PDF
[No PUZ file this week]
Solution

Hey everyone, and welcome to Week 61! In the vein of several recent crossword “performance art” pieces, I have created my own. I hope that the PDF you have to actually print out will remind you of crosswords of yore, and that you enjoy those Courier fonts. The puzzle itself is not hard, but the annoyance of printing it is. Enjoy!

Anyway: Two weeks ago, Chris Words released a meta, so let’s go over that!

The puzzle was looking for a popular British TV show, and the six long answers in this puzzle were:

16A – [Singer portrayed by Laurence Fishburne in “What’s Love Got to Do with It”] = IKE TURNER

22A – [Current Boston Celtics point guard named after a legendary Detroit Pistons point guard] = ISAIAH THOMAS

30A – [Author of the 1995 book “The Best is Yet to Come: Coping with Divorce and Enjoying Life Again”] = IVANA TRUMP

42A – [Muckraker journalist who attacked the Standard Oil Company] = IDA TARBELL

48A – [Russian author of “Fathers and Sons”] = IVAN TURGANEV

60A – [Australian swimmer with 5 gold medals] = IAN THORPE

These six answers are all the first and last names of various famous people, all with the initials I.T.

Even if you aren’t caught up on your British TV program(me)s, a quick Google would hopefully point you to the Channel 4 show The IT Crowd, this puzzle’s answer.

This puzzle also served as a detox for those who had been solving metas at the MIT Mystery Hunt, so I hope this helped. And for the question many of you asked about whether this show is a good watch, absolutely. Lots of smart humor, you don’t need much British knowledge to enjoy it. Also, the three main actors in it are excellent at what they do. Plus, it’s 25 episodes, so you could knock out the whole thing on Netflix in one weekend.

Altogether, 42 readers submitted “The IT Crowd”. Congrats to those who got it! This week’s randomly selected winner was Mike Ruslander. He will join Jon Delfin, John L. Wilson, Jim Quinlan, Eric Maddy, Andy Keller, David Cole, Roger Barkan, Patricia Miga, Erik Agard, Charles Montpetit, and Steve Blais in a future section of the site. Congrats Mike!

And in super exciting news, Chris Words will be off next week, but The X-word Files is back! And how appropriate that February 8th marks the first day of Vietnamese New Year, better known as TET! I’ll be talking about the celebration with organizers of the UVSA Tet Festival, the largest Tet festival in the world, which occurs annually near Los Angeles. Be excited!

Hope to see you next week for the interview, and the week after for Puzzle #62 that’ll probably have a PUZ file.

Enjoy!

Chris