Puzzling Evidence

I've gotten a bit hooked on crossword puzzles lately. The local paper runs one with the comics, I guess because it tends to be so obvious it's humorous. They run the syndicated New York Times crossword in the sports section with the classified ads. Probably because the NYT puzzle is difficult enough to be classified a sport.

Actually, once you get your sea legs, some of them aren't bad. They famously get harder as the week goes on, so while I had Monday half solved on my lunch break and completed later with only one or two Google searches to amplify clues, Tuesday took longer. Curiously, Wednesday seemed easier than Tuesday, and I felt pretty good going into Thursday.

Thursday is what they apparently call 'rebus day.' 38 Across was an obtuse master clue about how you could draw a picture by connecting the dots of this that and the other starting with the circled square. I read the clue a few times and didn't comprehend it, so I hoped other words would fill in enough blanks to get me there.

It turns out it wasn't just a rebus, it was the worst kind of rebus, a 'themed' one. 1 Down was 'Rémy Martin units,' which I rightly got as 'FIFTHS.' The musical theme is thus hinted at, since the puzzle starts with descending fifths, but even being a bit of a musician, I missed that.

My frustration came because I assumed, foolishly it turns out, that each square had just one letter in it. Isn't that an obvious, unstated rule of crosswords? Apparently not.

So 6 Down was 'Mideast peace conference attendee, 1993.' It started with AR and ended with T, so I naturally thought Arafat, but there were only five boxes. After Googling to see if there were any minor characters that fit, I decided they must mean ARABS.

See also 65 Across, a 'Renaissance cradle city,' I immediately thought Florence, but with only seven boxes I was stumped since Florence has eight letters. DaVinci has seven characters but Leonardo's last name means 'of Vinci,' and 'VINCI is only five characters.

Since the rebus encompassed all four quadrants of the puzzle, I was absolutely landlocked between things I couldn't come up with a plausible answer for and things that seemed to fit but then thwarted their intersecting words.

The key, printed in today's paper, includes the connect-the-dot drawing showing how 38 Across, EIGHTHNOTES is illustrated by a pair of eighth notes tied together, the dots being the multi-character squares occupied by DO RE MI FA SOL LA TI DO.

I've tried, lately, to make my own crossword puzzles and they are maddeningly hard to create. You can paint yourself into a corner instantly if you follow the rules: all the characters have to be part of both an across and a down (though the center of this Sphinx-stumper was isolated; which is defended I hear by the fact that it is both the part of a word and a phrase), it has to be diagonally symmetrical, etc.

Which is to say, I can appreciate that the puzzle's author, Danial Finan, is a genius, but I think it's an evil sort of genius...