Monday Puzzle

Have at it:

Click on the image to solve the puzzle. You’ll see a “save” button in the upper left in case you want to save your work and return to it later, and a “Submit” button if you want to submit your solution for judging. The three closest-to-perfect solutions will be acknowledged in this space and will receive appropriate rewards after the passage of a decent time interval (the length of which will be determined partly by the speed at which solutions arrive, but ought to be about a week).

Please try to keep spoilers out of the comments.

The rules are basically London Times rules:

  1. In most cases, there are two clues next to each other, one a straightforward definition and the other involving some wordplay. Part of your job is to figure out where one clue ends and the other begins. Example: “You could worship this mad dog” is a clue for GOD — “You could worship this” being the straight definition and “mad dog” being the wordplay. (Either could come first).
  2. Unlike in many American cryptics, there is sometimes a small connecting word that is not properly part of either clue.
  3. Internal punctuation means nothing. A question mark at the end of a clue is usually an acknowledgement that the clue is pretty lame. An exclamation point at the end usually means that the two clues overlap each other.
  4. Unlike in many American cryptics, not all clues are required to follow the above rules. There might be a few that deviate substantially, but in every case, once you know the solution, you ought to be able to say “Aha! I see how that’s a clue for that!”.

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9 Responses to “Monday Puzzle”


  1. 1 1 Smylers

    Thanks. 2d and 8d made me grin.

    Not got enough yet to be worth submitting it. If nothing else, it’s teaching me some American history: there’s some I half-guessed from the letters or wordplay then searched the web for and discovered they were indeed a culturally significant term/phrase in the USA.

  2. 2 2 John Faben

    Unless it’s a deliberate gag, there’s a typo in the clue for 1 across.

    I think I’ve got all of them, but there’s a few where I haven’t quite got to “Aha”, so holding off on submitting for a day or so.

  3. 3 3 Steve Landsburg

    John Faben: Typo fixed. Thanks.

  4. 4 4 nobody.really

    John Faben: Typo fixed. Thanks.

    WHAT???

    I based my entire sequence of answers on the idea that this apparent typo revealed a clever clue! Now I have to start over completely!

    Thanks a lot, Faben….

  5. 5 5 John Faben

    Steve, I got an error last night trying to submit,

    “Error submitting: must have internet connection and be submitting to the same website as the puzzle page”

    I got the same error on Safari and Chrome on a Mac, and Chrome on both Android and Windows, all different devices (I’m persistent). I’ve sent you a solution by email.

  6. 6 6 Steve Landsburg

    Well, that’s annoying. It was definitely working a few days ago and is definitely not working now. (I just got the same error myself.) Will investigate.

  7. 7 7 Steve Landsburg

    Aha! John Faben: I accidentally screwed up the submission code while I was fixing the typo you’d pointed out! Will take another five minutes or so to get this working again….

  8. 8 8 Steve Landsburg

    John Faben (once more!): It should be fixed now. I’ll be grateful if you try again.

  9. 9 9 John Faben

    Steve: success at last (pending confirmation on a few of the solutions, that is..)

  1. 1 Crossword Results at Steven Landsburg | The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics, and Physics

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