Sunday September 25: Archimedes did the Acrostic!

It’s always worthwhile to survey the quote before diving into the clues.  Observe the word pattern and the length of words; see how many times one and three letter words appear; guess whether the quote is a statement in the first person.

Today’s acrostic with several long word appeared at first glance like it might be difficult.  Of course, getting the 14-letter words is  ‘quintessential’ to solving an acrostic by-quote rather than by-clue.

We’re clue focused – although in the best case, it’s a quick process of working back and forth from clue to quote with the occasional check of author and title of the work.  We started today with only a half answer to a clue eat [later adding dirt] .  Of course ledger and rubdown and Ishmael filled in quickly.  Having spent time at Hampshire College, I had always thought it was in fact South Hadley or Hadley - alas it is in Amherst near the town borders.

Flipping up to the quote, 'a _ _ _ r' must be 'after' which provided the reward of off the rack.  Some clues like the ballroom dance, felt like you could have two left feet and still be able to guess two step.  Again often the most obvious works, as with The Idiot.  Here's the National Lampoon version of the novel,

What was Penelope doing in Athens? Didn't make sense, although a few of the letters helped.  It was a long time to finally return to Ithaca.

Last time we had antipodes as a last column answer, it felt almost redundant to have antitheses in this puzzle. 

The phase 'Illegitimi non carborundum' is one of the more famous examples of Dog Latin. Meaning "Don't let the bastards grind you down," it was US general Joe Stillwell's motto during World War II.

I wonder what geometric figures Archimedes had his servants draw.  Eureka!

Sunday September 11: Song of the Reed

We were in a guessing mood today, ready to take the barest hint and plunge forward. Single letters were enough to prompt several clue answers. Guess, guess, guess almost always feels right for an acrostic – at least if you do it in pencil.

In our first pass through the puzzle, we appreciated the dual definition Hot Spot - later we learned there are other more obscure definitions; who knows how one without even thinking about it enters Bethesda for a defense contractor – you’d think that most would be over in Arlington; and we promptly entered “At Once” and only much later, in re-reading the clue more carefully realized on time was right; Swatch was easy.

Ah, then in filling in these four answers, much more became evident. The ‘d’ from the Lockheed-Martin locale, screamed out as the last letter of ‘and’ and its ‘a’ mved us away from thinking about those cities being opposites but more topologically antipoles – well okay, we were close – antipodes. Remarkably only 4% of land has land opposite it in that line through the center of the earth. Beijing and Buenos Aries are certainly the biggest cities that are close to being antipodes.

The phasing of the Bogart question immediately made us think he came from privilege (his father was a surgeon). We suspected a prep school, and antipodes then led us to the word human in the quote which gave us the ‘A’ of Phillips Andover. What a fabulous actor!


Buchan's line about an atheist is amusing.  He was Scottish, 1st Baron Tweeedsmuir.

One mid-puzzle guess was the Eagles as winners in 2001, but in fact they've never won.  The 'a' and 's' though proved helpful in solving the puzzle and eventually a few erasures later, Ravens fell into place.

Okay, don't want to suffer from motor mouth, enough said on this week's acrostic, except for the words of Rumi's Song of the Reed.

Rumi’s Song of the Reed:

Listen to the song of the reed,

How it wails with the pain of separation:

“Ever since I was taken from my reed bed

My woeful song has caused men and women to weep.

I seek out those whose hearts are torn by separation

For only they understand the pain of this longing.

Whoever is taken away from his homeland

Yearns for the day he will return.

In every gathering, among those who are happy or sad,

I cry with the same lament.

Everyone hears according to his own understanding,

None has searched for the secrets within me.

My secret is found in my lament

But an eye or ear without light cannot know it..”

The sound of the reed comes from fire, not wind

What use is one’s life without this fire?

It is the fire of love that brings music to the reed.

It is the ferment of love that gives taste to the wine.

The song of the reed soothes the pain of lost love.

Its melody sweeps the veils from the heart.

Can there be a poison so bitter or a sugar so sweet

As the song of the reed?

To hear the song of the reed

everything you have ever known must be left behind.

Sunday August 28: Quirky Words

What a wonderful quote for this week’s acrostic. – always like it when the puzzle itself speaks about words.  It is the quirkiness of language that often makes the acrostic itself intriguing.  Of course, it’s the regularity of word patterns that often makes it doable.

This week’s puzzle started slowly as the theme was captured in several quirky-clues, like derby and TV Show and fairways. We started with only a few quick answers: ironic getting us going, then in the mood for irony necktie was apparent. Nest egg was also straightforward. 

