Hey everyone, and welcome to Week 64!
This puzzle was simply the product of “Which insane line from Timothy Parker’s interview with FiveThirtyEight [here] can I make into a crossword theme”? The result is shown here.
We stand with you, Bruce Manders.
Next week should be a meta! See you all then!
Chris
Hey everyone, and welcome back to Week 63!
Thirteenth themeless puzzle of the blog, and this one contains something for everyone: 70s rock, 80s comedies, 90s cartoons, tweets, and 1650s paintings. Yes, this puzzle might be a little name heavy, but I got four full names and two full song names, so I think today is a winner.
Also, in podcast news: Will Shortz did a podcast about his experiences with the Times Insider, and friend-of-the-show Tyler Hinman did a podcast about his experiences with the Jeff Rubin Jeff Rubin Show. Both of these are worth checking out.
Also, the USC Puzzle Hunt should start accepting registration starting tomorrow! Spring break is going to be fun!!!
Thanks everyone, and I should have puzzle next week, but since I’m pretty chockfull of exams this week, I hope you’ll understand in case I don’t.
Til next time!
Chris
No puzzle this week.
I should be back next week with Themeless Thirteen.
I apologize for my state for keeping Donald Trump still as a candidate.
Feel free to scroll through some of the 62 puzzles in the Archives, and tens of them are actually good.
Til next time!
Chris
Welcome to Week 62! Happy Valentine’s Day!
Today’s puzzle is just an 11×11, but hopefully you’ll find it 26-Across!
And in case you missed it, be sure to read the X-word Files article I published last week about Tet.
Enjoy!
Chris
Wikipedia defines “crosswordese” as “the group of words frequently found in crossword puzzles but seldom found in everyday conversation”. But here at Chris Words, knowledge is power, and everyone deserves a second chance. In these interviews, we learn more about the words that make up crosswordese, and what makes them so great.
Edition #3: TET
(has appeared 280 times in the NYT, 121 in the Shortz era)
In the third edition of “The X-word Files”, we travel to Southeast Asia to learn more about Tết, or Vietnamese New Year. To learn more about this annual celebration, we talked to Tony Phan, the Marketing Director of the 35th Annual Tết Festival hosted by the UVSA (Union of Vietnamese Student Associations of Southern California), which is the largest Tết Festival in the world. Even more appropriate, the holiday itself begins on Monday! We asked Tony Phan nine questions, and here’s what he sent us:
[Editor’s note: Tony notes that these answers were a collaborative effort of past officers, directors, and staff members from UVSA. I am truly grateful for the time and effort Tony and Co. put into these answers]
1. The name “Tết” is a shortened version of the full name Tết Nguyên Đán, which translates from Vietnamese as “First Morning of the First Day,” indicating a new beginning. Would you say that Tết for Vietnamese people is more important as a new beginning that New Year’s Day is for the United States?
TP: Tết is the first day of the Lunar New Year, similarly like how January 1st is the first day of the new year in the United States. Tết is particularly important for Vietnamese people because it’s the mark of a new beginning, with the spirit of new fortunes, family get-togethers, and celebrating traditions. For Vietnamese people who are away from home, Tết is the time they when they get to come home and celebrate the holiday with family and relatives (much like Thanksgiving in the US).
In Vietnam, when talking about age, most people refer to their “tuổi ta” (“tuổi” means age and “ta” means our) which counts from the first Tết after birth. In other words, they consider themselves 1 year older, because babies start at the age of one year (instead of 0) when they are born. It was only during the 20th century that Vietnamese people began to adapt the “Western” age (“tuổi tây”; “tây” meaning western) upon migrating to Western countries.
2. Is Tết a religious holiday, or is Tết just a celebration day?
TP: Tết is national holiday for the Vietnamese. All Vietnamese celebrate Tết, regardless of their religion. In the olden days (perhaps prior to the 20th century), Tết was celebrated for an entire month. Later it was shortened to ten days, and after that, to a week. Nowadays, Tết is celebrated over the course of three days.
3. Are there customs or traditions relating to Tết that are widely seen in Vietnam, but are rarely seen in the United States, whether it involves financial reasons, American customs, or other reasons?
TP: Customs and traditions are seen more prominently in families with elders (such as grandparents above the age of 60), or people who were born and raised in Vietnam.
Among the younger generations, especially those who were born outside of Vietnam, Tết customs and traditions are seen less. One of the main reasons is that most of the time, Tết falls on a weekday. Most people have to work or go to school on the day of Tết, which thereby limits their ability to participate in Tết activities.
The Union of Vietnamese Student Associations of Southern California (UVSA) has continuously organized Tết Festival for the past 34 years in Southern California. In organizing the Tết Festival, the youth (both Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese) have the chance to learn about the Vietnamese culture, customs, and traditions; not only see how Vietnamese people celebrate Tết, but become a part of it as well.
This year, the UVSA Tết Festival falls on three days: Friday, February 12 to Sunday, February 14, 2016, at the OC Fair & Event Center in Costa Mesa, CA. Tickets, program schedules, and additional information are all available at www.tetfestival.org.
