Not so hard, right?Ģ5A: I’ve worked on sets for film and television, and let me tell you, whoever coined the expression “Hurry up and wait” must have invented it for media production. Put the O in the first square at 1A and, with only three other squares, it’s likely that the answer is OSLO. At 1D, we have a fairly easy fill-in-the-blank, “_ buco,” which is OSSO buco, the veal dish. People ask me how they are supposed to know things like where famous artwork lives, but even if you don’t know that “The Scream” hangs in OSLO, you can take an educated guess and learn something to boot. You understand where this is going, right? Every alternate Down entry across the top of the puzzle is short its first letter, and the word floating just outside the grid represents the tip of the ICEBERG. Mentally float a letter C over that entry, and you have COVER CHARGES, which makes much more sense. Say what you want about the rising cost of “Entry fees,” but Mr. Now move over to 4D, where the answer, as written in, is OVERCHARGES. SLAM is a cool word, but how is it the answer to the clue “It's symbolized by a star and crescent”? The answer is that it’s not the real answer is ISLAM, but the letter I floats just outside the grid above the letter S. When read from left to right, they spell ICEBERG, as in “the tip of the.” What makes this even more impressive is that the words inside the grid that are affected by this turn of events are still perfectly cromulent words.įor example, the entry at 2D as most people will write it in - whether it is because you understood the theme or because you got it from the crossings - is SLAM. The first letter of seven of the Down entries at the top of the puzzle have escaped and are hovering (invisibly) just above the grid.
And, you might even think you’re solving a rocket ship puzzle, when you are really solving a puzzle about missing letters. Without solving the entire puzzle, you can’t possibly appreciate the skill it takes to make a crossword like this one. My bad, although it does remind me of that parable about the blind men trying to describe an elephant based only on the part they had contact with. Chen, I do see the ICEBERG in the middle black squares (as you mention below in your notes), although I will admit that before I got the theme, I thought it was a rocket ship. I’m reversing the usual order of things because once you understand the theme, the rest of the puzzle is not that hard to solve. If you are new to this and are solving online or in the app, consider keeping a pen and paper handy.Ĭurse you, Jeff Chen, and your subversive puzzle ideas! I loved it. And yes, not only is it considered fair to do this in crossword puzzles, but it has been done before.
If you haven’t seen this before, be prepared to have your mind blown. A few letters might have gone on walkabout, but we’ll find them sooner or later, and at least mentally put them in their place.
Everything that needs to be in the puzzle is there.
0 kommentar(er)
