125. MAD and Fowl

I have now achieved the highest honor of my career by having my latest book, Fowl Play, offered as a giveaway to those whose letters appear in MAD’s January issue (available now — Cheap!). Boy, will they be disappointed when they discover there’s not one mention of Octomom, Sarah Palin or Bernard Madoff inside the book’s covers.

124. Blogging for the NYT

Starting today Monday, November 2, I begin writing for the daily New York Times crossword blog, Wordplay. I’ll be manning the desk all this week and then continuing on beyond that, playing tag team in weekly chunks with the incumbent host, Jim Horne. Come check it out, and leave a comment about the day’s puzzle if you’re feeling the urge.

123. Time for Puzzles

Available in October: Two new puzzle books from Time Inc. Home Entertainment. Sports Illustrated’s Most Valuable Puzzles includes regular and jumbo-sized crosswords (Patrick Merrell), “what’s different?” picture puzzles (SI staff), a benchful of cross stats (sports statistics stumpers by Mike Baranack) and sports star profiles (SI). People’s Celebrity Puzzler: Holiday Special! includes a festive 20-page “Happy Holidays” puzzle section and over 100 pages of other celebrity puzzles (six types of puzzles by Patrick Merrell; picture puzzles, celebrity profiles and trivia puzzles by People’s crack staff; ten “classic” crosswords by a quintet of puzzling legends). $7.91 each at Amazon — cheap!

122. Odd Night Is a Failure

An odd group, 67 competitors, turned up for the 13th annual Pleasantville crossword tournament on the night of September 25th and failed to finish off an overflowing table of baked goods. They did much better with the Monday through Wednesday crosswords from next week’s New York Times. Jeffrey Schwartz, Bob Mackey and Ken Stern tackled the final (Thursday) puzzle on stage, finishing in that order. One of the highlights of the evening was host Will Shortz’s correct pronunciation of the name of Ashish Vengsarkar’s collaborator on a recent Sunday Times puzzle, Narayan Venkatasubramanyan.

Below: MAD magazine art director Sam Viviano, one the contestants, kept himself busy by doodling between rounds. Pictured, clockwise from left, are: Frank Longo, ?, Barry Weprin, maybe Tony Orbach (although Sam was doubtful since the resemblance is iffy), Rob (one of Will’s Ping-Pong-playing pals) and Amanda Yesnowitz.

121. Will the Real Steve Please Stand Up

Which of these is a real except from the original All About Steve screenplay (one really is):

120. Created from Scratch

Wait no longer. FOWL PLAY is now available to fulfill your chicken puzzling needs with 101 crosswords, brainteasers, Ask the Chicken, anagrams, math posers, visual puzzles, cockadoku, and other word puzzles — plus poultry trivia, quotes, art, and an answer to the age-old question, Which came first, the chicken or the egg? [More on Amazon]

“Patrick Merrell joins Frank Perdue and Colonel Sanders in the great pantheon of men who know chicken.” — John Ficarra Editor, MAD Magazine

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ALSO: It’s still not too late to order Eric Berlin’s original and entertaining Game Night suite of crosswords. Cheap!

119. Gadzooks! Le Tour

The Good Old Days: This year’s Tour de France was packed with drama, but it pales in comparison to the second-ever Tour in 1904. During the first of its six stages, four masked men in a car attacked two of the favorites. On the second day, 200 fans of one rider tried to block his pursuers. Nails were thrown onto the road in the fifth stage. In the end, 73 of the 88 riders were disqualified, including several who hopped aboard a car or train during the race.

Photo at right: For the climactic Mont Ventoux stage of this year’s race, Tour organizers showed their sense of humor by placing a giant syringe at the summit of the climb.

Tour Quiz: Three different riders wore the yellow jersey in this year’s Tour de France. Here’s a quick quiz using their last names:

1. CANCELLARA: Find three common six-letter words that can be spelled reading his name from left to right (letters can be skipped).
2. NOCENTINI: Find two words, each of which can be spelled using eight of the nine letters in his name.
3. CONTADOR: Find two words, each of which can be spelled using seven of the eight letters in his name. And can you find a six-letter word reading from left to right (letters can be skipped)?

Answers in the comments.

118. Chicken Puzzles

Have you been longing for a book with a wide-ranging and humorous assortment of poultry-themed puzzles suitable for all ages? Your wish is about to be fulfilled. FOWL PLAY is coming in November September!, just in time for the holidays fall harvest.

What’s in it? 144 pages of crosswords (some with illustrated clues), trivia, logic puzzles, anagrams, jokes, math puzzles, cockadoku, cryptograms, chicken lore, word searches, acrostics, mazes, criss-crosses, drop quotes, posers, visual puzzles, and an entertaining mix of other original word puzzles. Guaranteed to blow the lid off the poultry-themed puzzle book market!

117. Squares: ACPT Finals Cartoon

Previous Squares cartoons: CLICK

116. ACPT Snapshots

A few random thoughts about the three finalists in this past weekend’s American Crossword Puzzle Tournament…

115. Crosswide Puzzle

Can you figure out why this crossword grid looks the way it does? The answer appears after the cut.

114. Maze Monday

Okay, so I’m posting it on a Tuesday. But Maze Monday sounds much more alliterative. This is in honor of MAD Kids magazine, whose last issue will be hitting the newsstands this month. (©2006 by E.C. Publications, Inc.)

113. The Green Weenie

Watching the Steelers fans with their Terrible Towels on Super Bowl Sunday reminded me of an even stranger item that Pittsburgh fans would wave when I lived there in the late ’60s — The Green Weenie.

112. Puzzling Thoughts: Sunday Solving

Coming across this old, unpublished cartoon in my files, it struck me that those who solve the print version of the Sunday NY Times might enjoy it.

111. Rejected New Yorker Cover

Someone recently asked me about my rejected 2003 cover for The New Yorker, so I figured I’d put it up here. Everything you need to solve the crossword is in the illustration. Click to download a pdf.