Notes

1. The self-checkout lanes in Walmart had been set to "British". My inner glow at hearing a British accent was slightly jarred by the script changes (most jarring was hearing "notes" for "change").
2. I vaguely remember there being more than one brand of dishwasher detergent, but according to the store shelves I must have been mistaken.
3. At some point I should look around and see who still plays major league baseball and see who I should draft for the fantasy baseball league.
4. P&A has advanced from 6/12 to 9/12, with the addition of scuba, spa (which was as good as I thought it was going to be), and sailing (with Foggy cleverly sneaking two hints into the first hint for this puzzle, one of which was definitely needed). Foggy gave me (more-or-less) the hint I asked for on Archery; unfortunately, it completely destroyed what little work I had in the grid. (I didn't even have any answers that started with C.) So that's still in a state of much disrepair. It is possible that I have the meta correct (currently waiting on Foggy to adjudicate my third :sigh: attempt) with what I have, but I'm not thinking it's very likely.
   

P&A Progress Report, Weekend One Edition

The front half looks like a good set of puzzles; my black ink cartridge is mostly gone, so I'm trying not to print very much (until I get back to work on Monday, of course). As much as possible, I'm trying to solve in my electronic whiteboard software (which is a lot easier when I have my drawing tablet, but I've discovered that I can type on top of the screen-captured puzzle and it won't erase the lines in the grids, so it's still feasible), but the full-page puzzles are an awkward size for that. So I've just been doing the suite, and leaving the front half for later.

My initial reaction when looking over this issue's extravaganza was "oh no". Not that it is going to be physically possible to defend my "20th place" finish from last issue (unless Foggy makes the extended leaderboard a permanent addition, meaning no it's not possible), but I had hoped to finish the suite anyway. So I resigned myself to not finishing and got started. Now, after a weekend, I will concede that there is a small, but positive, chance that I might finish this one.

SCUBA: I see "fill-in puzzles where we've given you all the vowels, of which there's only one in the puzzle anyway" a lot. Apparently they're more interesting and/or fun and/or easy than I think they are. I don't refuse to do them, like I refuse to do puzzles that require me to cut the puzzle out, so I may end up doing this at some point.

Tropical Drinks: Still not a good start. Would knowing the ingredients of more than 2 (I think) of these cocktails help? I don't know. I was kind of hoping that I would be able to relate the given ingredients to the given names in some way, but that doesn't appear to do anything for me.

Archery: I think I see how this is going to work out, and I expect this to be an interesting twist on Marching Bands. This is all still somewhat hypothetical, for awkward size-related reasons, but it should be doable.

Golf (ding!): This is the one puzzle I printed. It also features in the on-going "Andrew sends an e-mail to the editor, wondering about an error in the puzzle, and gets a 'You idiot, that's not the right answer' e-mail in response" saga that I've been building up for a while. I swear, Foggy, no matter what, I'm not going to send such an e-mail next issue. I only literally just now figured out the clue in the flavortext, going strictly off training to figure out the last step (although I did fill in the scantron bubbles exactly backward the first time).

Sightseeing (ding!): I have never done Akari except in the nikoli.com applet, so this was a little interesting. Fortunately my electronic whiteboard software has both an automatic circle-drawing tool and a highliter that can "snap" to drawing straight lines (and ditto for an arrow-drawing tool that I used to work out the camera angles), so it worked out neatly. I correctly guessed the answer extraction mechanism, so I feel pretty good right now.

Horseback Riding: This seems like a lot of work. I should probably figure out what all the moves are first (and really: horseshoes?)

Volleyball (ding!): Nice and easy and actually where I started. I read far too much into the flavortext, so the puzzle was actually even easier than I expected.

Tanning (ding!): A cool little concept. In terms of figuring out where to put the words in the grid, I expected all the 1-2-3 to spell out T-A-N. That belief lasted exactly one word, since the first word in the grid couldn't fit under such a constraint. But the correct method was readily apparent, and apart from mis-transcribing four of the 1-2-3 sets when building the answer (and also not really knowing right away what the result phrase could possibly mean) it was all downhill from there.

