Wednesday, April 30 – 9:22

I enjoyed this theme from Henry Hook, and I think this was a reasonably good time.  I did get a square wrong though.  At the crossing of “Peace and quiet venue” (ARCADIA) and “Mann’s “Der ___ in Venedig”" (TOD), I had an N instead of a D.  Didn’t know the Mann work, and I got arcania confused with arcana, reasoning that if you’re off doing esoteric things, you probably don’t have much company.  Of course, arcana is not a venue, so that didn’t really hold up.

As soon as I figured out the ONMYMIND commonality in the first two themes, I filled that part of them all in.  I didn’t run into any big roadblocks except for being unfamiliar with DISSEVER, “Cut into parts”.  I had BISECTED there first.

Tuesday, April 29 – 9:51

Oof, slow today, mainly because of the SW corner.  In retrospect, there’s nothing exceptionally hard about that corner, but a bunch of only middle-hard (if that) clues conspired to trip me up with a couple of incorrect answers that really ended up slowing me down.  I didn’t get MCGUIRE airforce base right off the bat, I had OPUS for “It’s a piece of work”, ISM for “Suffix with modern”, I thought “Gun in an action film was a name”, and for “The Rock” I had the wrestler/actor firmly stuck in my head.  If I had been a little looser, I would have thought of the other meaning of The Rock, ALCATRAZ, rather than sticking on the other track.  I had AL and was thinking, why doesn’t the name Al something ring a bell?  Really stupid.

Monday, April 28 – 7:05

As I was solving, I felt like I was blasting through that one, so I’m a bit disappointed in my time.  I’m not sure where it went wrong.

Sunday, April 27 – 26:12

Not my best Sunday time, but not my worst either. I’m sure I would have been faster if I had figured out the theme faster. I didn’t concentrate on 65 Across (the explanation of the theme) until late in the puzzle, so in retrospect, certainly, that was a mistake. So today’s lesson is to determine if the discovery of the theme may depend on solving a particular clue, as opposed to solving one or more theme clues, and if so, see if that one clue can be solved early.

Then again, it might be debatable how much knowing the theme in this case (commonly misspelled words) would have helped. For me, I had seen lists of such words before, but not recently (possibly not in years), so I think it definitely would have helped some.

A minor lesson is to learn my zodiac months, or at least be more aware of zodiac clues. “Many August babies” was LEOS, and I didn’t realize it for too long.

Nit list: “Half-baked” was DOPY. I’m used to seeing this spelled like the dwarf, and I don’t like this uncommon variant at all. In general I don’t like variant spellings in crosswords. Google backs me up on this, with almost two million hits for DOPEY and less than 100,000 for DOPY. I think using variant spellings can be a sign of sub-par construction. Of course, the crosses for DOP go through two theme entries and the cross for Y goes through three, so it probably was a tough area to fill, so perhaps there was no other way to go.

Clue-rah: I liked ANE for “What a Tennessee cheerleader asks for a lot?”. DOH for “What a moron I am!”, Simpsons references are always good (two in one puzzle!), and that’s as good a description for d’oh as I’ve seen. EGO for “Massage target?” is another good one. I liked the answer HASAGOAT for “Attempts” solely because it looks like “has a goat”.  Edit: I swear I wrote that sentence before I read Orange’s post for this puzzle.

Saturday, April 26 – 31:50

Considering the difficulty of this puzzle, the number of long answers I didn’t know that I was able to figure out, I’m quite happy with this time.  I got lucky being able to guess two of the long answers in the NE with only a couple of letters – IAMACAMERA and MRSMINIVER.  After that I got the NW, then moved through the center and struggled with the SW and SE.  The SW didn’t take as long as the SE, which I had to leave and come back to a couple of times until it was the only thing left.  I remember as a kid seeing a nature show called “The Last of the Curlews”, so by the time I had three or four letters of CURLEW, that memory sprang to the fore and helped me out.  I had CABLECARS for a while instead of CLOWNCARS for “High-occupancy vehicles?”.

Anyway, I was able to complete the puzzle without any googling or other help, and that’s always a good feeling on a Saturday.  As for specific things that slowed me down that I could identify and improve, hmm.  I feel like I’m getting better at identifying “standard” crossword word, like Jewish months (ADAR in this case), and others (FRAU, AMA, ARUMS, AGT (for Reps.)).  Also getting a little better at identifying clues which aren’t straightforward.  “Pound sign letters” was not one of them – I kept thinging # or something to do with comic strip cursing until I had most of the letters.  “Galley output” I was able to realize did not mean editing-wise.  “Torpedoes” was HEROS, as in sandwiches.  “Hyphenated figs.” had me stumped for a long time (SSNS).  I realized “Cell’s lack” could be a biological cell or a prison cell, but it still took me a while to get it (PHONELINE).