It was clear though that to solve this puzzler, back and forth between the quote and clues and, of course, lots of guessing would be the order of the day.  Was it De Gama who crossed this country?  Didn’t seem right, but the guess did provide a few valuable letters..  Hmm, why doesn’t O’Keefe[sic] fit? Ah, like Mitterrand of the puzzle before, double the consonant and there we go. 

Hyphenated words often are two-digit numbers and the starting ‘t’ that we had filled in made twenty-something seem like a real possibility.  With our false answer from clue K, we were left with only one possible number – and lots of new letters to fill into the clues.

Given the paucity of doubleheaders, nightcap took a moment, but the fact that the Oakland A’s and Boston Red Sox played two on Saturday (to avoid Hurricane Irene on Sunday) had put the word on the Sports pages of the Times on Sunday.

Growing up you don’t quite know whether expressions your parents use are commonplace or not.  “Ersatz for oleo” I always attributed to my mother, now I finally see its usage is more common.

Kipling was the first English and youngest ever winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.  Floating up the Irrawaddy, how can you argue with the meter of -

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea,
There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
"Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!"
    Come you back to Mandalay,
    Where the old Flotilla lay:
    Can't you 'ear their paddles chunkin' from Rangoon to Mandalay?
    On the road to Mandalay,
    Where the flyin'-fishes play,
    An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!

Several weeks ago we learned of bisque as a croquet term, funny to see it appear again in yet another of one of it’s less common usages.

For a moment the quote with words like ‘QI’ looked like gibberish, yet the pieces seemed to be following in place, although first an amusing diversion into what the BBC show was all about.

Once O’Keeffe got all her letters and De Gama gave way to De Soto, we could raise our eyebrows in a smug, happy, expression.

Sunday August 14 Seawater

With amazement the instructor in a marine biology class I was in told us that human blood and seawater have the same salinity level.  I learned that day that there are remarkable interconnections in our cosmos.  In Sunday’s acrostic, we learned that those interconnections extend to our sweat and tears.

Of course, drinking that seawater is a problem as Coleridge's Ancient Mariner pointed out:

Water, water everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water everywhere
Nor any drop to drink.

 A moment of reflection on her first fill-in Mother Earth later provided some incite into the quote.  We think perhaps Em and Henry place clues related to the quote at specific places within the puzzle, but that analysis we’ll do another day. 

Ha, of course the damage was not colossal but the Colossus of Rhodes.  Nice play on words. Often such carefully parsing of a clue, leads to discovering the right word. Several other answers came quickly.  Remembering the double-r of Mitterrand and 10 more letters were known.  I wonder what the Star Trek episode would have been like if William Shatner had answered yes.

Playing poker, even if you’re not in the hand, it is at the showdown that valuable information about one’s opponents is learned – do they bluff a lot, how loose are they playing.  If everyone folds before that climatic moment, one can only guess (and listen to the post-hand chatter!) what everyone really had.

While I find cheating at card games abhorrent, I must say that I’ve often found myself in conflict with Hoyle because we played variations of games different from the official rules.  Imagine if Hoyle, in a new draft of his work, had rewritten the rules of Monopoly, would we really feel like we were cheating by taking collected fines when we landed on Free Parking?

While answers like the Greek-origin ogdoad and even guttate were surprising and interesting, the answer identikit, which we finally got as we honed in on the entire quote, was just annoying. – not an obscure word just a made-up one.

Perhaps the next time I cry, thinking at that moment “it’s just seawater” may arrest the tears.  As we finished the puzzle, we wondered what Aphrodite’s salinity level is if she was borne of ocean foam.

Sunday July 31: Ectomorphs, Mesomorphs, and Endomorphs

Today,we're thrilled to have a guest blogger: Liora, who is visiting California today.

It is always an enormous pleasure to do the Acrostic. How much more so with another acrostically-inclined member of the family. This one ended up with a quote from a particularly unusual book, David Feldman's collection of everyday oddities and, as he calls them, imponderables, Do Penguins Have Knees? That question, for now, will remain unresolved. Apparently it is a true imponderable. This quote, however, had nothing to do with penguins. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

After scanning the clues this week Doug and I immediately got our first clue: The coiner of "doublespeak" and "Oldspeak" were none other than George Orwell.

Soon after we looked a few clues downwards, and remembered something from our high school days of studying the periodic table: krypton and xenon are Noble Gases. I should note that I did the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle on the way up to SFO from LAX and found a very similar answer: INERT GAS.