Spa Treatments: This looks like it will be the best puzzle of the issue. I have made very little progress with it yet, though.

Luau (ding!): Once I managed to dig up a complete set to see exactly how the puzzle fit together, it was a very smooth ride.

Sailing: I guess I have most of the clues. Not sure about all those sailboats in the middle of the page, though.

Waterskiing (ding!): I remember telling R&B after one of their podcasts about the sampler that sometimes you just have to start the puzzle and the right thing to do will become clear once you have the first group of answers (I think the example I gave was "What's Black and White and Read All Over?"). This was one of those puzzles (using a highlighter again really helped). Training kicked in again to get the very last step.

So hey that's 6/12. I have a theory for what's going to happen with the meta, but it doesn't account for all those ... pieces of flint? arrows? ... objects in the answer boxes for each puzzle. I'm pretty sure it's going to take at least the first set of hints to get further (even if I get some more answer words), unless my theory is just amazingly correct.

ACPT: Words about the Numbers

Over 25% of the field were rookies this year, despite a 5% decrease in the size of the field. Where did all these people go? (There are always going to be people who can't make the date, can't arrange to come, etc. I mean, even I've skipped a year since I first started coming. 160 of them, though?)

The six non-number-five puzzles felt like they were flattened out relative to last year (as I pointed out in the last post) -- #1 felt harder than usual; I probably did more erasing on this year's #1 than on the other eight #1 puzzles put together -- #3 felt easier than usual, although it still took me 10 and a half minutes I guess. #2 was hard, according to the welcome letter in the packet, although I didn't think so at the time. (Looking back, the theme could have made life awkward if you hadn't caught on right away, or at all.) If the goal was to make sure half the field could solve every non-number-five puzzle, then we passed that test. I'm not sure I like it; I think having another harder puzzle (harder than #3 was, and harder than I felt #2 was at the time) is a good thing for the standings, and as long as it's a fun theme like #2 was this year I don't think people will complain about errors/not finishing.

Speaking of a good thing for the standings, we will once again go through the "down with minutes" chant as every year. My opinion is as neutral as ever: more refined scoring will be good for the standings, but bad for people's psychology, as now there are more "bad times". Now people are only upset when they finish at :59-:55; if we go to (say) every fifteen seconds, the bad times will be :59-:55 and :44-:40 and :29-:25 and :14-:10. So you'll be only be one-fourth as angry when you're angry, but you'll be angry four times as often. (And am I really the only person who does the blank square check before I look at the clock anyway? The only thing I'll put off if the clock is low is reading through answers to see they make sense.)

(I suppose I should say: when I say "good for the standings", I mean "more likely to make the standings meaningful, and put the better solvers in better places".)

ACPT: the numbers

Note well: all these numbers are based on the version of the tab-delimited scores that I downloaded earlier today. I may bother to update this with the "final" version in a week's time, or whatever, but I probably won't. As before, it is theoretically possible for my formulas to overestimate the number of perfect puzzles (you would need to make three errors for a total of five words (i.e., two errors in the same word), and have finished with at least nine full minutes on the clock to have a score that counted), but I'm not really worried about that actually happening.

# of contestants with points on a puzzle: 643
My placement: 35
# of rookies: 161
# of juniors: 21
# of seniors: 7
Most winning puzzles (puzzles with the highest score in the room): 6 (Dan Feyer, Howard Barkin)
My winning puzzles: 0

Median score for puzzle 1: 1080 (my score 1205)
Median score for puzzle 2: 1265 (my score 1540)
Median score for puzzle 3: 1407.5 (my score 1805)
Median score for puzzle 4: 1180 (my score 1110)
Median score for puzzle 5: 495 (my score 1315)
Median score for puzzle 6: 1745 (my score 1970)
Median score for puzzle 7: 1990 (my score 2440)
Median total score: 9010 (my score 11385)

Puzzles from easy to hard:
Puzzle 6 (yes puzzle 6): 85.2% solvers completed correctly
Puzzle 4: 82.0%
Puzzle 1: 80.9%
Puzzle 7: 72.8%
Puzzle 2: 68.7%
Puzzle 3: 56.1%
Puzzle 5: 15.4%
(By comparison, last year's numbers were: 94.2-81.3-74.1-66.5-53.6-44.9-16.4, which seems like more of a distinction between puzzles.)

