Alex Silverman author page
1 puzzle by Alex Silverman
with Editor comments
| S | L | E | E | P | S | S | O | O | N | B | U | S | ||
| Y | E | L | L | O | W | S | U | B | M | A | R | I | N | E |
| S | H | E | S | L | E | A | V | I | N | G | H | O | M | E |
| T | I | M | E | A | U | S | S | I | E | T | A | S | ||
| G | R | R | Q | U | A | N | T | |||||||
| B | R | A | V | A | S | A | L | B | U | M | ||||
| M | U | R | A | L | U | V | U | L | A | F | A | B | ||
| W | H | E | N | I | M | S | I | X | T | Y | F | O | U | R |
| S | R | A | L | I | S | L | E | L | O | R | R | Y | ||
| T | E | R | R | A | G | E | R | M | A | N | ||||
| A | N | C | H | O | I | R | S | |||||||
| L | B | A | R | A | M | I | N | O | M | I | N | E | ||
| P | A | P | E | R | B | A | C | K | W | R | I | T | E | R |
| H | E | R | E | C | O | M | E | S | T | H | E | S | U | N |
| A | R | I | A | Y | E | S | H | O | N | O | R | S |
Crossword constructing is a little like writing a palindrome. You want to write something as sensible and natural as possible. Still, there's the constraint that the thing has to read backward and forward the same, and chances are it's going to sound a little awkward.
Straw? No, too stupid a fad. I put soot on warts.
No one writes this way normally. But I look on a long palindrome like this and I marvel. It's a stunt, of a sort, and a very cool one.
Similarly, the Monday and Tuesday crosswords this week are "stunt puzzles," in which the constructor has started with some peculiar thematic constraint that compromises the fill.
The constraint in today's debut by Alex Silverman is the stacking of names of 15-letter Beatles songs at the top and bottom of the grid. I don't remember seeing thematic stacking like this before, and it bowls me over . The puzzle's subject, the Beatles, gives me good feelings besides.
The downside of the constraint, of course, is some non-Mondayish or less-than-stellar vocabulary. You can list it as well as I can.
For any stunt puzzle, I weigh the amazingness of the theme, and the difficulty of the constraint, versus how compromised the vocabulary is as a result. It's a balance. For an amazing stunt, I may make major allowances. For a smaller one, not so much. Both today and tomorrow, I think, the compromises are fairly modest and well worth tolerating to get the wow.
I won't spoil tomorrow's puzzle, but will say only that it involves a different sort of stunt with a different issue with the fill.
In both puzzles I hope you can make the same allowances I do to appreciate what's cool.