The arc of history bends towards today’s crossword.
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Crossword 341: Progressive Ism
Henry Perronet Briggs, The Progress of Civilisation
Crossword 340: Things Are Getting Tense
Cecil Gordon Lawson, Battle Scene Outside a Town
Things are getting tense here at David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade and Fortnightly Victorian Novel Recommender. The homophone faction is no longer on speaking terms with the homonym faction, while the parsing faction is threatening to break off and start its own site. Meanwhile, on the novel side, the female-novelist recommenders have made common cause against the male-novelist recommenders, each side rejecting out of hand my calls for mutual civility and reasoned debate, on the grounds that the bigotry motivating the other side deserves no consideration. We have, in short, devolved into a state of hopeless partisan rancor. How has this happened? I blame social media, artificial intelligence, online pornography, capitalism, forever chemicals, digital currency, and food dyes.
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340-Things-Are-Getting-Tense.puz
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Crossword 339: It Adds Up
Charles Burton Barber, Time to Wake Up
I’d been wondering— Why is my every move being recorded by a network of hidden cameras? Why have all my writings, however private, been uploaded to secure online databases? Why are my innermost thoughts being monitored in underground laboratories? And then, the other day, while solving a crossword, and finding that, yet again, a word was clued exactly as I had clued it in an unposted crossword I had made not a week before, it struck me: an international cabal of crossword publishers, unwilling to give me proper credit either in money or in fame, was secretly tapping into my mind for crossword content. It all adds up! If you find yourself admiring a feature of somebody else’s crossword somewhere, you would do well to remind yourself that in fact it’s probably actually something I thought up already.
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Crossword 338: Some Assorted Answers
George Dunlop Leslie, Untitled
I’ve been so busy! Everybody wants me to do everything, because I’m so good at it! So, finding myself short of time for this fortnight’s crossword, I’ve had to settle for just some assorted answers, an untitled painting, and no more interesting introductory comment than this one.
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Crossword 337: Coronation
John Martin, The Coronation of Queen Victoria
I meant to have this ready in time for Charles III’s coronation, back in May, 2023, but I felt it needed a couple years’ more polishing. So now its dedication is up for grabs. Perhaps you, reader, are heir-apparent to a monarchy, or know somebody who is? If so, drop me a line, and we can make a deal; I’ll settle for any minor position at the court (except groom of the stole).
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Crossword 336: Close with Clothes
Helen Allingham, The Clothes Line
Have you ever noticed how certain words or phrases sound more or less the same—sometimes are even spelled the same—and yet have entirely different meanings? This phenomenon was recently brought to my attention, and I had a thought: what if one were to base a crossword on it?
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Crossword 335: Is That a Dog I Hear?
John Collier, Love Me, Love My Dog
I used to have a dog. I loved him, and he loved me. But since he left this sad world, I’ve found dogs annoying: the little yappy dogs next door yapping their little yaps all the yappy day, the muscle-y dogs lunging at me on the sidewalks, the sweatered and bootee-ed stroller dogs that complicate my efforts to regard their owners with the respect I try to confer on all humankind—they annoy me. Now, my old dog had his bad habits. He would leave his scent everywhere. He would shed all the time. He would try to kill the plumber. But he had a deep, rich voice, respected pedestrians, would have scorned to wear bootees—was, in short, just a better dog than the dogs of other people nowadays. This puzzle is dedicated to his memory.
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Crossword 333: Shrift
Sir David Wilkie, The Confessional
This puzzle comes with an important disclaimer: the “shrift” it provides is not effective as a means of remitting sin or conferring absolution. If that’s what you want, you need a priest.
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Crossword 332: Change Partners
Robert Walker Macbeth, Our First Tiff
Are you feeling unhappy? Do you wonder whether you’re missing out on life? Do you fear you’ve failed to reach your full potential? Plentiful examples in film and fiction have a solution for you: get divorced! If you’re single, get married, then get divorced! If you’re divorced, get remarried, then get redivorced! Try again and again until you’ve divorced the right person. Then you’ll be happy.
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A crossword of mine will appear next Saturday, July 5, in The Wall Street Journal
Crossword 331: Or Else
John William Waterhouse, Magic Circle
It has lately come to my attention that the Internet is infested with a great many people who have wrong opinions and do bad things. And I have to ask myself—and invite you, dear solver, to ask yourself as well—does not our use of the Internet render us complicit with these wrongheaded people and responsible for these bad things? I fear it does. So I’ve decided that if the Internet does not remove these people within a reasonable amount of time, I will withdraw from it myself and invite you to do the same. Reform, Internet, or else!
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Crossword 330: SB
John Collier, Sleeping Beauty
Some time ago (see Crossword 317) I promised a series of crosswords honoring the Periodic Table of Elements. So today I give you “SB,” the chemical symbol for antimony. But SB can mean many other things as well, according to Wikipedia: San Bernardino and Santa Barbara, the Solomon Islands and South Burlington, Vermont, the Statistic Bureau of Japan, and St. Bonaventure. Any solver who understands Wikipedia and is able to add to this list “A crossword puzzle by David Alfred Bywaters” may apply to me for an autographed copy of this puzzle, suitable for framing.
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A crossword of mine will appear Wednesday, June 11, in The Wall Street Journal
Crossword 329: Rethinking
William Frith, A Private View at the Royal Academy
The purpose of this website, like that of all great modern art, is to bring about a radical rethinking of the human condition, of its meaning and purpose, its origin and end. When refined people see abstract painting or hear atonal music, their very sense of reality is challenged; they come away changed, ennobled, completed. Of course, there are those, not so refined, who see only smudges and hear only noise. And so it is with my crosswords. While I interrogate the unstable relationship between signifier and signified, with the aim of leading the refined solver to rethink the very meaning of meaning, there are those who just think, “Oh here’s another stupid pun.” But I do not cross my words for them.