Solvers all correct: 60
Solvers six correct: 138
Solvers five correct: 121
Solvers four correct: 90
Solvers three correct: 60
Solvers two correct: 74
Solvers one correct: 55
Solvers zero correct: 45

Highest finisher with an error: Adam Cohen (#18)
Lowest finisher without an error: Jeff Janus (#153)

ACPT: The Words

The numbers will come in a later post. (A spoiler is involved! Danger!)

1. "Sales pitch" was probably the most talked-about clue over the weekend. Everybody said to me, "That was a very clever and original clue!" I said to all of them, "But this is the third time I've seen it this week!" Since no one else seemed to have heard of it recently, it must have been in my book of Hook 'n' Hex Boston Globe Sundays that I've been doing. (Logic!) I'm not going to go look through several dozen 21x21 puzzles for a three-letter word, though. But maybe you can consider this a pro-tip for next year's studying.
2. I find it interesting that the only color pen that the rules stated you shouldn't use (green) turns out to be the only color in the standard Sharpie highlighter 4-color assortment that wasn't used (yellow for wrong, blue for right (as well as what the judges had to write your time on your paper), pink for "yes--no---wait I don't know"). The person next to me was using his favorite 49¢ Bic blue pen and got into a lot of trouble for it. (Do they use the scan system for the at-homes? Probably not.) I would bet you could get a green highlighter from Helene Hovanec at bargain prices right about now.
3. I somehow watched the entire slide-show for Eric Berlin's first puzzle twice (after turning in the grid) without ever seeing the clue for ENT (something-down, hooking off the first E in SPEED).
4. I got some motivation for continuing to work on a potential Friday night game of my own. Now I just have to learn how to construct some other variety puzzles (like diagramlesses), as well as puzzle suites. (I have no idea whether Will would consider a Friday night game with a diagramless and/or a cryptic in it as suitable for the crowd, but that's academic unless I actually manage to make one.)

An ACPT Thought Experiment

There's been flurries this year about the costs for ACPT being re-jiggered this year (I suppose the theme is "you thought you could save $50 by not choosing the banquet -- ha ha fooled you!"). So I thought about preparing a "bid" for bringing the thing down here. Obviously I won't be able to actually do a budget, because I don't know what the current budget really is, nor am I going to bother hotels for information about an event I don't have the authority (legal, moral, or otherwise) to negotiate for.

But I could at least gather information about what the event would "look like" from the contestants' perspective (getting here, events, perhaps relative prices for incidentals) and see how it compares. Then comes your part, dear reader(s): are the trade-offs for a non-New York setting worth saving (hypothetically) some money? I know what my answer is, but then I wouldn't have to travel. (And better yet, if you do one for your town, then presumably we might find the "best" place to do this, wherever it is.) Responses in the comments, or trackbacks I suppose.

So the details: The proposed site would be the Sheraton Norfolk (or, if we have some sort of contract with Marriott, I suppose we could move to the Norfolk Marriott three blocks down).

