Wednesday, March 4, 2009

A Lesson a Day ...

If you solve the NYTimes puzzle online, as I did today, you'll run into a bit of a problem filling in the grid. There's more to the theme entries than meets the eye, so you'll have to either remember where those squares occur or devise a way to indicate that the unfilled-square isn't really unfilled. What I did was type an askerisk into the appropriate square; for some reason only the programmer knows, that placed an open circle, not an askerisk, in the spot, but that was okay as it hardly mattered what was there, only that something be there temporarily.

It was a neat twist that didn't take long to figure out ... unlike my experience at the ACPT, where time pressure tends to freeze the brain.

And I know it's the time pressure that does the freezing, because at home I handily solved all the tournament puzzles -- except the infamous #5, of course -- without reference to the answer key. Okay, okay, some of that was re-solving but still ... places where I'd been stumped were suddenly glaringly obvious. Puh-lease! (The piggy puns were real groaners, btw -- boartoxinjections? oy!)

Back to the puzzle at hand ... I mean, on the screen ... I learned a new word today: basinet (this wouldn't be obscure crosswordese, would it?). Googling the word, I found that, according to its Wikipedia entry, it can be spelled three ways: bascinet, bassinet, or basinet. I also found that there is a jazz singer, Cynthia Basinet, known for her take on the Eartha Kitt classic "Santa Baby," and well enough known for her work in Africa to have been nominated recently for the Nobel Peace Prize. It would have been nice -- and I think with the same level of difficulty -- to see her clued for the entry rather than a medieval piece of armor.

There was also a geography lesson for me in this puzzle: India's Malabar Coast, 525 miles of southwest India coastline. Further googling also reveals a London company, Malabar, that sells designer fabrics handwoven in India. I shall definitely have to check them out!

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