Geographic Crossword

6th grade geography in the crossword grid. The difference between a plateau and a mesa? 5:2.

Doing it in pen is nothing compared to doing it in type.

Skill learned: use of the ½-space functionality. It's the only way to get yourself into all those little boxes that aren't quite 2 spaces apart.

1A-70A: First Names

Are you getting a load of all those first name clues? Seems unfair, especially for a Tuesday, since you either know them or you don't. Luckily for me Allen Ginsberg once spent the night in the house I grew up in. Total gimme.

Sweaters on The Van Hise Terrace

It was a beautiful sunny day today in Madison, WI. I ate lunch out on the terrace. Not The Terrace, but definitely a terrace. We worked on the crossword while we ate. One in green Le Pen, the other in a red Paper❤Mate FLAIR. It's true what they say, the FLAIR is great for editing documents and papers, I do all my grading with it now. Things did get a little tense around 24A: Bank (CAROM), because really, who's ever heard of a carom? And ATOZ didn't make any sense either, until we realized it was actually A to Z.

The last time you saw this sweater, the colors were all around you (and I was wearing the same shirt).

# of Frames: 36

In Which Crosswords are Conquered

On Friday I spent 3+ hours in a car without music. It sounds terrible, but it wasn't really.  I had ten 1 oz. servings of Flaming Hot Cheetos and two and a half 8 oz. servings of Wild Cherry Pepsi [left] to keep me company. Also in the car I had 1 friend plus T-Pain, although we wouldn't realize until later that we were never actually on a boat.

During the ride I completed the Thursday NY Times crossword. It required enough corrections and/or rewrites to render most of the grid illegible, but it is all there. Even the cheesy geography theme clues:

• 17A: Eco-friendly in Las Vegas? (Green with NV)
  
• 26A: Omaha's waterfront during downpours? (NE port in a storm)
  
• 44A: First-place finishers in Bangor? (ME Award-winners)
  
• 59A: Jogging atop Great Falls? (Running on MT)

On the heels of that accomplishment came today's Monday puzzle, which I did in green. Monday's are easy puzzles in the grande scheme of things, but this puzzle is the first in my 7 years of NYT subscription that I can remember having completed any puzzle without mistakes. I'm glad it finally happened, I'd been starting to obsess about why it hadn't happened for me yet. Now I can just relax and enjoy it. This one happened to include both of the following: 

• 20A: Fix part of dinner with lettuce, carrots, peppers, etc. (Toss a Salad)
  
• 58A: Prepare to camp (Pitch a Tent)

Vocabulary Review: 2/27 - 3/2

Across

2. The remains of a rat or mouse killed by a snapping trap OR A flying squirrel nest

3. Pertaining to the intestines OR An unsuccessful split in Russian ballet

4. A container used to hold ham OR The last flash of a camera's timer light

6. Of or relating to the 1st branch of Government OR A ghoulish taunt typical of non-jumping zombies

8. A poor attempt to whistle loudly OR A foot treadle on the first sewing machine

10. A friendly term used towards an older man OR A hard green cheese made from skim milk

12. An alcoholic drink consisting of equal parts whiskey and goat's milk OR A colloquial term used to describe poorly synthesized methamphetamine

Down

1. Bleeding out on the operating table, resulting in death OR Not able to look someone in the eye

5. Overripe rotting fruit OR Cloth used to wrap around a toga

7. The prominent erect ears desirable in many breeds of terriers OR A nocturnal schnauzer breed capable of flight

9. More meaty OR A sheep-shearing mechanism

11. The Jewish dance crazy that swept Israel during the summer of 1993 OR to shuffle about in sloppy old shoes

File it under TT825 D570.2 1974

Before we get to the sweatering, is anyone else listening to as much Kanye and Akon as I am right now? 808s and Freedom? Both are seeing some serious action by The Barnebey Collection's playcount department. On the female side, I can't really get enough Cyndi Lauper's Into the Night Life and Linda Ronstadt's Silver Threads and Golden Needles. They are lighting it up.

That brings us, and me, to the Linguistics Department reading room/library. Typical activities in this room include printing the semi-quarterly department newsletter (bottom left), reading scholarly journals (back center), lounging on small pieces of furniture (front center), putting the unabridged dictionary on high shelves (back right), and completing the Thursday NY Times crossword (bottom right).

Here is what I would look like while doing all those things, to a zombie wearing night vision glasses.

cross x word

 

I had to look up those last 4 letters, but I still consider this Friday puzzle a success. 51-down caused more problems than it should have; when it comes to F.D.R. you've only got three choices: CCC, WPA, or TVA. I wanted 49-across to be ATILLA instead of ATTILA though and that held me back for a little while.

Success.

Lies.

This is one of my favorite crosswords I've ever done. Bill Clinton's was also fun, but this one was pretty innovative for a crossword. A bunch of the clues are factually inaccurate, hinted at by the unusual grid, and the number which are wrong is the answer to another clue. Also, I like it because it's a Thursday puzzle that I managed to finish completely.