Friday, April 24 – 18:12

I’m very happy with this time.  I got parts of the NE and SE first, got enough around the middle to get PENNYWISEAND and POUNDFOOLISH, got the 1 down BMOVIE which yielded the rest of the top (LORAX was easy since I’ve read that about 184 times in the last few months to my 2 1/2-year-old), and with a couple of blips finished the rest.

The first blis was 13 down, TIMEZONE for “Mountain, e.g.”.  I had TI_AZ_N_for a while, switched it to TI_AS_N_ (by switching out MATZO for MATSO, which originally started out as MANNA), so I left it alone for a while and ended up getting ELAPSE, which gave me TI_AZ_NE (I was back to MATZO by then) and TIMEZONE jumped out (I had DAR instead of DER (Kommissar).

The other blip, and the last thing I got, was 36 down, “Views through a keyhole”.  I was waffling between PEEPSAT and PEERSAT because I didn’t know what either PFC or RFC was, as far as the clue, “Its logo is a goateed man in an apron”.  This shows you how often I eat at KFC, which I eventually figured out.

Gimmes for me in this puzzle were the previously mentioned LORAX, (Adrian) ZMED of T.J. Hooker, the sight of NAVYPIER along the lake in Chicago (mom lived there until quite recently), and MAXWELLSMART.

I’m very happy with my solving on this.  If anything would have helped, it would be to get more familiar with some of the more obscure cluing in general.  Things that gave me trouble which more crossword clue experience would have helped with are ESS for “Start to salivate?” (shoulda been a gimme), SOSA (not necessarily for knowing the clue, but for knowing SOSA as an athlete shows up a lot), LEOI (Leos of various pedigrees show up a lot, and I just failed to associate archdeacon Hilarius with a pope – it sounded made-up, so I was assuming it was from something theatrical, like “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”), ETTA Hulme (didn’t know that Etta), AERATE (another common word, it should have taken less time to get this), ACUTE (it’s never right, duh), PAX (Irene’s Roman counterpart).  Geography I didn’t know were KARA Sea, part of the Arctic Ocean and PANAY, Iloilo’s Island.

Ones I wouldn’t have gotten a few months ago include EASYA and TREXES (I would have thought it was one word).  Possibly the hardest one for me was OOLONGS for “Gunpowder alternatives”.

Thursday, April 24 – 10:57

I was able to successfully guess on a couple of clues in this one, including ASI for “Alicia Keys #1 album “___ Am”, ACTS for “Predecessor of Romans”, and RACK for “Pool accessory”.  Things I didn’t know were “Grandmother of Jesus” (SAINTANNE), “Hamilton who wrote “Mythology”" (EDITH), “Sanford and Son setting” (WATTS – even though I used to watch that show, a lot), “The Rams of the Atlantic 10: Abbr.” (URI – ah, just looked it up, I am enlightened), that CHUTNEY is made with a mortar and pestle, or that Charlemagne’s mother is named Bertha.

The fill was pretty easy here (I don’t think any of the answers approached the obscurity of some of the ones in Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday puzzles).  One tricky clue was “G” for “SOL”, and my favorite clue was “Mayo can be found in it”, yielding ANO.

I didn’t get hung up noticeably anywhere in this puzzle, so nothing to point to in particular where improvement would have helped.

Puzzle Solver Program Status

I mentioned a while back I was thinking of writing a program to improve on Across Lite, and just wanted to give an update.  I got some good suggestions to go along with my own thoughts, and I definitely want to write a better solving program.  So far, I’ve been working at decoding the .PUZ file format.  I built upon some prior work someone else had done and I pretty much know how all the data is stored in the file, except for one thing.  I have not yet been able to figure out the encryption used for the solution when it is “locked”.

What does this mean?  It means at this point I could write a program that would display any existing .PUZ file, it would know about rebus clues, circled letters, be able to save partially done puzzles, etc.  The only thing it wouldn’t be able to do is check if your solution was correct if the .PUZ file was locked.

So I think I’m going to keep working on understanding the encryption, but in the meantime I’ll start working on the new program itself.  I know the program won’t be as useful if you can’t tell it to unlock the puzzle and check your solution, but you could always save your solution and reload it in Across Lite for unlocking.  I certainly wouldn’t refuse an offer of help from anyone good at codes (I have a lot of test data to work from).

Happy Birthday to (Square Ti)Me(s)

Square Times is a month old today.  I’ve actually managed to write a post on every puzzle since it started and my enjoyment in doing this is still going strong.  I think I may even have a small regular readership, according to my hit stats.  Here’s a chance for any lurkers to pipe up and let me know someone is listening.  If you don’t, I’ll keep going anyway, but I think Square Times would appreciate some birthday greetings.

Wednesday, April 23 – 8:35

No complaints about this puzzle, as far as time or difficulty in solving. Some nice cluing, and good theme, but is OKAYGUY really a phrase?

Note: This should have posted last night, and I only just noticed it was still in the draft stage.  Not sure what happened, but here it is.