ROWS GARDEN 68 — HARDER
ROWS GARDEN 68 — EASIER
Rows Garden 68 Harder — Solution
Rows Garden 68 Easier — Solution
Back from a whirlwind weekend in Brooklyn, where I took in the 35th annual American Crossword Tournament. It was my fourth jaunt to New York and I thoroughly enjoyed myself once again. If you haven’t heard, Dan Feyer won his third straight tournament, and both he and Anne Erdmann made it to the stage having made an error – something surely unprecedented, but also something that speaks to the difficulty of the puzzles this year. Puzzle 5, generally the toughest of the tourney, wasn’t as difficult for me (read more about that later), but Puzzles 2 and 3 were significantly a notch tougher than in years past.
Patrick Merrell’s Puzzle 2 in particular tripped up many solvers, and it was there that I made the first of three bad mistakes. The clue for “pitcher’s asset” yielded ARM quickly for me, and I never looked back, even when it crossed the non-word RARN going down. That entry, devilishly clued as [Downfall?] should have been RAIN, and ARM should have been AIM. Speaking to many solvers during the weekend, this mistake was a frequent one, and though AIM isn’t an asset per se (most people would refer to a pitcher’s control or accuracy), the down answer was eminently gettable and I should have been able to catch the error. My other two mistakes were very dumb, but at least one of the errors made the “greatest hits” of incorrect answers that Will Shortz read on Sunday morning. On Patrick Berry’s Puzzle 3, I blanked on the Rita Hayworth movie [GILDA] – ironic considering movies are my wheelhouse, and I slaughtered Puzzles 4 and 6, whose themes involved movie titles – and put GOLDA, with POPE crossing instead of the correct PIPE. I somehow managed to convince myself that an [Oil transporter] was the POPE himself, what with the blessing of holy oils and such…but alas, Rita Hayworth surely did not portray Golda Meir on-screen; if she had, you can guarantee I’d have seen that movie. That would have been the best-looking Israeli diplomat I’ve ever seen.
Speaking of Puzzle 5, I murdered that puzzle, which was the best moment of the weekend for me. I solved it in just over ten minutes, and had that eerie feeling of exiting the ballroom and entering the lobby to find a very, very sparse crowd – perhaps only the ten best solvers had beaten me on the puzzle time-wise. That, plus a very good Puzzle 6, vaulted me to 34th overall, which is pretty impressive for me considering mistakes on two puzzles. Alas, right before I went to bed that evening, a re-check of the scores discovered an error on Puzzle 5, which dropped me to 48th overall. It appeared that I forgot that the word SLENDER existed; on the final across answer in the puzzle, I can remember that I had SL_NDER filled in and I thought SLANDER was the only possibility. I checked the across clue, saw that it read [Slight], which could fit for SLANDER (like a verbal slight), saw that the Down entry was DIA, and never checked the clue. I suppose I thought that since the Across clue fit and the Down entry was a word, I had it wrapped up. Never mind that [Loaded item?] was a nice clue for DIE and not DIA.
So one mistake on three puzzles. 44th overall. None of my pre-tournament goals were fulfilled – i.e., complete the weekend error-free, improve on last year’s 41st-overall ranking, and make the B finals – but I still had a blast. I brought 500 advance copies of this week’s Rows Garden and I came home without any extras, which was great. If you’re new to the site – welcome! And to all those friends, new and old, that I met this weekend, it was great to see all of you. I enjoyed finally meeting AP.com fans Bruce Sutphin, Phoebe McBee (congrats on the trophy, Phoebe!), and Laura Dove; catching up with my Texas Crosswords test-solvers Linda Murray and Neville Fogarty; meeting CRUX developers Sergio Mertsching and Jamie Morgan face-to-face; chatting with constructors such as Andrea Carla Michaels and Ian Livengood; playing countless rounds of Peter Gordon’s “Celebrity” iPhone game with a varying collection of crossword characters; catching up with the Minnesota contingent at the ACPT, namely John Wilson and Victor Barocas; and everybody else that I failed to mention. See you next year!
