"As the categories have gotten, well, weirder, I’ve tried to create balance by not mixing tricky wordplay with hard trivia, so that there’s a path to a solution."

"If there’s a particularly hard-to-spot category, I might try to include a hint on the board. While cards are usually arranged to mislead the solver, sometimes the arrangement can be used to help, too. The category of 'Anagrams of Famous Painters' was tough, for example, so the top row of that board read 'EGADS SCRAMBLE ARTIST NAME' (EGADS is an anagram of 'Degas')...."

From "I Make Connections. Here’s What I’m Actually Thinking. The 1,000th Connections puzzle is out today. Wyna Liu, the writer behind the game, knows you have thoughts" (NYT)(gift link).

"I’ve... learned that some people hate when a word on the board is repeated in a category name. So I was honored when a friend showed me a post in the subreddit r/NYTConnections, with the heading 'In celebration of the single worst purple connections category ever …' A solver shared an image of what appeared to be a tattoo: a clam encircled by the words 'Things That Open Like a Clam.' (COMPACT, LAPTOP, WAFFLE IRON and … CLAM.)"

I think the problem is that a clam isn't like a clam. A clam's a clam. It was a great category, just named inaccurately.

Now, that I've got my "mollusks" tag on this post, I'm motivated to blog this other thing. I didn't even know about nudibranchs — lovely colorful mollusks — but I learned about them today when somebody at Metafilter linked to Wool Creature Lab a place that uses the craft of felting to make (to order) images of quite specific nudibranchs. They're beautiful, too beautiful to believe they are accurate images of real creatures. But the scientific name is listed with the felt item, and you can look it up and see photos of the living nudibranch. It's accurate.

"Poem so beloved by Abraham Lincoln that he carried it in his pocket and memorized it."

The clue for 11 Down in today's NYT crossword.

Should have been 34D.

I'm reading Rex Parker's write-up of today's NYT crossword: 

35D: Annual breast cancer awareness observance (NO BRA DAY) — I did not know this was a thing, or still a thing. Seems like an impractical option for many women. According to wikipedia, "The day is controversial as some see it as sexualizing and exploiting women's bodies while at the same time belittling a serious disease." I misread the clue as [Annual breast cancer awareness month] and, having the "NO-," wrote in NOVEMBER (which fits ... it's wrong, but it fits). Breast Cancer Awareness Month is actually right now, October, and NO BRA DAY is next week (October 13).

I'd never heard of "No Bra Day" — I don't think — until I did today's NYT crossword. A search of the NYT archive shows it's only ever been used in the crossword. This annual "observance" — ahem — has never been spoken of in an actual article or column. It's not like Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which is talked up all the time.

I'd say it’s ridiculous to have a day where women are urged to invite people to focus on their undefended — unshielded, unsupported — breasts. Making breasts more gawkable does not create awareness of cancer. It creates awareness of breasts, especially healthy, good-looking breasts. But we don't want a special event for that, because it seems to legitimate staring. If the idea is to increase awareness of the comfort of not wearing a bra, it fails. The best bralessness happens when you believe no one notices, whether your belief is true or false.

Anyway, too bad the NYT made the clue 35D and not 34D or 36D. 35D almost sounds like a bra size.

"meh - candidate for worst puzzle of the year"/"perhaps worst of the decade!"

Comments at the NYT column about today's crossword, which wasn't that hard, but was rather annoying for those of us who like to — semi-spoiler — see what we are doing.

Revolution in the air.

Seen, just now, in a prominent place, which I won't name, out of mild avoidance of spoiling.

You know, Bob Dylan recorded "Tangled up in Blue" on the second-to-last day of the year 1974 — half a century ago. And he was telling the story of something further back in the past: "It didn't pertain to me. It was just a concept of putting in images that defy time – yesterday, today and tomorrow. I wanted to make them all connect in some kind of a strange way." It's hard to say what year there was that "revolution in the air." Perhaps a decade earlier.

And now the "revolution in the air" is in the crossword puzzle.

Speaking of revolution "in the air" in the 1960s, I always think of the 1969 Thunderclap Newman record, "Something in the Air." Maybe if "Tangled up in Blue" didn't pertain to Bob Dylan, it pertained to Thunderclap Newman. He'd have heard their song in the air:

Call out the instigators/Because there's something in the air/We got to get together sooner or later/Because the revolution's here....

"I love this style of clue, where even if you don't know the exact trivia (I've never heard of the band or the song) you can puzzle it out based on the context."

