Angry verbs.

[tablesaw]

I have been asked in a comment by sivet to explain the cryptic ticker at the bottom of many of my journal entries. I believe most of the gentlemen and ladies reading this humble journal know what it is, but since I've been adding new journals to my friends list who have in turn been adding me to theirs, there are many who don't know what they mean.

They are my times for the crossword puzzles I do online most every day. I first mentioned them in an entry on March 24. Some people were interested, so I continued to do so. I explained my reason for putting these things down in another entry on March 27. Since then I've been posting times and comments pretty regularly, and it has evolved into the condensed, ticker-tape-like notation that appears at the bottom of my entries.

So here's what everything means, using today's crosswords as an example:

SatLATX: 15:30. Two new words, and I had to research the crossing of 40D/53A. MonNYTX: 5. Very nice fill overall, especially for a Monday. MonLATX: 5:45. When I did the SatLATX yesterday, I was actually doing the Monday puzzle, misfiled under Saturday. No wonder it was so easy. The same comments apply: I should note that I made an error on 3D because of an obscure Muppet Show that I've never been able to forget.

This is a longer entry than normal, which is good. First, the basics.

Each puzzle follows a very specific pattern:
DateNEWSPAPERX: time in minutes. [Comments.]

Date is the three-letter abbreviation for the day of the week. Sometimes I do more than one puzzle from the same newspaper on the same day, so I always include the date so that you, gentle reader, understand which puzzle I refer to. I never post times that are more than a week old, so the day refers to the most recently passed Monday, Sunday, Friday or whatever.

NEWSPAPER is the three-letter capitalized abbreviation for the newspaper in which the puzzle was printed. There are three syndicated puzzles that I do on a regular basis, the New York Times daily (NYT), the Los Angeles Times/Tribune Syndicate daily (LAT) and the Wall Street Journal weekly (WSJ). There are other puzzles that I do with less regularity, but I rarely include them in my journal, usually because I don't get a good time from them.

X is for Xword. This is redundant, but I like the way it looks in there.

Time is the time it took me to solve the puzzle, as recorded by the computer timer of crossword puzzle software I use. They are unscientifically rounded according to how much time I think I may have lost or gained because of the program. Litsoft pauses the timer whenever I minimize the puzzle window, but sometimes I forget to minimize it. Some puzzles start the timer the moment I open the file (leading me to lose time as I resize the window), and others do not (leading me to work for a minute before remembering to turn on the timer). If I think my time is too far from the timer's readout, I simply don't post it. In short, the time is usually fairly close to how quickly I did the puzzle, but is not exact.

Comments are anything I may have to say about a particular puzzle. It's listed in brackets above because sometimes, if I don't have anything at all to say, I just put the times.

And now, here's some more background and crossword puzzles in general, for those who have trouble decoding the comments.

tahnan, a member of the National Puzzlers' League and a contestant in the last Crossword Puzzle Tournament, has written a very good and succinct description of how crosswords work generally. If you're interested, you should read it. He also posts times to his journal, although he's in training for next year's tournament, so he's a bit more serious about it.

Here are some other terms I use which may be opaque:

crossing

A single square of a puzzle, as identified by the crossing of two clues, one across and one down. I tend to refer to them in the format "40A/53D." Crossings are usually a problem when the two clues in question are obscure or unknown to the solver.

crosswordese

There are two types of crosswordese. The first consists of words made up of frequently used letters, which make them invaluable when creating a puzzle (e.g., EPEE, ASSAY, DEED, SASSED, ASEA, ANTE, ORE, SARI and ALIT). Because these words appear in crosswords so often, regular solvers identify them very quickly. The other, and often more annoying, sort of crosswordese consists of words that have an abnormally high occurrence in crosswords as compared to everyday use (e.g., ESSO, ELAND, AUK, EMU and variations on AERIE and EMIR).

entry

Any word or phrase that is filled in the grid.

fill

The actual words that are placed in the grid. A good fill usually has a wide variety of words, a wide variety of letters ("J" and "Z" are harder to work into a puzzle than "E" and "R") and no or very little crosswordese.

grid

The arrangement of black squares in a puzzle, without respect to the entries in the puzzle. A "pretty grid" is one that looks nice before one puts the words in.

theme

The relationship between certain entries in a puzzle (usually the longest ones). Themes may be based on puns, letters added or subtracted to common phrases, phrases that have a certain word or series of letters in them, etc. A good theme is clever, consistent and not overly obscure.

And that, I believe, pretty much covers it. Hope it was worth it.