Coolosity

To begin, I have a bit of commentary on the Essay Topic, "Prove how uncool you are", itself. I find this formulation suspect. Do we get a merit badge or something if we score high enough on the uncoolometer? And more importantly, who's operating the uncoolometer. Hopefully not the lame-oids that created this list that Lucia found:

I got a list on some x-box internet site from teenage boys (it includes many many many references to their genitals), sunglasses, a good cell phone, listening to cool music, a MySpace group that forces you to prove how cool you are, and then a discussion of some book called The Tipping Point on how new ideas become widely accepted.

Because that's not very cool. Anyway, my point is that when 'cool' has come to mean 'uncool' and 'uncool' has become something you prove yourself as being so that you can be cool, we are in a strange place. That being said, I'll play along.


1. As has been hinted at before, I'm a geographile. I can recite the capitals of the 50 states, the 13 Canadian Provinces and Territories (although the new one Nunavut still causes me problems sometimes), and pretty much all the national capitals of the world (with the exception of the Lesser Antilles and Oceania, because really, that's just too many islands to keep track of). I also really enjoy maps. This is uncool because being cool requires that one maintains an aloof superscilious attitide towards all things (except one's appearance) at all times. By learning capitals and studying maps I have demostrated interest in things outside of my immediate. -5 cools


2. I found the use of 'can' as a bare verb in both Lucia's and 11Frogs' posts exciting. It's not cool to get excited. Especially about verbs. -6 cools

3. I do the NY Times crossword everyday, even though after Thursday I can rarely finish. Not only is the NY Times not cool (lack of aloofness), newspapers themselves aren't cool (too learny), nor is continuing to do something you can't succeed at cool. -4 cools

4. I know that the grammaticality of the following sentences means that I have unrestrictive quantifier binding:

Every boy's sister opened his mail.
Alice talked about every director's report and his possible resignation.

and I am curious if they are grammatical for you as well (are they?). I'll just go ahead and say it, Linguistics isn't cool. -2 cools

Total: 17 points less than cool.

Confusion in the Print Room

At lunch today I opened up my paper to do the NYTimes crossword and encountered an unwelcome surprise. I had already done the crossword printed there. This was confusing to say the least. Above is a picture of pages B2 (today's crossword page) and B11 (the opposing sheet). You may notice something odd about them, especially since they are actually one piece of paper.

Crossword Solved

I solved this today. I'm pretty proud of myself. More to come later.

Later:
The thing that about this puzzle is the tricky rebus-stlye construction. Notice 37A: Bargaining phrase ... and a hint to this puzzle's theme (ITSGONNACOSTYOU). As in an arm and a leg. Get it? Well sure, once you get 37A you're set. My problem was that I got 9D: One column in the periodic table (NOBLEGASES) first. And instead of entering LEG into one square I thought there might be some twisting clues at work in this puzzle (follow the blue arrows), as that is another trick Mr. Shortz likes to keep up his erudite sleeves. Misleadingly, this actually fit with the rest of the answers in the northeast corner. 36D: Food company whose name is spelled out in its advertising jingle (OSCARMAYER) was originally entered this way as well, until 51A: It tends to increase with income (TAXRATE) necessitated some reconsidering. Not until it became clear that 17A: Events for some teens had to be some type of mitzvah did I figure out what was really going on here. Finally, I would like to discuss 60A: Something never shown in bars (CIRCLEGRAPH). First off, this clue needs a question mark. Second, I feel like 'circle graph' is pretty marginal. It's called a pie chart. Graphs have axes. A little disappointing Will, a little disappointing. (I did enjoy 45A: Follower of red or 50 (CENT) though.)

Oh, and we went for a run at 4:00 AM last night. Although there was some blowback from this, over all a good decision.

Omelettes and Methamphetamines

This morning wasn't looking to be a good day. I over cooked my eggs to start with. I should have stayed with my tried and true, two eggs over medium, but I went with the omelette instead. I'm actually really good at the over medium. Based on my experience ordering them at dining establishments, better than most people working a griddle out there. Omelets I've never done as well with though.

Anyway, the point is I wasn't happy with my breakfast. And then the group emails started coming in about the linguistics exam next week, almost as if we didn't have a TA meeting yesterday to figure that out. Then there was the call alerting me that Wendy might have died, which she knows she's not supposed to do. I had actually been worried about this already, so I had to make quick use of the telephone. Having satisfied myself that she wasn't dead, I went to 101 lecture to do the crossword. That's pretty much what I do every Monday and Wednesday at 12:05, and because it's only mon. and wed. I usually do pretty well on the crosswords. Not today. I think I filled in about 5 clues, 2 of which I would later realize were wrong. This was the low point of February 21st, 2007 (Yesterday's low point occurred sometime around 8:00 PM Central Time as UW completed their loss to Michigan State).

Discouraged, I gave up on the crossword, turned to the front page, and read this. It lifted my spirits. Thank god I'm not smoking meth with the whores down the hallway. Oh, and later I finished the crossword. The watershed moment being:

Clue #20A: Slangy question from a benefactor, maybe
(whos your daddy)

Quickly followed by:
Clue #36A: 1964 party song by Manfred Mann
(do wah diddy diddy)
and
Clue #50A: Stuffy sort
(old fuddy duddy)

Once you get those long 3 the rest just fall into place, although I will admit that the iliac artery did throw me for a loop at first. Darcy, I'll assume you would have known this and award you 1 point.