• Getting here: Norfolk International has the name-brand airlines (including Southwest). If you're an AirTran or Frontier partisan, you can fly into the Newport News airport, but that can be a heck of a ride down to Norfolk. Either way, you would need to do a shuttle service to get out of the airport (from NIA, it would be $22 to the hotel and from Newport News $55, near as I can tell). I don't know how well the competence of the shuttle company compares to Connecticut Limo, but I don't see how it could be worse.
• Stuff around: Well, you're in Norfolk. You've got a zoo, a nautical museum, the botanical garden, a mall, and a reasonable amount of water. There's a bus system that I've never used that can get you to all these places. There are a few concert arenas there, which may or may not have something going. And if you're willing to rent a car and go further afield, there's Colonial Williamsburg and some battlefields, plus some more museums. And there's Virginia Beach, but in February that may not necessarily be an asset. (Maybe if we go back to St. Patrick's Day....)
• Sleeping: The any-idiot-off-the-street room rate at the Sheraton for Feb 19-21, 2010 is $105. Presumably we could do even better on the group rate.
• Eating: I don't know that area at all, but Yahoo maps seems to indicate that there's some fast food type things down highway 460 (don't know how walkable that is, 'cause that's a big-deal road, but it's about five blocks) and some more normal restaurants to the NW, towards Scope Arena and the water (but that's more like ten to twenty blocks away).
• Facilities: The main ballroom is 12685 sq ft. The main ballroom at Brooklyn is 16000, if we used it all. My spatial visualization ability is notoriously non-existent, but my recollection would seem to be that we had ABCDE, but not FGHI (based on the floor plan on the Marriott site) meaning we were using about 12350 square feet for a capacity of 935. The hotel has about 470 rooms (the Marriott, a 14400 sq ft ballroom and about 400 sleeping rooms). The hotel bar closes at midnight, which is probably a concern to several.
  

The main difference I can imagine is that we are a more car-centered area; getting around without a car is just not as easy as in the Northeast, and I've not been on the water in Norfolk at all, let alone enough to know how pedestrian-friendly the territory is.

So there you are. Would it be worth it? You tell me.

List

1. The advantages of today's grocery run are (a) I got to get my car cleaned off in advance of tomorrow's 8am class and (b) I got to then park in the sun to let more melting happen.
2. Of course, the only problem was on the passenger side (and the front and back, naturally); the driver's side was completely free of any snow, ice, or other winter accoutrement.
3. It would be really nice if I could get, when I wanted, the third item of a numbered list to be labeled in the Monty Python and the Holy Grail stylee. My attempt here was not accepted by Blogger with a "Your HTML cannot be accepted: Tag is broken" message. My readers who know CSS (if I have any readers who know CSS) will have to tell me whether this is something that needs to be done in a style instead.
4. Less than two weeks to ACPT. Now I need to practice "sitting in a chair and doing things in pencil" (as opposed to "sitting in a chair and doing things on computer" and "lounging about doing things in pencil"). Also have started collecting estimates on bringing a large number of puzzles to Brooklyn.
   

This Recent Time Period in Puzzles

1. OMG OMG two P&A metas in a row. Either Foggy is slipping or I, after 10 years of this, have started to not suck at these. They both seem vanishingly unlikely.
2. My ACPT training: I started working on the big book of Boston Globe puzzles when I got to the auto shop today at 9:30. My hand started to hurt around 12:15, so that's not bad I guess. I took a break and started in again at 12:30 and then the car was ready at about 1. I was unable to solve one of the HH puzzles. :( Bonus observation: Not even Henry Hook can make a Sunday-size quote puzzle anything but insipid, or obscure. It was a bit of a shock to the system to do a "real" HH puzzle after several quote puzzles in a row.
3. Next part of ACPT training: print out Fireball 2, find the Official ACPT Pencil And Eraser, set the kitchen timer to 20:00, and go. It won't be a complete reproduction , because I won't be sitting at the junction of two of those long industrial tables which are at different heights, meaning I have to sit at an angle (because I'm right at the legs of the table) and add some padding underneath the puzzle (so that the puzzle lies flat). Maybe I should just sit on the aisle this year.
4. OMGOMG two P&A metas
5. I got seduced by a quote for my next acrostic, and didn't originally realize that it had 452 characters in it. I have since edited it, and now it's at 294 characters (IIRC). It still might be too much.
6. I have made 0 progress on my idea for an ACPT puzzle suite.
7. I won't be able to bring Matt Gaffney pencils (plural) to Brooklyn, since I've only got one and I'm already dead for this month. (Well, technically the book prizes now include a pencil too, but those odds aren't usually very good.)
   