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Crossword 327: It’s All Wrong
Charles Burton Barber - Not Much Wrong
Do you ever find yourself suddenly wondering whether everything you think and do is just wrong? This happens to me from time to time. For example, recently I found myself wondering whether posting crossword puzzles and Victorian novel recommendations for free on the internet every fortnight might not be the best use I could find for my time. Crazy stuff! But there’s no limit to the human mind’s potential for self-delusion.
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Crossword 326: Padding
John Anster Fitzgerald, The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of
What would we do without padding? Everywhere—in the pages of student essays and of Victorian novels, through hours upon hours of concept albums and superhero movies, on the chests of women and the shoulders of men, in the résumés of politicians and the expense accounts of executives, on the knees of skateboarders and the walls of maniacs—padding enhances and protects us! And yet how often is it mindlessly maligned! Today’s puzzle offers in contrast a humble tribute.
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Crossword 324: Fashion Shoots
Frederick Daniel Hardy, The Young Photographers
We like to keep up with the fashions here at David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade and Fortnightly Victorian Novel Recommender. When people started wearing their hats backwards, we wore our hats backwards. And then when people started wearing them forwards again, so did we. This helps us feel like we’re a part of something bigger and stronger than our sad individual selves crawling around a comfortless world pointlessly and alone. Have you seen our new polo shirts?
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Crossword 322: Trash Bin
Ernest Normand, Evil Sought
Here is yet another in my series of crosswords exploring the dark side of the human condition (see, for example, Crosswords 112, 114, 115, 224, 306), the filth and misery that other crossword constructors never come near. Why don’t they, I wonder? Is it that they are afraid—afraid, perhaps of the darkness within themselves, lurking just beneath their facile self-regard, their bourgeois pieties?
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Crossword 321: Er, Er, What Was I Saying?
Frederick Morgan, The Teeter-Totter
I was saying something, I think, and it must have been something about crosswords, because this is where I introduce my fortnightly crosswords—but what? Was it about the power of crosswords to do something? Bend the arc of history toward justice maybe? No, no, that was something else. Cognitive function—that’s it. Crosswords help maintain or even improve cognitive function in aging adults. Studies have shown. I’m pretty sure I read that somewhere. Or did studies show that crosswords failed to improve cognitive function? Or, actually, weren’t there also some studies that showed a correlation between crosswords and the arc of history? I think I read about those too somewhere, maybe in the New York Times, or was it The New Yorker? I’ve got to look those up. If I could only find my glasses. . .
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321 Er,-Er,-What-Was-I-Saying?.puz
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Crossword 320: Overworked Abbreviations
Charles Sillem Lidderdale, The Letter
Where would crossword constructors be without abbreviations? How many themes would have to be discarded if it weren’t for EEO and EOE? And the AAA and the ABA and the ACA and the ADA and the BBA and the BBB and the BBC? Indignant solvers may complain that they’ve never seen a screen referred to as an SCR, that SSRs aren’t much talked about anymore, that SPR is not a season they’ve encountered outside of a crossword, that an STR is not and has never been an orchestra section, or a narrow maritime passageway, or a stock unit, or a riverboat, or a soft-shell clam. And they have a point. But what they don’t consider is just what these guessable letters may have spared them in the way of unguessable jargon, or trivia, or slang. This puzzle is a grateful tribute to the hard-working, much-abused abbreviations that have got us all out of more than one tight cruciverbal corner with minimal semantic damage.
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320-Overworked-Abbreviations.puz
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A crossword of mine will appear Wednesday, January 15, in The Wall Street Journal
Crossword 318: The Morning After
Henrietta Rae, Songs of the Morning
It’s a 1972 Academy-Award-winning song! It’s a Supreme-Court-case-worthy pill! It’s an episode of the 60s British spy series “The Avengers” (but after Diana Rigg left)! It’s also a 1937 song that didn’t win any awards, and (I’m consulting Wikipedia here) three other songs, and six record albums, and a radio show, and a web series. Isn’t it time it was a crossword puzzle? I’ve tried to fill this void while learning from the mistakes of the mornings-after of the past. I hope my “Morning After” does not quite sink to the banality of the award-winning song. I’m pretty sure it can’t be accused of arousing the heated political conflicts of the pill. And I have included Diana Rigg!
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Crossword 317: Five Times Nine
William Dyce, Piety—The Knights of the Round Table about to Depart in Quest of the Holy Grail
This is the first of a projected series of 81 puzzles honoring the multiplication table, which I intend to publish as a mnemonic aid for grade-school students. After that I’ll honor the periodic table of elements with a series of 118 or 119, depending on whether ununennium is discovered in the meantime. And then, concluding my table series series, I’ll honor the Knights of the Round Table: Sir Lancelot, Sir Gawain, Sir Galahad, Sir Bagdemagus, Sir Segwarides, Sir Gumret le petit, Sir Bleoberis de Ganis, Sir. . . well, according to one medieval source, there were 1600 of them; and their table, allowing each knight three feet of space (which, given the armor involved, is not particularly generous), must have taken up over 42 acres. Since their puzzles, posted at the rate of one per fortnight, will take up over 60 years, I may have to omit a few.
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A crossword of mine will appear Saturday, December 7, in The Wall Street Journal