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.

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!

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

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

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.)

109. Clue Wannabes

The Washington Post’s weekly “Style Invitational” had a recent contest to write alternate, funny clues for the entries in a real crossword written by Paula Gamache. The results are HERE (scroll down to week 792 results).

A few of my clues made the cut, but a gridful of others didn’t. So I’ve taken a dozen of my dumbest rejects and recycled them into a mini puzzle:

107. Reviews!

Although I’ve created a fair number of books, the amount of feedback from them has been rather paltry. A gratifying and, frankly, startling exception is my recent release, Bird Brainteasers, which has garnered 50 mostly glowing reviews on Amazon.com. I mention this in the hopes that you might consider it as a present for an upcoming holiday or in the year to come. It’s suitable for adults who like fun, not-too-tough puzzles and teens. And not to be overlooked, about 3/5 of its 324 pages is a wide-ranging mix of trivia, lore, art, quotes and info.

106. Christmas Crossword

I realize it’s still 25 days until Christmas, but stores have been playing Christmas music for a month already, so I figure it’s time to offer up this all-new Yuletide crossword.

• PDF download

• Across Lite download (upper left on the page this sends you to)

99. Cheep Thrills

Click on the end of this post to view six spreads from my new book, Bird Brainteasers, a 324-page book of avian trivia, quotes, and breezy puzzles. Click HERE to find out more about it on Amazon.

Full of whimsical facts, pithy quotes and meaty puzzles, Bird Brainteasers will keep you so engrossed you might not even notice that you’re not just having fun — you’re also learning more about birds.
— Scott Weidensaul, Pulitzer Prize finalist for Living on the Wind

This isn’t just another bird book or brainteaser book. It has something for everyone: quotes, quips, fascinating historical snippets, humor, and of course, the compelling artwork and clever puzzles that are Patrick Merrell trademarks. There’s a smile or more on every page. And I’m still smiling.
— Rich Norris, Los Angeles Times crossword editor

97. Fall Books (for grown-ups)

Bird Brainteasers: An entertaining and enlightening mix of puzzles, trivia, lore, and quotes — all related to birds. (Puzzles, text, design, and illustration by Patrick Merrell — cover illustration by Leigh Wells) Storey Publishing/324 pages/4×6/$9.95
Fabulous Fun with Puzzles: A merging of Joseph Leeming’s two classic puzzle books of the ’40s, updated and refined. (Edited, designed, and illustrated by Patrick Merrell) Time Inc. Home Entertainment/400 puzzles/224 pages/8×10/$13.95
The People Celebrity Puzzler EXTRA!: Regular and jumbo-size crosswords plus acrostics, word searches, sudoku, arrow-words, and criss-cross puzzles. (Puzzles by Patrick Merrell) Time Inc. Home Entertainment/144 pages/8×10/$10.99

80. Hasta La Vista, SCI-DOKU

The last Scientific American SCI-DOKU will run Tuesday, March 4th, ending the puzzle’s 15 month run. It will then “march forth” no more.

78. Super Bowl Puzzles

An Across Lite version of my Sports Illustrated Super Bowl crossword can be found here: SUPER BOWL. It’s an easy 13×13 puzzle that appeared the week prior to the event.

This additional trivia challenge can be solved when you look at the answer grid (link below) and unscramble the letters in the tan squares (WARNING! The 2-word answer is directly below the crossword answer grid — scroll down carefully):

What team with a winning Super Bowl record has been outscored by its opponents 148-107?

The crossword answer and two other, tougher Super Bowl puzzles (an acrostic and word search) can be found here: S.I. PUZZLES

75. SI Puzzles

For puzzle-solving sports fans, I’ve got a Super Bowl crossword in this week’s issue of Sports Illustrated (the Super Bowl XLII issue pictured here). I haven’t seen the final layout or the magazine itself, but I hear it will be on newsstands today, Thursday (no online version).

Monday afternoon, they also asked me to put together two bonus Super Bowl puzzles for their website (an acrostic and word search), and those went up Wednesday morning. They can be found here — BUT BE WARNED, the answer grid to the magazine’s crossword appears big as day right below the download link: Sports Illustrated bonus puzzles

63. Puzzles for the Kids

Here are 3 good puzzle books for the kids (and only one is mine):

1. Picture Clue Crosswords by Patrick Merrell
(ages 4-8 • $3.95 • 64 pages • 8×10)
click here for a mini-sized sample puzzle
Puzzles set up like adult crosswords, except with pictures for clues.
2. Clever Crosswords for Kids by Trip Payne
(ages 9-12 • $5.95 • 96 pages • 5×8)
These are well-made, fun puzzles. There’s a whole series; my daughter loved this one several years ago at the age of 12.
3. The Puzzling World of Winston Breen by Eric Berlin
(ages 9-12 • $16.99 or less • 224 pages • hardcover)
An intriguing, page-turning mystery with a nice variety of puzzles woven into the story.

62. Turn your computer upside down

I rummaged through my sketchbook and found these rough drawings, some of my first attempts at ambigrams. The top five (my wife, daughter, wife’s maiden name, and me) read the same when rotated 180 degrees. The bottom two are mirror ambigrams, which read the same left to right and right to left. I’ve added in the Will Shortz ambigram here because it was one of the “client” ambigrams I did at the time that worked out well.

If you want to make your own ambigram, here’s a clever site that’ll generate a very basic one for you — and maybe even give you a feel for how to do it on your own: Ambigram.matic

And here are a couple of more finished ones I made in recent years:

all ambigrams ©2007 Patrick Merrell