Tuesday Crosswords, More Music, and a ?  

More fun with crosswords:

Tuesday's NY Sun was awesome: the theme was related to King Arthur, and as you can see from the photo, the grid was arranged so that the black spaces show 'the sword in the stone'. Merlin, Arthur, Pendragon, and Excalibur are all theme answers. It was actually tough for me to finish, taking about 12 minutes.

I also had some trouble with the Times, although 11 minutes is about par for my Tuesday course. 'Sopranos' theme today, although I thought the theme answers were a bit ham-handed: 'Fuhgedaboutit' is really tough to spell; 'You talkin' to me?' is from "Taxi Driver"; and 'Mob Scene' is kind of a poor play on words. Bit of trouble with the NE; I thought the Army barber clue would be Crew Cut, not 'Buzz Cut', which made EZ Pass nearly impossible, blah blah. Whoops. Also, huge rookie mistake in the Casablanca reference: Rick's love is 'Ilsa', not Elsa. Dammit.

Well, I was determined to make these crossword entries more fun by including thematic music. Since "1975 Pink Floyd album" was really easy for me but I don't have my CD with me in Phoenix, here's a cut off "Meddle" that I really enjoy: One Of These Days. The title comes from the growled lyric before the song takes off; "One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces." Yikes.

Finally, does anyone else do these things? I haven't really found any other free daily puzzles that are worth my time. The L.A. Times website offers the last 30 days free, so I'm going to look into that, but the Chicago Trib and all the D.C. papers gate their puzzles. If anyone tells me about a good free puzzle, or hooks me up with a password, I'd be happy to share my NYT username and pw. You'd have access to 100 free archived articles, all the TimesSelect content including columnists and gated blogs, etc., along with ALL past and present crosswords. Comments are open.