Happy (almost) Halloween, puzzlers and PuzzleNationers!
For the last two years, we’ve marked the spookiest of holidays by posting some punny costumes for you to figure out, and it’s only appropriate that we celebrate Halloween AND Follow-Up Friday by bringing you our third edition of the PuzzleNation Punderful Costume Game!
It’s simple. I post a picture, and you guess what the costume is.
For example:
He’s Batman! (With Catwoman beside him!)
I’ve compiled ten costumes for you to figure out. Let’s see how many you can get!
Special thanks to the folks at The Chive and The Thinking Closet for their assistance in compiling this year’s punny costumes!
How many did you get? Have you seen any great punny costumes we missed? Let us know! And Happy Halloween! (If any of them stumped you, don’t worry! I’ll be posting the answers next week!)
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Halloween is this Saturday, and one of the best things about the holiday is how creative people get with their costumes.
This creativity can come in several forms. Sometimes, it’s the costume itself, an idea that wows you as ambitious or clever or totally unexpected. Other times, it’s the execution of the costume, either in how impressive the effort involved is OR how ingeniously they’ve kept their budget reasonable.
In college one year, I was short on funds for a costume. But one thing never in short supply around Halloween are empty candy wrappers. So I took an old shirt, glued candy wrappers to it (along with some stray kernels of popcorn and an old cell phone) and I went to a costume party as the floor of a movie theater.
It’s one of my favorite costumes to this day, because it required me to think outside the box.
Today’s post is also about a costume that’s outside the box. Many people dress up as celebrities or famous fictional characters for Halloween, but rarely do they dress up as many characters simultaneously.
Check out the photo below! Our costumed gentleman has decked himself out in the trappings of numerous Johnny Depp films. Can you name them all?
This is a great costume, not only because it’s ambitious and meticulously put together, but because there’s clearly a great deal of thought behind it. Terrific stuff!
Oh, and if you’re looking for more puzzly costume fun, check out our Follow-Up Friday post this week, as we celebrate our Third Annual PuzzleNation Punderful Costume Game!
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I talk a lot in this blog about the role puzzles have played in history, in our culture, and as touchstones for particular individuals. But it’s far more rare for me to talk about one puzzle in particular that changed someone’s life.
Today, I have the privilege of doing precisely that, because a puzzle crafted by our friends at Penny Dell Puzzles has changed two lives for the better.
One day, a gentleman named Bryan reached out to Penny Dell Puzzles with an audacious proposition: his girlfriend is a big fan of their puzzles and he wanted their help in crafting a special puzzly proposal of marriage!
He supplied ideas for clues and entry words, and a topnotch editor accepted the challenge of crafting a page of Escalators puzzles specially tailored for the occasion.
(For the uninitiated, an Escalators puzzle involves clued entries where a 6-letter word loses a letter and anagrams into a 5-letter word, then loses another letter and is anagrammed into a 4-letter word. Those lost letters end up spelling out words and phrases reading down when each grid is complete.)
So this singular puzzle featured his girlfriend’s name, then his name, and then the fateful question: will you marry me?
And to really cap off the presentation, the puzzle was inserted into an actual puzzle magazine (in a special limited run at the printers), so that our hero could deftly guide her toward the puzzle with her being none the wiser.
It’s an absolutely awesome idea, a testament to puzzly ingenuity, and honestly, just about the cutest proposal story I’ve ever heard.
I’ll let Bryan take it from here, in an email to his fellow collaborators at Penny Dell Puzzles:
I wanted to let you know that I proposed to Erin today with the puzzle and she said yes! It went perfectly. The puzzle looked great in the book and Erin thought nothing of it, thinking it was just another Escalators puzzle.
Once we got about halfway through the puzzle and she saw my name, it became kind of obvious, and once I knew that she knew, I got down on one knee and popped the question.
She was so surprised and blown away she even forgot to say yes and was just asking how I made it happen! She did eventually say yes after a lot of hugging, kissing, and tears, and then we continued to solve the puzzle before making calls to the rest of our family and friends.
Congratulations to Bryan and Erin! I wish them nothing but the best on their journeys to come.
And kudos to our friends at Penny Dell Puzzles for truly going the extra mile for puzzle fans and romantics alike.
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The puzzle world was stunned this weekend by the sudden passing of a true crossword legend: Merl Reagle.
Merl has been one of the biggest names in puzzles for a long time now, one of the few crossword constructors who was successful and prolific enough to work on puzzles full-time.
Between his appearance in the Wordplay documentary and a cameo on The Simpsons alongside New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz, he proudly represented both the love of puzzles so many solvers share AND stood as a standard-bearer for crossword construction and quality puzzling.
