21. Puzzling Thoughts…
…about favorite clues. A couple of recent posts here got me thinking about my favorite crossword clue that I’ve written. Not the best or funniest or cleverest, just my favorite. This is the clue: Extinct Namibian shrub genus: Var.
Pretty bad, isn’t it? But there’s a reason for that. There are also a few interesting incidents surrounding the puzzle in which it appeared (NYT, January 15, 2004). You can try the puzzle if you’d like [CLICK HERE for a PDF] or just read on. Sorry, Across Lite won’t work for it.
The theme entry running through the puzzle was: CAN YOU FIND TEN THINGS WRONG WITH THIS PUZLE. The word “PUZLE” was one of the mistakes. The Namibian shrub clue was another, the mistake being that it had no accompanying answer in the grid. What better chance could there be for writing the lousiest, dumbest clue one could think of?
Perhaps the most surprising thing to me about this puzzle was the wide range of reactions to it. A few people deemed it one of their favorites, while others felt quite the opposite. One person, who threw it out half-finished, told me, “There are some things you just shouldn’t do with a crossword puzzle!” And that was a friend!
The oddest incident surrounding the puzzle was a series of phone calls I received from my sister-in-law the morning it appeared. Through a friend, she’d gotten a part as an extra in Jonathan Demme’s “The Manchurian Candidate” and was hanging out during a lull in the shooting with four secret service agent actors — who were trying to solve the puzzle! They knew something odd was going on with it but couldn’t quite figure out what. My sister-in-law asked to see it and saw my byline on it. “My brother-in-law wrote that puzzle! I’ll call him,” she told them. She did, and after a series of calls over the next hour, they completed the puzzle. (Alas, she ended up on the cutting room floor, nowhere to be seen in the movie.)
Just one last incident I’ll mention, and then I’ll let you go. It concerns the puzzle’s appearance in The New York Times’s European sister publication, the International Herald Tribune. One eagle-eyed assistant on their staff noticed that Will Shortz’s name was misspelled “Will Shorts” (one of the 10 mistakes) — and corrected it! I can only imagine what solvers there thought of the puzzle, hunting for a 10th mistake that didn’t exist.
PDF answer: [CLICK HERE]
September 5, 2007 at 11:05 am
Count me as one of those who think “Ten Things” was the best puzzle ever, knocking the Election Day ‘96 puzzle down to second place.
September 5, 2007 at 2:50 pm
Surely this puzzle has been reprinted by SMP by now (though not in a book proofread by me). Since there’s no editor’s byline on those pages, what did they do?
September 5, 2007 at 3:01 pm
It was reprinted, I think about a year ago, by St. Martin’s Press. Since there is a large puzzle number on each page, it was decided to turn that upside down. It ended up being puzzle #96…
…not. :-)
September 5, 2007 at 4:21 pm
Every day there’s a new puzzle, but some days are special. This one was an EVENT! I remember that Thursday when it was published. In the days of the spoiler rule, we had to wait till noon to talk about a puzzle and at twelve o’clock there was a rush to post the list of “mistakes” and see what others had to say. I was quite surprised to find that a few people were underwhelmed, but the vast majority enjoyed it very much. It’s wonderfully creative, a true classic, and one of my favorites.
September 6, 2007 at 7:03 am
I remember exactly where I was when I solved this puzzle: On the Amtrak train headed to Boston, en route to the Mystery Hunt. I remember thinking that crossword was a perfect warm-up to the weekend of puzzles ahead.
September 25, 2007 at 7:32 pm
Seems to me there is another mistake. It’s in the Across Lite version of the answer on the NYT puzzle page. I was scratching my head for several minutes on this one until I discovered that the answer on Pat’s PDF is correct.
September 27, 2007 at 8:39 am
Don, I’m assuming the “mistake” you mention is SPOILS/SWEE in my pdf vs. SPOILT/TWEE in the original NYT answer.
There was no pdf available for this puzzle when I went to post it on my blog, so I created one from my original files. Seeing SPOILT/TWEE in the grid, I wondered why I’d used that pair — and so changed it! (It’s not historically accurate, but I prefer it now.)