Posts Tagged ‘crosswords’
Here goes!
It’s no accident that I’m launching this blog around June 1. My library colleagues and I have picked up and dusted off projects that fell under the wheels of the runaway stagecoach known as semester-in-session. We’ve engaged in our annual April-May shopping spree for the collection, as we claimed eleventh-hour purchase power on unspent remnants of department-specific library allotments. The lights have basically gone out on the academic year AND the fiscal year. So what next?
Outdoor rocker and pile of unread books? Check. Sun tea jug? Check. Community garden? Check. Prospect of several church barbecues with pastor as grillmaster? Check. Devoted friends with projects to discuss and jaw-droppingly precocious children to cherish and fawn over? Check. Yankees chugging along? Check. New subscription to HBO and Showtime and Tennis Channel in time for the summer Grand Slams? Check. Netflix plan drastically downgraded to assuage guilt of acquiescing to outrageous cable prices? Check. And, oh, yeah, there’s the whole puzzle thing.
Even as I use this space for dispatches from a country librarian, talking about things I’ve read, seen, heard, done….it won’t be hard for me to frame the anecdotes and commentary for all my fellow puzzlers out there. I mean, do you know how many times a day I cull a phrase from conversation and mentally total up the number of letters? As information and discourse surge and ebb daily, I’m left with tide pools to inspect for lively vocabulary possibilities. Darting silver fish, bristling ruddy crabs, and spiny sea urchins—all at the service of my next cruciverbal bouillabaisse. (I hope for the high-end, anyway, knowing that sometimes, depending on the solver, the verdict is canned chowder).
I don’t know exactly where this will go. Maybe some posts will not mention crosswords at all, but of course crosswords are a big part of my life and crossword people represent a sort of built-in audience. So it seems very likely that I’ll have some musings about the craft or about curiosities of language. I’m prone to grousing and ranting about laziness in usage (completely apart from puzzles), so I won’t promise this will be a pedant-free zone. But I have a feeling once I get a few pet peeves off my chest in that area I’ll quiet down and learn something from all you laid-back descriptive grammarians out there.
Yes, there will be free puzzles, although there’s no way BEW can match BEQ’s output. I’m hoping to settle into a regular schedule, but I’m reluctant to commit right away. I will say this: I’ve always wanted to try an homage to the World’s Most Ornery Crossword puzzle, so each puzzle will have two sets of clues and you can choose Smooth or Extra Crunchy based on your preferred degree of difficulty. Or, download both and start off Crunchy but peek at a Smooth clue or two if you get stuck. (Hmmm…I need a Nutter-Butter.)
If you stopped here looking for Brad Wilber’s Metropolitan Opera Futures forecast, you’ve got the right guy: see tab/link above. But opera is not always a completely separate endeavor from puzzles, as you all know. Maybe with some posts I’ll tack on capsule backstories of principal characters and arias for the crossword set. Deposit them in the memory bank over time, and I promise you that opera appearances in puzzles will hold fewer terrors for you.
OK, so my last item before signing off: I am gearing up to read Justin Cronin’s highly touted vampire-dystopia epic The Passage, the beach read that you’ll not want to carry in beach bag because it’s 800 bloomin’ pages. Now, I’m as hostile to the (apparent) genre as they come. Many of you know that creature-features are decidedly NOT my thing. I’ve never read anything by Stephen King; already comparisons between The Passage and The Stand are flowering like dandelions. I spent most of my time in the Twilight movies counting the number of times Kristen Stewart refuses to make eye contact with her scene partner (it’s a lot; she must find chins and sternal notches fascinating), and I
only made it through season 2 of True Blood because I couldn’t stand to miss anything uttered by Michelle Forbes.
But I feel I must support Cronin in this huge project because I so deeply respect his earlier novels Mary & O’Neil and The Summer Guest—just sublimely lyrical and well-observed pieces of domestic fiction. I had a few bad moments when I heard that not only was Cronin writing a huge novel about vampires, but he was committed to a trilogy. I’m hoping that his supreme skill can transcend all the fang-fiction tropes that are a turn-off to me. In the meantime, do get hold of Mary & O’Neil and pray that Cronin can carve out some time in the next 7 years to write something for those who fell in love with it like I did.