Well, I have discovered that "today's puzzle" is not today's puzzle...but I'm going to discuss today's puzzle on the "Today's Puzzle" thread even though it's an old puzzle and not today's. Now that you're all thoroughly confused, I shall elucidate. After finally figuring out the answers to the
New York Times puzzle that appears in today's
Los Angeles Daily News and then looking online to learn more about the puzzle, I discovered that it appeared in the
New York Times on September 11. It seems that the local paper runs the
Times puzzles five weeks after their original publication. That means that when I comment on them here, I'm discussing a five-week-old puzzle. I'll have to confine my comments to other crosswords and not the belated
Times puzzles.
The five-week-old puzzle printed today was described as "the most-discussed puzzle at Lollapuzzoola 7, a tournament held in New York City on August 9." Patrick Blindauer title it "Change of Heart." All the across answers contained three, five, seven or nine letters and the middle letter of each---the "heart"---had to be changed to another letter so the vertical answers would be correct. The changed letters resulted in real words horizontally but those words no longer matched the clues. The answer to "Computer purchase" was MOUSE but it had to be changed to MOOSE. "Canadian pop singer Lavigne" is AVRIL but the word had to be changed to AVAIL. The "O" and the "A" became part of OAK going down. Blindauer could have skipped the "change of heart" idea and simply written clues to fit the words that appeared in the completed puzzle but of course then it would be just an ordinary puzzle. As it is, the puzzle is rather pointless. The middle letter of every across answer has to be changed so the vertical words make sense. For a puzzle titled "Change of Heart," it might have been better if the middle letter of
every word, across
and down, had to be changed.....but such a puzzle might have just been doubly frustrating and difficult, especially since
none of the answers would match the clues.
Rex Parker's puzzle blog has 229 comments about this one and almost everyone hated it. Among the descriptive adjectives: annoying, confusing, moronic, pointless, cruel, poor, arcane, tedious and arbitrary.
http://rexwordpuzzle.blogspot.com/2014/09/sturdy-tree-in-beech-family-thu-9-11-14.html