P&A Progress Post

This is here mainly to remind myself, when I want to throw this entire stack of papers out a window, that I've actually done something with this set. Also, to help me keep track of which ones of these I want to look at sooner rather than later. (And of course all the finished puzzles are implicitly "unless I've done something stupid".)

Shadow of the Vampire: sure looks nice, though
Day Watch: ding! (the hint here was the needed inspiration, so hooray!)
Space Vampires: 0 done, should get to quick
Billy the Kid vs. Dracula: ding!
Let the Right One In: ding!
From Dusk till Dawn: ding!
Monster Squad: ding!
Dracula: ding! (Tell you what: starting in the lower left, combined with the flavortext, originally sent me in a far different direction from where I was supposed to go.)
Queen of the Damned: ding! (currently: favorite puzzle) (and re-ding! because my original answer was (5 8) instead of (7 9) as the hints claim it should be) (and now un-ding! since this answer can't fit in the meta grid now:( )
Cronos: ding!
Scream, Blacula, Scream: ding!
The Hunger: 0.5 done I will always be able to solve the -0ku part and never ever solve the bit where you actually get the answer
The Wisdom of Crocodiles: ding!
Count Dracula: ding! (Used the hint rather than figure out what the total number was supposed to be)
Metas: Mirrors fixed in Being Human, and one word revealed. I have taken a reasonable guess and submitted it (hence making Vamp forever out-of-bounds).

Ten-to-eleven puzzles done already, using a total of three hints: I don't know what's wrong with me.

AND FINALLY: ding ding ding! So back to the original answer for QotD, which made my guess, while correct, even more outlandish (since I had fewer letters now, rather than more). Oh well.

ACPT Questions and Reckless Answers

1. What interesting things are going to happen Friday evening? Good question. There will be a huge crush of humanity trying to meet and greet and set up plans for Friday after the games and Saturday lunch and Saturday night and Sunday lunch and Sunday after the awards. One group getting together Saturday noon will discover that none of them actually knew each other previously, and three romantic couples will form in the protoplasm. Eric Berlin will come up with something interesting, specifically awarding Tyler Hinman and Merl Reagle a free drink from the hotel bar. The rest of the time will be filled with an old tape featuring news reports of the ACPT from 1984, incorrectly indignant letters-to-the-editor from Will's pile, and a pick-your-poison contest where everyone will do the cryptic (as they always do), despite the alternatives of (1) a page of 4x4 Kenken(TM)(R)(K)(P), (2) guessing what's in Henry Hook's pocket, (3) a page of 6x6 Kenken(TM)(R)(K)(P), and (4) a diagramless.

2. What's up with Saturday night? Pliska and Chaneski will come up with something, and will stretch it too far because nobody else will have volunteered something, although this year we'll be able to legitimately do 1 vs. 100 on Saturday night because only 100 people will have bothered to show up.

3. Aren't there some crossword puzzles? Yes.

3a. Well? Byron Walden will make his triumphant return to puzzle #5, which will be a rebus theme involving two Greek letters, two Cyrillic letters, and two Hebrew letters. The subsequent applause after announcing Maura Jacobson's name for puzzle #6 will delay the tournament for ten minutes. Merl will have the Sunday puzzle, and will manage to get 21 puns in a 21x21. Five contestants will break 2:00 on puzzle #1, and Trip Payne will pull a muscle trying to break 2:00 on puzzle #4.

4. Who gets the money? I think it's just reckless enough to answer: Dan Feyer, 2010 ACPT champion.

5. A talent show? Again? Not a talent show: a "variety program", just like Milton Berle used to do. Guests will include Ed Wynn, Martha Raye, and Francis Heaney, who will be so vaguely discomfited at being unable to boycott the awards banquet this year that he will write and perform a self-mocking parody of "Howl".

6. What will be the biggest surprise of the weekend? Will not announcing time/location of the next tournament, as he will be investigating taking the show on the road rather than continue to pay the extortionate fees charged by the Brooklyn site. [Who am I kidding; that will never happen. The real surprise: the hotel security team not kicking puzzlers out of the lobby at the stroke of midnight this year.]