this baby and take it along with you while you’re traveling. Are you a Kaidoku newbie? Don’t worry – this one is pretty accessible. We’ve got (count ‘em!) three palindromes in the grid and a word with a pretty unusual letter combination going down in the bottom right. I think the “S” and the “E” are pretty easily identifiable in the grid, too. Give it a shot! You might be surprised how well you do.
So, will I see you this weekend? Probably not, as I’ll be home in Los Angeles. Infant son takes precedence over cross-country travel. But have fun, enjoy today’s puzzle, and we’ll see you on Monday.
Do we really need another Puzzle Pointers page? After all, we’ve already got Will’s and Ephraim’s. Not to mention the uber-convenient CrosswordButler. But I’ve created the new puzzle pointers badge you see above that offers a few advantages:
• It offers direct links to the BEQ and Daily Beast crosswords
• It’s in a nice, readable format where all the day’s puzzles are bunched together
• It’s embeddable to your own home page! It looks great on MyYahoo or iGoogle, and as you can see above, it works on other pages as well.
If you want to put it on your page, visit here. Enjoy!
I really enjoyed Matt’s Kaidoku today. I think you will too. Maybe you should start with a Q-hunt? Happy President’s Day! See you Thursday.
When I was done writing today’s puzzle, I noticed something unusual – at least nine eight words in it can be broken up to form two smaller words! For an example of what I mean, the word CURSING can be broken into CUR + SING. This was purely accidental today. Weird, right? Or maybe it’s not? Anyway, can you find the words I’m referring to?
Wow, next week we hit three-quarters of a century on this blog! Thanks for sticking with us. Enjoy the puzzle, and see you Monday!
Have you ever heard the “proof” that there are no uninteresting positive integers? It goes something like this: let U be the set of uninteresting positive integers. Now if U is non-empty, it has a smallest element … but that number is then interesting, for being the smallest uninteresting number! Thus U must be empty, so there are no uninteresting numbers.
Well, the proof is silly but the sentiment is true, at least for a mathematician like me. Take today’s number, 72. Why, it’s the smallest number non-trivially representable as xy*yx; specifically, 72=23*32. Not bad, right? Hey, speaking of integer powers, here’s a number puzzle for you – my age is an integer power and so is my wife’s. My wife is four years older than me. How old are we?
Anyway, if you did Matt’s contest last week you probably know why I have this stuff on the brain. Anyway, enjoy today’s puzzle, and we’ll see you Thursday!
Getting inspired to write crosswords is hard. I get inspired to write a crossword about … oh … every month or so. Usually less. And of course, not every crossword I write gets published. Not even close. So you can see why my puzzle output is so low. (Meanwhile there are people like Brendan Quigley and Matt Gaffney who are essentially constantly writing crosswords. How do these people do it?)
Anyway, getting inspired to write Kaidoku is much easier. Just start with a word you really like! At work these days we’re working on a system called PORCUPiNE. So I thought, hey, that would be a good seed for a Kaidoku! (No, not PORCUPINE. You’ll see what word it is when working through today’s puzzle). By the way, I’m pretty happy with the way this one turned out. I think you’ll like it too!
Enjoy the puzzle, and have a great weekend! We’ll see you Monday.
