More crosswords

[tahnan]

My sleep schedule is to schedules what military music is to music. Or perhaps, what kosher bacon is to bacon, i.e. "something else entirely."

Napped from midnight or so until 4 am, got up in need of a glass of water, failed to be tired, checked email, did the Sunday, September 29 crossword.

Good theme, yes. "Title Holders": clues like "The French Lieutenant's Woman" and "The Natural," for which you had to supply the name of the title character. However, I ended up with 13 wrong letters, my second-worst this year by a long shot, because all of these names that I didn't know (OK, I knew The Natural) were crossed with names I didn't know, like "Nicholas who directed 'The Man Who Fell to Earth'" and "'South Pacific' director Joshua" and "Author Adler". (As well as some other strange words like "Israel's Bank _____".) Disastrously bad score; over a thousands points behind my goal, and only fifty points ahead of my worst week to date. (Almost a hundred points worse than one of the weeks where I made it only halfway through the Saturday in half an hour.)

I'm not sure I'm getting any better at this. If my performance at this past year's tournament was a fluke, then it's going to be another three years before I'm eligible for one of those nice safe D awards again.

Comments

[ztbb.livejournal.com]

if it makes you feel any better, i bombed on that one too.

i dunno, maybe i just want life to be easy for me and hard for crossword constructors, but i've always felt that pop culture clues shouldn't be crossed with pop culture clues at letters that aren't determined by the remainder of either of the words.

[thedan.livejournal.com]

I, on the other hand, despite not improving all that much, am hoping for a shot at one of those "nice safe D awards."

Checking last year's results, I came in 172/401. That means the top 160 of those people will be in C division next year... also 6 of the people in slots 161-172 were in C division last year, which may or may not be true next year, depending on how many years they've been in C division.

In other words: Among the people at last year's tournament who will be in my division next year I am ranked somewhere between 6th and 12th. Not bad odds at all if you ask me. (Which you didn't.) :)

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Actually, it does help to know that it wasn't just me. It was one nice thing about doing the puzzle each night with saxikath: she was much faster than me, but at least there was someone I could look at afterwards and say, "Did some of those entries seem weak to you?"