Writes Malika, at Rex Parker Does the NY Times Crossword Puzzle.

Here's the clue: "Girl in Jefferson Airplane's 'White Rabbit.'"

One day everything new will be old, and one day everything will be forgotten. 

"... the anile, demented echo chamber of social media."

A phrase I found — in a 2016 National Post article about Justin Trudeau’s "sunny Liberalism" — when I looked up the word "anile" in the OED.

A Wordle spoiler follows. "Anile" is not the answer, but "anile" was accepted as a guess, though after getting the right answer, I was told that "anile" would never be the answer in Wordle.

Why not?! "Anile" is a perfectly good word. It means, the OED tells us, "Of, belonging to, or characteristic of old women; resembling an old woman. Chiefly derogatory with connotations of foolishness, senility, or decrepitude."

I knew the day would eventually come... and it came yesterday.

I changed my first word, and it's off to a good start on the last day of the year.

"Chayka, a millennial, is nostalgic for... the images he once shared on Tumblr; an earlier, jankier World Wide Web of illegal file-sharing, blogs and and massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) forums."

"He first heard 'My Favorite Things' not in 'The Sound of Music' but the John Coltrane version, listening to an indie station as he wended his way back from a friend’s house in the suburbs in the early ’00s. Boomers and Gen X, with more years logged algorithm-free, might find 'Filterworld' unduly bleak; Zoomers, hopelessly naïve. Or, as they say on the internet, YMMV."

I'm reading "Can You Escape the Algorithm?/‘Filterworld’ Gives It a Try. An experiment in digital disengagement prompts Kyle Chayka to consider how technology has narrowed our choices and dulled the culture" (free access link to the NYT).

That's a review, from a couple weeks ago, of the book "Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture" by Kyle Chayka (commission-earned link).

I'm reading that this morning after searching the NYT archive for "MMORPGs," a very annoying set of letters that I'd never noticed before, but ran across as an answer in a crossword, clued as "RuneScape and World of Warcraft, for two: Abbr."

My reaction was: If that's the way it's going to be, I'm not doing your crosswords anymore.

Overreaction? My test of whether this is something I should recognize, because it comes up in real life, is whether it's in the NYT archive. This was not the NYT crossword. And, yes, I'm a Boomer.

You can see that the recent appearance of MMORPG was in parentheses, after a spelling-out of what it abbreviates. Before that, it hadn't appeared since 2019. But back in 2013 and in 2005-2006, the annoying letter combo appeared a handful of times. I see the phrase "the wonderfully named MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games)."

I guess I won't boycott that puzzle, but I can see how puzzle publishers risk alienating their audience. Puzzles are full of things that are easy for Boomers like me and that must be very annoying to Millennials and Zoomers. But when I see something like MMORPG, I just think it's a pathetic play to get young people to think this thing is for them. And please don't say YMMV either. 

And yet MMORPGs are among the things the "Filterworld" author is nostalgic for. It's not new. It's old. Mid-level old. Like blogs. I'm nostalgic for blogs too, of course, but I'm still here in mine, and I presume there's this other group of people — who the hell are they? — who are still out there in their MMORPGs.

"At least Hanlon's razor... has something witty and memorable and real-life-applicable about it..."

Writes Rex Parker about today's NYT crossword, where the 18-across clue is "'Never attribute to ___ that which is adequately explained by stupidity' (Hanlon's razor)."

The answer to on that clue is... spoiler alert...

"Travel back in time and solve a puzzle from every year of [Will] Shortz’s career at The Times."

"These puzzles will be available for free until Nov. 30. When solving, remember the context of the year you’re solving in. Some facts and figures have changed since the year each puzzle was originally published."

So it says, in "Will Shortz’s Life as a ‘Professional Puzzle Maker’/The New York Times Crossword editor celebrates his 30th year in a job many would love to have" (NYT).

I'll give you the links to those free puzzles... as the dealer tries to hook you. This is a good way to learn the levels of difficulty on the various days of the week. Me, I like Friday best (and then Saturday):

A vogue word, rejected.

You don't need to care about the NYT crossword to be interested in what follows — it discusses a current buzzword — but it does reveal a couple answers. 

From Rex Parker's write-up of today's puzzle:

A new sighting of "large boulder the size of a small boulder."

In today's New Yorker crossword:

My tiny screen grab doesn't show the place for the answer, but it's a 10-space answer that I'll just spoil after the jump.

