Last weekend in New York City was Lollapuzzoola 15. My wife Vicki and I competed in the pairs division and … we placed second! We even had an official final for the top three pairs for the first time, too, although we didn’t get to solve on the big boards like the top individual solvers do. We just solved on paper in an isolated space away from everyone else. We got stomped by the final puzzle since the “Express” division clues were brutally difficult, but even if we had been a little faster I doubt we would have caught pairs champions Pete and Claire Rimkus. Congrats to Pete and Claire and all the other top finishers at the world’s best crossword tournament on a Saturday in August. (Claire also wrote the New York Times crossword from this past Friday. She’s just piling up the W’s this week.)
Solution to Evan Birnholz’s Sept. 4 crossword, “College Admissions”
Anyhow, we had a great time as always. Seeing everyone from the puzzle family is always one of my favorite breaks from the rest of life. You can still order the Lollapuzzoola puzzles for solving at home at the link above, and they include not just the tournament crosswords but also a tiebreaker puzzle, a few warm-up puzzles and two meta suites. One of those meta suites was printed on a colorful single-page poster that looked especially gorgeous, so I’m looking forward to tackling that.
In other news, I mentioned last week that I was planning to interview a friend of mine from the crossword world in this space. I’m still planning it, but we’ve had to delay that interview by at least a week. I’ll let you know when it’s ready.
Classes are starting up again at universities, and they’re bound to get some new students. The first names of eight celebrities have been inserted into college names, creating wacky phrases:
- 23A: [Christmas toymaker wouldn’t shut up? (Actress Drescher admitted to a North Carolina university)] is ELF RAN ON, based on ELON University + FRAN.
- 30A: [Prayer beads for fans of Dashboard Confessional’s music? (Activist Parks admitted to a Georgia university)] is EMO ROSARY, based on EMORY University + ROSA.
- 36A: [Awful celestial explosion caused by actress Jovovich? (Pianist Gilels admitted to a Pennsylvania university)] is VILE MILLA NOVA, based on VILLANOVA University + EMIL.
- 59A: [Rip some geek? (Singer MacGowan admitted to a New York college)] is BASH A NERD, based on BARD College + SHANE.
- 69A: [Thick heads of hair on people in a hot tub? (Author Melville admitted to a Maine college)] is BATHER MANES, based on BATES College + HERMAN.
- 80A: [Headline about a mollusk being aboard Noah’s ship? (Poet Van Duyn admitted to a Massachusetts university)] is CLAM ON ARK, based on CLARK University + MONA.
- 98A: [Most authentic issue of a fashion magazine expected to arrive? (Actress Getty admitted to an Indiana university)] is PUREST ELLE DUE, based on PURDUE University + ESTELLE.
- 109A: [Street where people wear Greek garments? (Journalist Robertson admitted to a Louisiana university)] is TUNIC LANE, based on TULANE University + NIC.
The revealer that ties it all together is at 120A: [New college students, and what’s spelled out by the first letters of the people admitted to this puzzle’s colleges] which is FRESHMEN.
Some other combos of names and colleges that I left out include TEMPS IDLE (which is TEMPLE University + SID), REDMOND ICE (RICE University + EDMOND), DENIED DYSON (DENISON University + EDDY), and OMAR GOT BERLIN (OBERLIN College + MARGOT).
Some other answers and clues:
- 61A: [” Carmina Burana” movement about cruel fate] is “O FORTUNA.” This answer comes from personal experience — I’ve sung “Carmina Burana” twice with different choirs and it was a blast both times. Even if the name of the piece isn’t familiar to you, there’s a good chance you’ve heard “O Fortuna” before.
- 82A: [” Futurama” character in a pink sweatsuit] is AMY WONG. I’ve used another “Futurama” character (BENDER) in a previous Post puzzle. Somehow, the character with the friendliest letters (LEELA) hasn’t made an appearance in one of my puzzles yet.
- The crossing pair 4D / 27A: [With 27 Across, Pride platforms] is PARADE / FLOATS. The similar clue [Pride procession] showed up last week for the answer PARADE.
- 10D: [Bois who co-founded the sports YouTube channel and community website Secret Base] is JON Bois. Secret Base has become a go-to deep dive into YouTube for me; it publishes a ton of fun content about sports that you’d never think to consider. The “Fumble Dimension” videos where Jon and Kofie Yeboah find different ways to create outlandish scenarios in sports video games are long but hilarious; I especially liked the one where they forced “NBA 2K” to draft a class of utterly terrible basketball players every year until the league was entirely filled with them. Jon is also the person who coined the word “scorigami,” which refers to a score from a sports league that has never happened before. A 2-2 tie in an NFL game would be one of the rarest of rare scorigamis, aside from maybe the scores that are so high that there just isn’t enough time in a game to reach them. Someone even made a website to track NFL scorigamis as they happen.
- 46D: [6 weeks?] is JUNE. This might be tricky to make sense of, but “6″ refers to June being the sixth month, and the weeks in it collectively make up June.
- 56D: [” Uncle” whose initials match the country he personifies] is Uncle SAM. I’m not gonna lie: I somehow had never realized until now that Uncle Sam matches the initials U.S. and that the nickname was chosen for that reason. It seems so obvious in retrospect.
- 62D: [Chris who played Matt Foley in SNL sketches] is Chris FARLEY. Just an excuse to link to one of those sketches.
- 115D: [” You can do anything you want in life. Unless Jay ___ wants to do it too”: Conan O’Brien] is Jay LENO. More than a decade later, I still find that whole feud between Conan and Leno fascinating.
What did you think?