In any case, noble gas gave us the S in the first word of the puzzle, and Doug suggested that the first word would be USING, which got us going with the quote.

We spent a while speculating about Archemides' bathtub discovery, wondering which principle of science derived from his Eureka moment. We thought buoyancy or suchlike, but didn't realize it was density until somewhat later on.

Meanwhile, though, we realized that the Adirondacks are in upstate New York and A Christmas Carol and Billy Budd are examples of Novellas.

Things were starting to come together. We realized we had the word LS in there, which is nothing other than the plural of the letter L. Great, I thought, a quote about words or letters. And we saw that there were going to be some other plurals of letters in there, too. But it took us sometime to understand the subject of the quote.

Memories of high school science classes served us two more times in the puzzle: What is a "Meteorologist's line of work?" We knew immediately that it was some line on a map that a meterologist might use. A front? The jet stream? But somewhere, from deep in the recesses of my repository of 9th grade earth science came the beginnings of the answer. iso--, iso--, is it isomer? We put that in for a few minutes, before realizing that, no, an isomer came from 11th grade chemistry, not 9th grade earth science. The word was isobar. And Mrs. Bell, who taught that 9th grade earth science class came in handy one last time. What is a "flaky sort of stone?" I remembered Moh's scale of hardness, and scratching rocks with other rocks. Eventually we came to it: schist, which sounds so delightfully inappropriate.

We filled in one of the cleverer clues: where might litter be picked up? Of course, in a Pet Shop.

Then, as we filled in some of the parts of the quote, realized how W.H. Sheldon must have classified a "beanpole": an ectomorph. This story, which we look up on wikipedia after, is worth some attention.

W.H. Sheldon was a serious kook. Born in Warwick, Rhode Island, in 1898, Sheldon was most interested in anthropometry, or the measurement of human bodies. On the side, he came up with an unusual system to classify different kinds of American pennies. The anthropometry, though, was the weird part. He classified humans into three types: ectomorphic or slim (hence the "beanpole"), mesomorphic, or muscular, and endomorphic, or fat. These body types had real social implications. The ectomorphs were more likely to end up in mental institutions; the mesomorphs more likely to become criminals. In service of this classificatory system, Sheldon engaged in what seems today to be his most bizarre project: collecting scores of nude photographs of incoming ivy league freshman, particularly at Yale. With the science behind them discredited, the Smithsonian eventually decided to shred its collection of photos.

Back to the puzzle, though. Things at this point were coming to a close. The real breakthrough was getting the word "CAPS" in the beginning and "CARTOONISTS" just after and realizing that this was a quote about the use of capital letters by cartoonists. Why? Because capital letters are more equal in size than their lowercase counterparts.

And what about James Taylor? Yes, his album was called Gorilla. And the song, "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You) is just as catchy as ever.

So that was it for the acrostic. But now we had to look up this highly unusual book, the source of the quote itself. Do Penguins Have Knees? also answers questions about why sticks of butter are longer and narrower on the East Coast and shorter and wider on the West Coast. But the answer wasn't on the Amazon preview, so we still don't know.

Sunday July 17: Happy Days

If Shakespeare lived today perhaps he would have said: ‘All the world’s an acrostic.’ The challenges of modern life so beautifully mirror the series of clues found in an acrostic. When all these obstacles are surpassed we are presented with an underlying order, the allegorical 'quote'. We tried not to get too caught up in this undoubtedly apt and sound metaphor as we pressed onward.

New York Times Magazine Article:Going for BrokenOur hopes to avoid distraction were quickly dashed when we were made to pause in contemplation of our 42^nd President and in what 'well-locked' escapade he had been involved.  But given that just a month ago The New York Times Magazine ran an article about the decaying state of the Eric Canal, the reference to DeWitt and not Bill was evident.

It took Obama’s 2008 victory for us to finally forget the disaster eight-years prior in Florida.  Despite generally in favor of much of their policy stances, we did not need to be reminded of Nader and the Greens.

My favorite part of the instructions on the box of our croquet set is the line that says set up the two posts at opposite ends of the yard and configure all the wickets in the remaining space.  The dilemma in that backyard game was always whether to take the extra shot or smash one’s opponent (i.e., "sibling's ball") into the neighbor’s yard.  A bisque is like a mulligan that the handicapped player can use at their discretion sometimes during a match.