"... cluing voice..."

"I hear that there's some scheme afoot in the NYT Games newsletter to offer themeless puzzles up with clues that have been completely rewritten by in-house staff (gutting the original constructor's cluing voice completely, without their consent). Editors change clues all the time, of course, but that's ... editing. Not wholesale rewriting. Maybe I have misunderstood, and the plan is less heavy-handed and constructor-unfriendly."

Writes Rex Parker, in today's blog post about the NYT crossword. (Answers for today's puzzle revealed at the link.) 

I'd always assumed all the clues were edited into the style of the NYT, so it's interesting to me to see that the constructors — the original constructors — are thought of as having a "cluing voice" — something that is valued and can be threatened. There is a lot of room to be dull or clever or cute or weird in the clues, so, as a daily solver of the puzzle, I get what it means to say "cluing voice." And of course, I know how much "voice" means to a writer and how aggravating it is to suffer the intrusions of an editor who's bent on imposing a uniform institutional voice. That's why I write a blog and not law review articles.

New term learned: "Sunday scaries."

I was surprised to see this childish locution as a serious answer — clued "Feeling of dread heading into a workweek." It would be a spoiler to say where, but it was in a highly respected puzzle and presented as an established phrase.

I googled and got over a million hits:

So... they're doing this in the New Yorker crossword.

That's today's puzzle. Clue: "What kind of white nonsense..." Answer: "The Caucasity!"

It's good wordplay — a twist on "the audacity!" — but not anything I'd seen before, and the clue suggests this is a phrase in ordinary speech these days rather than a new joke. 

It really is white supremacy, in my view, which is — as advised yesterday by WaPo's Philip Bump — not to be too "rigid" about the meaning of "white supremacy." Bump, you will remember, argued that "white supremacy" could be understood to include promotion of the "structures of power that largely benefit Whites." So, if you like just about anything the way it is, you may be a white supremacist.

I had thought that The New Yorker would refrain from using racial taunts in its crossword! Why did it seem okay? Answer: White supremacy. You don't understand my point? To quote Philip Bump, "This confusion... stems from overly rigid understanding[] of... 'white supremacist.'"

ADDED: Here's a Yahoo article from 2020: "The 'caucasity': How a viral TikTok video is laying bare cultural appropriation through slang."

"Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition."

"Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature – if that word can be used in reference to man, who has 'invented' himself by saying 'no' to nature – consists of his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgic and in search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude."

Wrote Octavio Paz in "The Labyrinth of Solitude." 

I wasn't reading that book. I encountered the first line of the quote in a puzzle just now and went looking for more context. I became aware that the sentence was alone and experienced a longing that it realize itself in a paragraph. 

"Survivor 44 recap: Why all old puzzles need to go/With players memorizing puzzles before they even step foot on the island, it's time for producers to start anew."

That's the headline for Dalton Ross's new column.

The problem, as — spoiler alert — you saw in this episode, is that the show re-uses old puzzles, and some players, before beginning their stint on the show, have made 3D printed copies of these puzzles and practiced. This week, we saw Carson do a complicated puzzle speedily and then heard in the voiceover that he'd done the puzzle a thousand times at home. He also openly celebrates nerd power — uses the word "nerd" to rally the other nerds. 

Ross asks: 

[I]s that really what we want to watch as viewers — someone just putting together a puzzle they already learned how to solve before they even stepped on the beach? 

Okay, let me nerd out in my particular lane of nerdery — language usage. I have no problem with Ross writing "before they even stepped on the beach." But I don't like the wording in the headline "before they even step foot on the island." 

I reveal the name of the puzzle cited in yesterday's post, "She feels that curves are far more appealing than angles...."

I didn't want to spoil the day's "Name Drop" puzzle, but now that I've updated the post, I'm afraid you won't see it and some other new material that I added there, and because I think some of it is kind of cool, I'm going to repeat it here, after the jump:

I do the NYT crossword every day, and often it contains humor, but I had never, not once, until yesterday, laughed out loud.

It was just a small outburst. A "ha." But it was huge, because I've gotten so many clues over the years that went for humor and not one thing had burst through my steely exterior until yesterday. 

I don't want to spoil the puzzle for you, and frankly, I don't want to have to explain the theme, which is a tad complicated. I'll just say: 88 Across. Finally, a crossword answer that made me laugh. 

Do the puzzle yourself, or read Rex Parker's write up, here. 

A little music to puzzle over: