All posts by drJ

NYT

Previous puzzles

If you’re looking for hints for earlier puzzles (perhaps you read a syndicated version of the NY Times puzzle…They come in 5 weeks after the original publication). Here are links to those pages:

Thurs. 2012-12-06

Weds. 2012-12-05

Tues. 2012-12-04

Mon. 2012-12-03

Sun. 2012-12-02

Sat. 2012-12-01

Fri. 2012-11-30

Thurs. 2012-11-29

Weds. 2012-11-28

Tues. 2012-11-27

Mon., 2012-11-26

Sun. 2012-11-25

Sat. 2012-11-24

Fri. 2012-11-23

Thurs. 2012-11-22

THEME (Mon. 2012-11-19)

THEME & CLUES (Sun. 2012-11-18) Star-crossed Lovers

CLUES (Sat. 2012-11-17) (Themeless)

THEME & CLUES (Fri. 2012-11-16)

THEME & CLUES (Thurs. 2012-11-15) “There are six hidden in this puzzle”

THEME & CLUES (Weds., 2012-11-14)

THEME & CLUES (The REAL Tues., 2012-11-13) 2012 James Bond Film

THEME & CLUES (Tues., 2012-11-13) Category for 17-, etc. across  Uh oh!  The NY Times online is messed up!  This puzzle is apparently from August 3, 2010!!!

THEME and CLUES (Mon. 2012-11-12):  Sound effects

THEME and CLUES (Sun. 2012-11-11) Bottoms Up!

CLUES (Sat. 2012-11-10) 

CLUE (Fri. 2012-11-09) Where chromosomes gather between poles during mitosis (Hint, not answer)

THEME (Thurs. 2012-11-08) Hint:  Home field advantage…or what the last square in the answer to this clue…

CLUES & THEME  (Weds., 2012-11-07) Something to sing…

CLUES & THEME (Tues., 2012-11-06)

CLUE (Mon. 2012-11-05) Wynken, et al.

THEME (Sun. 2012-11-04) Frankly speaking

CLUE (Sat. 2012-11-03) Like old gaming consoles

CLUE (Fri., 2012-11-02)  1990s girl group member with a tongue piercing

THEME (Thurs. 2012-11-1) With 74- & 75- Across, “invisible” part of a distribution list

THEME (Tues. 2012-10-30): 64-across Ingredients

THEME (Tues. 2012-10-30): Circles

THEME & CLUE HINTS (Sun., 2012-10-28): What the…

CLUE HINTS: Joon Pahk’s Sat. 2012-10-27)

CLUE: (Fri., 2012-10-27):  When it’s approximately

CLUE: (Thurs. 2012-10-26): Big Whig

THEME (Thurs. 2012-10-25) basic instruction for [circled letters]

CLUE (Thus.  2012-10-25) The Gulf of Mexico has a big one

CLUE (Weds., 2012-10-24) Mrs. Krabappel, Bart Simpson’s teacher

THEME/CLUE (Tuesday, 2012-10-23): Org. suggested by the starts of 17-, etc.

THEME/CLUE (Monday, 2012-10-22): Sting Operative

THEME (Sun. 2012-10-21) Bypassing Security

 

 

 

I fell in love with crosswords because of Manny Nosowsky.  He’s the all-time “leading author” of NY Times Friday puzzles.  As you may know, the NY Times has an amazingly consistent daily structure over the course of each week.  The puzzles get progressively difficult up to Saturday.   Sunday is somewhat different animal:  much bigger, for one and always with a “theme,” a particular wordplay that permeates the puzzle.  Because it’s bigger, sometimes the theme answers are really long and cool, sometimes disappointing.   Most everybody, but geniuses or fools, starts by doing Mondays and maybe Tuesdays for a while, and filling in as much of Sunday as they have the time for.  Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays and Sundays always have a theme, something that ties them together; almost always it’s a word play in the long answers.

Ah, but Thursday, there’s a puzzler’s reward for making it through the week!  The best themes, even better than most of the one’s on Sundays!  And often [drumroll] a trick!  (I’ve heard this called a “rebus” though that wasn’t what I thought a rebus was.)  Usually, it’s that one square has more than a single letter in it.  I recall a puzzle that used the symbol/letters for the four

And then there’s Friday.  Friday is a whole other Rubicon to cross.  A good Friday puzzle has barely a clue seen in the NYT before.  Emmett Quigley’s “hard” puzzles on his site are essentially Friday puzzles with a little more current (rap group names, current TV, slang) clues and occasionally racy language.  Friday puzzles can be memorable.  Saturdays are harder than Friday, but how hard it is depends somewhat on how many clues are in areas that aren’t in your world.

I learned on paper.  In fact, the NYT puzzle on my lap got me to and fro on the Long Island Railroad more hours than I care to admit.  But that moment when you go through a whole puzzle once and there’s barely a single answer you can put confidently on the paper.   And working through and over it gradually begin to fill in a few squares.  Maybe it even goes evenly forward for a while, only to seem to hit another cup de sac.  And a thought occurs to you and you can see it’s right and you’re going to have figured out the whole puzzle.  That’s a wonderful moment.

I occasionally look at Rex Parker’s NYT Crossword Blog, but usually don’t.  I did my own blog for a while, but Google wasn’t updating it often enough for people to see it, so it was too much work for nothin’.  The pleasure of doing the puzzles is enhanced, I think by a couple simple things.  So that’s what this is, a little “in case you didn’t consider this.”

1.  Do the puzzle the way you like.  Don’t let those who sneer at googling for answers get your goat.  It’s a way to learn.  But only go to that once you’ve done as much as you can without it.  Same goes with seeing if you’re correct (the “Check” option in Across Lite) or the “just tell me what the answer is” of “Reveal.”  Do what it takes to make solving fun.  I suggest not getting too hung up on how long it takes you to solve a puzzle.  Aren’t you doing this to relax, not to prove how smart (or how dumb) you are?

2.  Do try to memorize a few things, or make lists of them:  Frequent characters in the Simpson, Seinfeld, the Jewish months of the year (ADAR’s particularly common), extinct animals, higher ed degrees and professional associations (PHD, MBA, ABA, AMA, ADA, etc.).  It’s hopeless, of course, and really suggests you have way, way too much time on your hands, if you try to memorize a lot of stuff in an area you know nothing about.  (Rap stars definitely fall into this category for me!  Also anything with current television except Project Runway and sports.)   If it’s finite and frequent, like the nicknames of major league teams, yeah, then it’s worth getting a few in your memory band.  If it’s not or there’s no way it’s gonna stick, go on to something else.  There are always areas in puzzles that are easy for some and all but impossible for others.

3.  Try fixing in your mind one new word that shows up in each puzzle that you have a feeling might show up again.  If it’s really obscure, no use memorizing, you’ll probably never see it again.  That applies to a lot of the long phrases.  The NY Times very rarely repeats a long phrase it’s used before.

4.  They say that doing Xwords might prevent Alzheimer’s disease.  Seems unlikely, but it can’t hurt to exercise those little gray cells and it sure beats being bored.

 

 

 

Thought

Fragments

Pieces.  Each reflecting an image, a truth.  But always only a partial proof.  And not like a jig saw puzzle:  The fragments cannot be put together, the whole cannot be re-created from the parts.

It frightens us when we see it in raw form in the overtly insane, but we know it to be universal human fate:  to have to put together our world with the fragments we can find.

Thought

New short essay: Do we learn to be a community from our disasters?

Added a short essay on the aftermath of Katrina, Irene, and Sandy.  It’s a reflection on what we do and don’t seem to learn from these momentous acts of nature that our human hands seem more capable of exacerbating than resolving.  We seem to come together, under the impact of the disaster, but all too quickly go back to regarding our fellow humans as competitors for limited resources rather than our companions in the struggle to progress as a human community.

Update Announcement

Announcing Version 1.0

Rarely do you hear something proudly touted as “Version 1.0.”  I remember being told “never buy the first model of anything.”  I defied this dictum and bought a Dodge Omni in 1978.  (If you don’t know me, yes, I’m that old!)  A mechanic, who’d been able virtually to earn a living on the costs of repairing my car alone, said to me: “They call it an Omni because they got every part from a different country.”  He wasn’t kidding either, everything seemed like it came from somewhere different and had been put together by someone who didn’t know very much about cars.

So defying the dictum of never call anything 1.0, that’s what this is Version 1.0, the first incomplete, if also completely imperfect, version of my writings, Reflections in a Cracked Glass.

Oh, I’ll keep writing, but I feel a sense of completeness, of having touched the bases I wanted to, with the addition of the essays on socialism, and on the role of trajectory in artistic creativity.

If you’re new to this site, pick an essay and see where it takes you.

Gianni  Rutchik

 long time admirer of Kilgore Trout

 

NYT

New feature: Hints (not answers) to NY Times Crossword Puzzle

I enjoy doing crosswords, particularly NY Times Thursday, Friday & Saturday.  I also usually do Emmet Quigley’s challenging Monday puzzles.   Sometimes you get stuck on an answer.  You don’t want just find out (Googling is soooo easy…) but you’d love a hint to get you unstuck.   So, if you want to see some hints-not-answers, here you go.   To be honest, the point of this xword blog is to attract word-centric readers who might, just might, be interested in checking out the essays of my blook.

Update, 2014-11-20:  After about a month of doing this which was mostly fun, I’m not updating the crossword blog currently.  I still enjoy doing crosswords regularly, but it my real interest lies in the essays more than the blog.  So I’m “on hiatus” from blogging the NY Times puzzle for a while.  If you’re the kind of person who would enjoy a hint now and then, though, shoot me an email through the contact page and I’ll pass back to you an occasional hint.   — Jon Mack

Update Announcement

Adding essay: Why Socialism Matters

I’ve been  working on this essay for quite a while.  Here we are in the midst of electing a new president and it’s as though socialism only exists as what Obama doesn’t want to be accused of being.  Well, he isn’t.  But it still shocks me that our battle continues to be not to lose rights we thought we’d won long ago, rather than how we can move forward.  Capitalism, on a global scale, is falling apart, but is a socialist alternative seriously considered?  Rarely.

