Top 10 Search Phrases Crossword

Triond's top ten search phrases is the theme of this puzzle.  Unfortunately, illness delayed my completion of this project.  A few of the terms have moved off the list since I constructed the grid.  Even so, most of the search terms on the current list are the same as those from ten days ago.  Some Triond writers check these terms frequently; this puzzle will contain few surprises for them.  For the rest of us, I've included a screenshot of the top ten search terms as they were when I made the puzzle.  You can find the solution to the puzzle at the end of the article.

Puzzle

Clues

Across

1. You can get these from chia

5. Long Island or 51

6. Before Pirates of the Caribbean V, we saw POTC _.

8. ___ out means scrape by

9. Where the power of chia is concentrated

10. Acrostico del  ___ __ __ madre, Triond's only recent Spanish-language search term in the top 10 

12. Kid

14. Social insect

17. Extrasensory Perception

18. High direction

19. Used to attach feathers

20. Disjunctive conjunction

21. Iron ___ Stream

23. Home Box Office

24. This giant bird carried off Sinbad

27. I bring it, and you eat it.

31. Is this gooey stuff good for you?

33. Age

34. Like or __

35. Israel's country code

36. Watch out for this free download

Down

1. Hairstyle named after a teen singer

2. Something indispensable

3. Maradona said this organization "is a big museum."

4. Grab

5. Confederate general

6. Concepts

7. Very special

9. Droop

11. _____ has not yet taken Margaret Thatcher.

13. Purchase

15. Arrest

16. Someone who provokes an argument on the Internet

17. To make a mistake

22. Praise

25. Triond readers are searching for the worst job in this country.

26. Something I do with my little eye

28. A high silk hat

29. Stoner

30. Scottish politician Hardie

31. Scoffing laugh

32. Moray, for one

Notes and Observations

My goal is to crack the crossword market.  This crossword is built on a 13 x 13 grid, the minimum saleable size in the U.S.  The puzzle also has the 180-degree rotational symmetry required here.  The puzzle remains unsaleable in the U.S. for several reasons:

Unchecked squares.  In the US each blank square of a crossword puzzle must be checked; that is, the letter for each blank square must be a part of a word from the across list and one from the down list.  In the UK,  where crossword puzzles have a more lattice-like look,  unchecked squares are fine.

Two-letter words.  Saleable puzzles have none.  Indeed, in the US many editors won't buy puzzles with too many three-letter words.

Too many solid blocks.  Ideally, an American crossword should be about 16% solid blocks.

Forbidden topics.  Death, drugs, disease and (dare we say it) sex are not acceptable. 

Here's a video about making American-style crosswords.  Notice the use of software.  I use a pencil.

I'll try again soon.

 

Answer

Top 10 Search Phrases Crossword by Mark Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

On May 22, 2012, a version of this article appeared on Triond's Quazen site:

http://quazen.com/games/puzzles/top-10-search-phrases-crossword/

Pirates of The Caribbean 5, the Crossword

Newspapers, magazines and puzzle websites pay the authors of professional-quality crossword puzzles $50 to $1000 for each puzzle.  Compensation at this level dwarfs the income most bloggers or self-published novelists receive for their efforts.  Always on the lookout for new opportunities, I put together a crossword based on what little we know about “Pirates of the Caribbean 5.” 

Triond readers and obsessed, pitiable souls who search day after day for new information about “Pirates of the Caribbean 5,” welcome. I invite you to solve my puzzle.  After the puzzle, I discuss how close (not very) I came to creating a crossword that a puzzle editor might buy.  The answer to the puzzle appears at the end of the article.  

Pirate Music

First, some pirate music from Elizabeth Velez Urie put you in the mood:

Puzzle

Across

1. This actress may return for "Pirates of the Caribbean 5."

3. Sparrow's actor's last

6. Eighth of a piece of eight

7. Pirate talk or Accident Risk Assessment Report

8. Utah or University of Tennessee

10. Will it be an epic film or an epic ____?

12. Four ______ theme parks have Pirates of the Caribbean rides.

13. ____ was I ere I saw Elba.

15.  The two-eared Van Gogh brother

17.  Negative response

19.  Hear "Hi-yo ______" in the next Depp film. 

 

Down

1.  Body of water between Miami and Maracaibo

2. Tow-toed sloth kept as pet by pirates

4. "Pirates of the Caribbean 5" is expected to ____ billions.