Merl sold his first crossword to the New York Times at age 16 — ten years after he started constructing puzzles, amazingly enough! In a career spanning five decades, his contributions to the world of puzzles were myriad. Nearly every year, one of his puzzles appears at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. The crossword he constructed for the 100th Anniversary of the Crossword was turned into a Google Doodle, and, based on my research, is the most solved crossword puzzle in history.
A craftsman with humor and heart (and no small amount of anagram skill), Merl was truly one of a kind.
I had the privilege of meeting him at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament this year. It was only for a few minutes while the tournament participants were tackling one of the early puzzles and the vendor’s floor was pretty empty. (Otherwise, there were always puzzlers crowded around Merl’s table between tournament puzzles. He was the center of gravity around which many fellow puzzle fans orbited, a master of ceremonies wherever he went.)
He was friendly and gracious, one of those people who can strike an instant rapport with virtually anyone. He put me at ease immediately as I checked out his latest puzzly offerings and we briefly chatted about the tournament itself. (I didn’t get the chance to challenge his legendary anagramming talents, sadly.)
Fellow puzzler and friend of the blog Keith Yarbrough was kind enough to share one of this experiences with Merl:
Merl gave me his philosophy of puzzle construction at the ACPT one year. His goal, he said, was to make the solver smile. Coming up with a funny theme was the main thing. His test when he came up with an idea was to run it past his wife, who is not a puzzler. If it made her smile, it was a keeper.
He wasn’t out to frustrate the solver with obscurities or unnecessary crosswordese, so he used common entries as much as possible. His mantra was that the fill should not be overly difficult.
The dozens of tributes I’ve seen online are a testament to how many friends and admirers Merl earned over the years. There are too many to link to here, but I want to highlight a few from fellow puzzlers Brendan Emmett Quigley, Deb Amlen, and David Steinberg.
Merl, you will be missed. Thank you, for the laughs, for the tough crossings, the trickiest-of-tricky clues, and the many unexpected delights you managed to spring on so many solvers.
By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.
And today, I’m posting solutions to our Sharknado and Crosswordese puzzles from the last two weeks!
Two Follow-Up Fridays ago, I posted a deduction puzzle in honor of Sharknado 3 rampaging its way across TV screens all over the world, and I challenged you to complete the schedule of mayhem wrought by our five heroes with five different weapons across five different cities on five different days! (Whew!)
How did you do?
And that brings us to our second solution. Last week, we discussed crosswordese — those words that only seem to appear in crosswords, to the dismay and bafflement of casual solvers — and I created a 9×9 grid loaded with crosswordese.
Did you conquer the challenge?
ACROSS
1. Toward shelter, to salty types — ALEE
3. Arrow poison OR how a child might describe their belly button in writing — INEE
5. Flightless bird OR Zeus’s mother — RHEA
6. Hireling or slave — ESNE
8. “Kentucky Jones” actor OR response akin to “Duh” — DER
9. Compass dir. OR inhabitant’s suffix — ESE
12. Wide-shoe width OR sound of an excited squeal — EEE
15. No longer working, for short OR soak flax or hemp — RET
16. Like a feeble old woman OR anagram of a UFO pilot — ANILE
17. Actress Balin OR Pig ____ poke — INA
DOWN
1. Mean alternate spelling for an eagle’s nest — AYRIE
2. Old-timey exclamation — EGAD
3. Unnecessarily obscure French river or part of the Rhone-Alpes region — ISERE
4. Supplement OR misspelling of a popular cat from a FOX Saturday morning cartoon — EKE
7. Maui goose — NENE
10. An abbreviated adjective covering school K through 12 OR how you might greet a Chicago railway — ELHI
11. My least favorite example of crosswordese OR good and mad — IRED
12. Ornamental needlecase — ETUI
13. Movie feline OR “Frozen” character — ELSA
14. Shooting marble OR abbreviation for this missing phrase: “truth, justice, and ____” — TAW
I hope you enjoyed both of these challenging puzzles! If you haven’t had your fill of crafty puzzlers, worry not! We’ll be tackling another tough brain teaser in two weeks!
This Saturday, August 8, marks the eighth annual Lollapuzzoola!
A puzzle tournament and beloved yearly tradition for top constructors and solvers, Lollapuzzoola is touted by its organizers as “the best tournament held in New York on a Saturday in August.”
The brainchild of Ryan Hecht and Brian Cimmet, this all-crossword puzzle tournament has a different unifying theme each year (last year was baseball, two years ago was birds) and is administered by the dynamic duo of Cimmet and Patrick Blindauer.
[Blindauer and Cimmet, ready to put your puzzly mettle to the test.]
But if you can’t make it to NYC this weekend, worry not! There’s an At-Home Division that will allow you to participate as if you were there! You’ll get your puzzles by email the day after the actual tournament for a very reasonable $10 fee!
PuzzCulture 