My favorite clue? 19 down, with 39 across a close second.

I'm just starting Cox and Rathvon's latest, from the Atlantic, called "Loops". I love it when I look at a puzzle and say to myself, "I'll never get it, never", like Don Music on Sesame Street. Just off the top of my head, though, I'd say the challenge in this one will be fitting the words into the diagram properly, not solving the clues. That's a legitimate part of a puzzle, of course, but I can't help thinking I like deciphering better than rearranging letters to fit in boxes the right way. One can hope, though, that I'm wrong and C&R will come up with some real doozies to keep me up all night. Tally-ho!

The last word on what is to be done in the Middle East - by Binyamin Netanyahu - is here:http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2002/03/29/News/News.46032.html

MINE, ALL MINE

Richard E. Maltby's latest effort, in Harper's this month, proved amusing, instructive, yet frustrating. Maltby's like that. He has great ideas, comes up with intricate clues, but too often finks out by, for instance, throwing in a French word that wasn't even in my Pocket Larousse. Now it's OK by me to use a few foreign words, but one should keep them familiar. The one he used wasn't hard to figure out, but that made it even more galling. One sympathizes with the puzzle constructor's dilemmas, but the mechanics shouldn't show through. That said, I liked the puzzle, solved it fairly quickly, once I got going, and it certainly wasn't 48 across. Is it possible someone told Maltby to "dumb down" his efforts? I have been rummaging around in old puzzles, from the early nineties. I could swear they're harder. Oh, well. I give "Mine, All Mine" three question marks on a scale of six. ???

Victory vs. Peace in the Middle East

What's this got to do with puzzles? It's the greatest conundrum of all - to be or not to be. The flaw in the thinking? There's no such thing as peace. The choice for the Israelites and the Philistines is not between war and peace. It is between victory and defeat. The Israelites could have "peace" tomorrow by just giving up and letting the terrorists kill them all. But that peace would look an awful lot like defeat. That's why "peace" talks never work. If you called them "Victory talks" their true nature might become apparent.

All victories, of course, are only partial and temporary. To the winner, victory and peace look the same. To the loser, defeat is not made any easier to bear by being called "peace". When you realize there is no such thing as peace, you realize why the Israelites will never purchase "peace" by ceding land to the Philistines. Every such concession puts them closer to defeat and they know it. Both sides are stymied, not because they can't get the other side to accept "peace", but because they can't figure out what any lasting victory would consist of and how to achieve it. That's why the Philistines are thrown back on the extermination of Israel - an impossible dream. And Israel in desperation thinks fondly of an "iron wall" to keep the Muslim world at bay.

"Peace" is a terrible thing. It resembles a lot of other illusions, like the Edenic myths that inspire the so-called "environmentalists". Do any of them really think that the Earth can or should be kept in a certain ideal state forever, maintained like a terrarium at standard temperature and pressure, with two and a half species per square inch, never changing, never growing? Do any of them really think that if you cut a tree down, others will not grow to replace it? Do any of them really think that if you pave a meadow the pavement will remain forever?

No, of course they don't. They barely think at all. Just like the "peaceniks", who, if they were honest, would admit what they really want is not peace, but victory, they emote and feed off others' emotions and become hypocrites and liars to get power over others.

So there's my rant for the day.

PUZZLES IN

My favorite day of the month – the new Harper’s and Atlantic puzzles have come out.

Richard E. Maltby’s effort in Harper’s is already making me tear my hair out, but that’s what I like. Eight of the answers are deformed in some unspecified manner before being entered into the diagram. Of course, the eight deformees are not marked in any way. I guess that makes it more fun, but doesn’t it seem to you that it’s always pretty obvious, when you’ve got a good solution – one that hits with a solid “chunk!!” – whether it fits into the diagram or not. The possibilities are not endless.

Which brings up another point. How do these composers come up with these wild and wacky ways of messing with your mind? It’s hard enough just to compose a simple crossword. Is it as hard as it appears to construct cryptics? Perhaps a composer can chime in with some trade secrets (NOT!!)

One answer away

I got an old copy of an Atlantic puzzle and cranked away on it. Maybe it was guilt for copying it out of back issues at the library, but something didn't let me finish it quite. So here I am wondering what in the world Expanding Second-Rate Farm, in Westernmost Georgia means, having the letters _h_ng already. Making it more difficult is the scheme of the puzzle, which requires that some of the puzzle entries, including this one, must be constructed by taking the answer to the clue and taking out a word - four letters long in this case - that means some kind of food. For instance, one of the answers was "RaisingCain". But all you entered in the diagram was "gCain" because you took out the "raisin". Clever, no? The clue in that case was "I sing"California" in shower, creating a ruckus".(11) two words.