5. First two words of movie series title.

8. Unmanned Aircraft System

9. In the video Elizabeth Velez Urie plays a hornpipe on a ___ whistle.

10. POTC 1,2,3,4 and soon _.

11. Not right

14. Latter Day Saints

15. Movie starring Charlton Heston, "Ben-___."

17. Netherlands, National League etc.

18. Output Voltage

Problems

Unau PD-US Image by Davepape via Wikipedia.

A good crossword puzzle must satisfy aesthetic standards of symmetry and language.   After I made the puzzle, I reviewed the writer's guidelines for five possible markets for crossword puzzles.  The puzzle above has numerous problems:

• It’s the wrong shape.  A puzzle fit for publication must have 180 degree rotational symmetry; that is, the puzzle must be the same shape when you turn it upside down.  My puzzle has bilateral (mirror) symmetry.
• The sides have an even number of squares.  Saleable crosswords have an odd number of squares on each side.
• A good puzzle can have very few three-letter words and no two-letter words.  I have two three-letter words and four two-letter words.
• I used a partial phrase, “_______ __ the Caribbean.”
• I have one word of crosswordese.  Most experienced crossword solvers know unau is a vernacular name for a two-toed sloth and Ea was a god of the Babylonians, but they don’t want to see these words very often. (I used unau for fun.  Besides, I read somewhere that pirates kept them as pets.  I swear it.  Really.)

I could go on and on.

I do plan to make some more crossword puzzles, but I’ll try for a saleable puzzle next time.  This one was just for fun.  

In case you were wondering, the author of a Sunday crossword in the New York Times receives $1000 on publication.

Answer

This article originally appeared on Triond's Quazen website:  http://quazen.com/games/puzzles/pirates-of-the-caribbean-5-the-crossword/

A Tik-Tok of Oz Puzzle

 PD-US via Wikipedia

I have an unrealized ambition to create a series of puzzles based on the Oz books of L. Frank Baum.  These fifteen books, containing hundreds of characters, color plates and line drawings, provide ample material for puzzles of many kinds.   I offer the first of the series below.

In case you’re unfamiliar with him, Tik-Tok is a mechanical man Dorothy Gale meets and winds up when she’s trapped by the wheelers in “Ozma of Oz,” the third volume of the series.  A popular character, he figures in many of the later books, and Baum later wrote a book around him, “Tik-Tok of Oz.”

The puzzle has three parts: a passage with a few words omitted and replaced with blanks, a set of scrambled words, and a word search puzzle in which the scrambled words appear unscrambled.  Once you’ve puzzled out the words, use them to fill in the blanks in the passage.  The passage is the speech from “Ozma of Oz” in which Tik-Tok explains his origin.  I edited the speech very slightly to improve continuity.

If you get stuck unscrambling the words, try picking them out of the word search, where they appear unscrambled, or guessing them from the blanks in the passage.  On the other hand, if you’re good at unscrambling words, you’ll have a word search puzzle to enjoy once you’ve figured out the passage.

In the Oz books, Tik-Tok speaks with a mechanical voice, which Baum represents by stringing the words together with hyphens.  Robotic speech is all about us today, so I give the answer to this puzzle in an unusual form, an Xtranormal video I made in which Tik-Tok tells his story.

Tik-Tok of Oz (PD-US)

The Passage

Wordsearch

The answer spoken by Tik-Tok himself:

Puzzles are for Fun

You won’t get rich making puzzles.  Once upon a time you could make money constructing puzzles for magazines, but now most of the puzzle magazines you see on newsstands print only computer-generated puzzles.  (If you have a mental picture of sweating bots shoveling digits into the flaming furnace of a Sudokumatic 2012, you’re not far from wrong.)  A good crossword puzzle, on the other hand, still requires considerable human ingenuity and can fetch $200 or more.

This puzzle was computer generated.  After picking out the words in the passage I wanted to hide in the word search portion of the puzzle, I created the word search and scrambled the words using armoredpenguin.com.  Next I sat down to solve it myself to guard against mistakes and to check on the difficulty of the puzzle.  My memory isn’t particularly strong.  I was taken aback by the scrambled word “clpdietcoma” and had to consult the word search.

I hope you enjoy my puzzle.

Answers

An earlier version of this article appeared on Triond's Quazen website: http://quazen.com/games/puzzles/review-trilogy-303-puzzle-quizzes-by-the-grabarchuk-family/