Check it out:  Why Socialism Matters

(A Spanish translation of this article will be available soon.)

Thought

Sometimes I get so scared…

Sometimes I get so scared…

There were rumblings today about Iran possibly being willing to negotiate about their “nuclear program.”  I try to forget that Israel is poised on the verge of starting a war like we have never seen before, a war horrible beyond imagining.  But here is the New York Times saying that some suspect that Iran is only trying to “buy time,” two weeks from the U.S. Presidential election in proposing talks.

Buying time?  Two weeks?  Are we really that close to Israel attacking Iran, with or without U.S. immediate military support?

While Obama and Romney spar, far more like prizefighters than statesmen.  Are these the men, and the men and women around them, who will decide our fate?

It terrifies me.

Thought

The age of the universe

The age of the universe

 

The conventional way of describing the universe, saying “a little under 14 billions years old” has struck me for a while to be wrong:  that the Big Bang happened about then.  Now ,Oct. 12, 2012, we can see it right on Google.  It’ll pop up with 13.75 billion years quicker than you can change a channel with your remote:

But as best we understand it today going back to Einstein says that time is tied up with mass, that mass warps time.  How we understand gravity today is based on this, in fact.  So we sometimes may hear the expression “time loses meaning as we go back as far as the origin of our universe.”   As mass became denser and denser as we understand the universe was at its birth, then time also ceased to exist in the way we understand time today.

 

So the universe went from a point outside of time as we know it to time as we think we know it today,  how long was the time when time had no meaning?  A minute, a second, an eternity?  Just as that question has no meaning, neither does the 13.75 billions year figure.

Update Announcement

A marriage quote

I’m sure that I wasn’t the first to say it, but seeing divorced couples fighting  particularly over children, years later, evoked this from me:  “Marriage is temporary, but divorce is forever.”

Of course I know that some divorced couples get remarried.  That just proves the point.  A marriage may cease to be but the relationship remains.   ‘course one could argue that all of this just proves marriage, happy or not, together or not,  is forever.

Coming soon:  an article on socialism and an article the importance of trajectory in the teaching and learning of art.

 

Thought

On playing the villain

About ten days have passed since I finished a run of acting the part of Henry Ford.   Playing Henry Ford is not like playing Mark Twain.  Samuel Clements, so far as his persona is concerned, was a wonderful man who sometimes said things that sounded crass, but weren’t, not really.  Ford, on the other hand (in this Mark St. Germain play, Camping with Henry and Tom), is a fundamentally base man.  He is very fucked up.  I’ve played unpleasant characters before.  Sometimes you feel like the people you act with take personally your role with them on the stage.  Sometimes you feel like you are the nasty son-of-a-bitch you’re portraying.

When I played a nasty union boss in a Clifford Odets play, my friend and director told me something that he’d learned from a director he respected: “An actor shows his character flaws not by what he reveals on stage, but by what he refuses to allow to show.”  I kept this in mind throughout doing Ford.  But as much as it’s “fun to play a villain, a real prick and an asshole, it’s no bullshit that you do get some contact of some very dark places of oneself.  As they say, it’s necessary to do that to get any reality to your character.  Even so…

I wonder if this is fundamental to any artistic process:  that both dark and light need to be explored.   I think so.  I think of a Beethoven symphony or Van Gogh’s Starry Night or James Joyce’s Ulysses or the poetic songs of Dylan and blues and jazz.  In theatre, except where there’s a terrible struggle going on inside the character, there’s often the dark and light are dichotomized into different characters.

Thought

The death of the word has been greatly exaggerated

There’s the wonderful quote by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) that rumors of his death were “exaggerations.”   I wonder if this is something that has happened to the power of the written word.  I wonder if we have come to accept the notion that life has been reduced to postings on Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube or 10-second television sound bites to the degree that the written word in the form of essays and books is irrelevant, anachronistic, the domain only of the most academicians and other “intellectuals.”  Perhaps the death of the word has been exaggerated.

Perhaps the word is only badly injured, in intense need of rehabilitation, not altogether abandoned to the landfill of history.   Perhaps it will rise like Lazarus.  Because it is the word that makes us human.  And, as much as we may admire the great apes and the infinitesimal bacteria, as much as we are ashamed of what humans have done in the name of humanity, we should also be proud of what we are:  Thinking, choosing, curious beings.   Beings who can express complex and wonderful thoughts to each other.  Beings who can be moved by what we read, whose lives are affected by what we read.

There will always be diversions, ways for us not to think.  Who can blame us?   There are plenty of good reasons not to think, not to dig beneath the surface of the reality presented to us.

But there will always people who do think, who have not given up, who have not stopped trying to figure out how to make better sense out of this world.

I guess that’s why I write.  And why I read.