One of the fun moments in doing an acrostic is when some odd notion of the right answer provides enough letters to help solve the puzzle.  It is why our motto is always guess, guess, guess and eventually the correct answers will emerge.  This was true when we convinced ourselves to answer ‘oversite[sic]’ for the double meaning of vista and miss.  Our conflated guess came to mind perhaps because of that beautiful word: oversight — right out of Dilbert, it of course has two essentially diametrically opposite meanings.   Only much later in our effort, did we correct this to overlook but ‘over’ had helped with a number of fill-ins.

The pieces of this puzzle came together rather quickly.  The reference to Fonzie and Happy Days was a fabulous self-referential link to the source of the phrase ‘Jump the Shark’ because it was the decline in that TV series following that very episode that the phrase originates.

Sunday July 3: 1984

Well, compared to a fortnight ago, this puzzler certainly posed less of a challenge.  Six or seven answers came  quickly with little hesitation.  Ok, so "talk back" was wrong, but later filling in mouth off was easy enough.

For those of us who were watching the Raiders defeat the Redskins that day back in 1984 that would change Super Bowl commercials forever, we cannot forget the remarkable Apple computer that introduced the Macintosh:



While I think of Captain Ahab coming from New Bedford, home of the Whaling Museum,  I've spent enough time in the environs to know that he sailed from Nantucket.  Still thinking of Ahab I was wondering if the driftwood of a later answer was part of the Pequod.

Answer like gobble that placed a 'g' at the end of a word is one of the back and forth plays between the answers and the quote - leading to the extra letters of 'ing at the end of a word.  Strangle later provided a similar opportunity.

We sometimes go to the beach for a burrito dinner. Inevitably we wrap them in tinfoil. It's been since World War II that aluminum replaced tin as the foil of choice. Like "dialing" a phone, it's another anachronistic term that has yet to fall out of favor.

On this warm Independence Day weekend, glad to be thinking about picnics - and now I know the right etiquette to follow.

Sunday June 19: Cleopatra

This acrostic appeared to be a real-stumper.  The first pass through the clues only yielded  Flash Flood for a canyon camping danger.  The image is horrifying.  We’re always thinking about how a clue’s answer may relate to the puzzle quote; not sure this fits in.

 With a moment’s thought, we realize that an imaginary plane slicing through the center of the earth, cuts a great circle on the sphere’s surface.  The ball itself is cut in half, hence Hemisphere.

With little to go by from the clues, the only hope is aggressive guesses in the quote.  That led to the simplification of Transylvania to its country: Romania.   Thinking that Stoker wrote Dracula at the turn of the century, we first thought Rumania, but later corrected this.  

Idle Gossip (Fruitless product of a grapevine) was the most amusing clue on the board, and it was a welcome addition to our arsenal of answers. With our minds already on pane et vino from “ Wine sometimes mistaken for pinot blanc” it was a late grid-in. Our one complaint (minor!) was that the word play should have led to question-mark. Teakettle (singer when it’s hot) also showed characteristic acrostic cleverness, though it too avoided question form.  Clearly our friends Em and Hen felt in a declarative mood this week! Lucky we overcame this obstacle through our commitment to Academia (Way of life devoted to study).

Filling in the quote with ample guessing always leads to some surprises, but when our first full words to find were “Elizabeth Taylor” we couldn’t imagine what she was doing here; and we then wondered what something could be as what? as her.

Saying the clue “Said with an accent” made us realize that we were emphasizing the last word and the answer fell quickly into place.  When we finally convinced ourselves that chardonnay has two n’s, it was only a matter of time.  We knew we could arm wrestle this stumper to completion.

Years ago I was excited to win a baseball glove when I called in to the local radio station sports show with the correct answer to the quiz question.  Phone in to such broadcasts I haven’t done since.

As a sports fan, I thought the 1908 Giant clue would be easy, but my baseball memories just doesn’t extend back a century. To know Fred Merkle.  I did know Tinkers, Evers, and Chance from the Frederick Adams poem.  There is great irony here, because in fact Evers was involved in the play that gained Merkle his nickname of “Bonehead”  and eventually led to the Tinker-Evers-Chance Chicago Cubs beating out Merkle’s Giants for the National league pennant. The refrain of the Adams poem, speaks to a different outcome:

 “Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,

Tinker and Evers and Chance.

Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,

Making a Giant hit into a double –

Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:

 "Tinker to Evers to Chance."

So of course, Elizabeth Taylor is Egyptian.  Nice quote!

Well, it’s now early in the morning after working through this puzzler, time for a pogonotomy.