Foreign language puzzles

I was wondering how they do puzzles in Timbuktu or Baluchistan. The characteristics of the different scripts must make for some decorative efforts. Or is the good old Anglo-Saxon world the only place where word puzzles caught on? Seems unlikely. Imagine acrostics using Chinese ideographs! I know something about Arabic, have seen their daily newspapers on a trip to Cairo, but can't remember ever seeing any word puzzles. Anyone out there who knows of an interesting non-Roman script word puzzle, let me know if you can at robspe@paris.com. I won't publish any emails unless you specifically say it's OK, but I would really like to know.

Last month's Harper's puzzle, by Richard Maltby, was called "Misprints". I found it tantalizingly difficult yet interesting. The idea was to decipher clues with a misprint in them - that made up half the puzzle clues. For the other half, you had to enter the answer to a "regular" puzzle clue in the diagram with a misprint. This was a lot harder than it looked. One interesting feature was the definition of a "misprint". It was defined as a simple letter substitution, always occurring in a cross-clued light.

I have always been fascinated by how the puzzles I liked are made. I've tried my hand at it but always seem to botch it up. I have a feeling the pros have methods beyond my ken. Not that I couldn't learn.

So, no puzzle news this morning. I'll just have to get my two cents' worth in on the news of the day. The Israelis look justifiably suspicious of the Zinni initiative, which seems designed to give the Palestinians what they couldn't achieve on the battlefield or by murdering unarmed civilians by the hundreds. Of course, they could have had nearly the same deal many times in the past. Is it too cynical to think that the present generation of Palestinian leadership wouldn't be able to function if they didn't have Israel to blame all their problems on?

That said, how do the Israelis get themselves out of this situation? Is an "iron wall" the solution? Or implanted machine-readable tags that would distinguish Jews and Israeli Arabs from Palestinian possible terrorists? By the way, why is no one commenting on the fact that almost no Israeli Arabs have been killed in the eighteen months of the "Al-Aqsa intifada"? Could there be any more persuasive showing that, one, the Israelis are not "racist", even though that charge is absurd, because they're all Semites, or, two, that Israelis can live with Muslims? On a more general level, is it possible for a highly developed modern culture, with TV and the internet and some degree of individualism, like the Israelis, to exist cheek-by-jowl with a heavily hierarchical matriarchy like the Arab world?

Yes, I said matriarchy, because I believe, with Dr. Johnson, that "Nature has given women so much power that the law very wisely gives them little." And the less power women have in a society by law, the more they have by nature. Israel, despite the influence of the Orthodox clan, has given women much power by law. To pay for that, of course, the same women have lost much of their natural influence. In the Arab world, women run the family and hence the society, using men as cannon fodder and mouthpieces in their usual manipulative way.

CONUNDRUM - the advanced puzzle solver's forum

Ever since I found I could do the New York Times daily crossword puzzle in ink in less than fifteen minutes, I've been searching for new puzzles to conquer. The "cryptic" puzzles in the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's magazine have challenged me for years. It's about time I shared my enthusiasm for this puzzle type - and any others readers might suggest. I'm looking forward to discussing your opinions and circulating my own. As each puzzle comes out, I will solve it - or not! Then I'll analyze it. I hope this will be fun.

PUZZLE ODYSSEY
So I looked at a lot of puzzles. "Word finds" were my first introduction to the world of moron puzzles. They give you all the words and ask you to find them in a block of letters, cleverly disguised by running them backwards, forwards, upside down and diagonally upside down backwards. They didn't hold my interest for too long. That must have been because of my lifelong habit of reading dictionaries upside down and diagonally backwards.

On a slightly higher intellectual level, I had a long-term relationship with crostics. They give you a block containing a quotation and definitions with the letters of the answers to the definitions keyed by number to the spaces in the quotation block. If that description has given you a headache, you will understand why crostics gave me headaches. After a while, though, like crosswords, they became merely a stenographic task, my fingers racing to keep up with my mind. As I got older, the headaches were accompanied by arthritis.

By the way, doesn't this blog-writing thing remind you of Sam'l Johnson sitting at a table in a coffeehouse in late eighteenth-century London scribbling copy for his periodical Tattler or Rattler or Rambler or whatever it was? Only he always got it right the first time.

As soon as I can figure out how, I'm going to separate a section of this blog for daily political and philosophical rants. Then I will figure out how to set up an email block so anyone who may be reading can join in. Mojo Man may be joining us.