4. What are some Tết traditions that meant a lot to you growing up, whether it was a tradition often seen for most families, or just something your family did in particular? I’m told the red envelope is a popular tradition, especially for kids.
TP: Some Tết traditions seen in the household include, but are not limited to, cleaning the house prior to Tết; decorating the house with flowers; cooking traditional Tết foods such as bánh chưng (square sticky rice cake), bánh dầy (round rice cake), mứt (sweetened, dried fruits like preserves); gathering with family members to celebrate; counting down the New Year; giving New Year wishes to elders and in return, receiving lucky (new) money in red envelopes (lì xì); and paying respects to one’s ancestors.
What young people tend to remember the most about Tết traditions are wearing the traditional Vietnamese dress (áo dài) and receiving red envelopes. Practices that are less common nowadays, particularly in the US, are gambling, fireworks, and taking off work or school for many days to celebrate Tết.
5. Obviously, we can’t talk about Tết without talking about food. Bánh chưng is a popular Tết dish, made from rice, beans, and pork, all wrapped tightly in leaves in a nice square shape. What made this dish such an important meal during the Tết season?
TP: There is a history about this special dish “bánh chưng.” In short, bánh chưng originated in the Hong Banh Dynasty (prior to 258 BC) when the King’s youngest son presented the dish as an offering to his ancestors. The full-length history is available here. Bánh chưng is as essential to Tết as turkey is to Thanksgiving.
6. This year’s Tết Festival is featuring an eating contest of both a Vietnamese and crowd favorite, pho. If you were in this year’s competition, would you have any tips or tricks of how a competitor could finish first?
TP: As with any contest, you probably need a lot of practice to discover your strengths and weaknesses. This will enable you to strategize how to overcome your weaknesses and take advantage of your strengths. During competition, in which time is not on your side, you’re chewing your food just long enough to be able to swallow without choking on it. We don’t advise putting additional hot peppers. In competition, anything that slows you down should be avoided. Phở is usually served close to boiling hot, so you should make sure you taste the soup first to see how hot it is before trying to swallow the first gulp. Practice will help the competitor get used to the rhythm of breathing, eating, and swallowing at a faster rate. Practicing beforehand also helps to expand the stomach and prepare it for consuming a great amount of food in a short period of time.
7. One of the most visual displays seen at any Tết Festival, and certainly at the UVSA Tet Festival, are the Lion Dances. How much time and practice does a team put into both making and performing a Lion Dance, and how do the dances tie back into the holiday itself?
TP: Lion dances involve a lot of teamwork, because there are two people beneath each lion. The person in front carries the head and the dancer behind carries the tail. Ông Địa, who is the lions’ dance partner, typically leads the path for the lions. Some of his characteristics include having a large belly, wearing a mask over his entire head, and being a merry, comical character to keep the atmosphere festive. Aside from the dancers and Ông Địa, there’s also the instrumental team which includes drummers, and people 
playing the cymbals and gongs.
Lion dance teams practice a lot to be able to synchronize as dancers and perform stunts safely. Some teams hold practice sessions for many hours at a time, for several times a week. Usually lion dance teams do not make their own lion heads and costume, but they purchase it from costume designers or manufacturers. Most of the lion heads that Vietnamese lion dance teams wear in the US are purchased from Chinese shops or overseas, which is why they look so similar to Chinese lions.
In Vietnamese, lion dance is called “múa lân” or the unicorn dance. Lion dances are typically only seen on special occasions such as the New Year (Tết), the Mid-Autumn Festival (Tết Trung Thu), and the opening of a new business.
8. As the largest Tết Festival in both the US and around the world, the UVSA Tet Festival is certainly a wonderful way to kick in the Vietnamese new year. What are your expectations for this year’s event, regarding attendance, public awareness, and celebration?
TP: The UVSA Tet Festival is a well-known festival which has been organized by students from UVSA in collaboration with numerous youth organizations in the community. We strive to grow bigger and bigger with each passing year, therefore having the OC Fair & Event Center as our new home is an amazing transition and opportunity for us. Our goal is to make Tết Festival a region-wide event, not one that is just limited to the Vietnamese community. We’re constantly working hard to bring awareness about Tết Festival to residents all over Southern California, so we are extremely grateful for the visitors hear about our festival from all over the country and overseas.
In terms of celebration, we have more activities lined up for Tết Festival this year! Also, one of the main features of UVSA’s Tết Festival is the Cultural Village. Its theme changes every year to introduce different historical sites and cultural elements. This year’s theme is “Vietnam: 4,000 Years of Culture and Resiliency.”
9. And finally, what makes Tết a unique holiday for those who celebrate it?
TP: Tết is as monumental of a holiday to Vietnamese people as Christmas is to some… except combined with New Year’s Day, Thanksgiving, and your birthday! The fact that Tết has much to do with the coming together of family makes it the biggest holiday of all for Vietnamese people.
Extra links:
UVSA Website
Cultural Village at UVSA Tết Festival
Chris Words would like to thank Tony Phan, the 35th Annual Tet Festival, and the UVSA for answering our questions. We hope you’ve enjoyed our interview, and we hope you’ll appreciate seeing this piece of crosswordese in a future puzzle.
Chris Words will be back next week with a new puzzle.
Happy New Year!
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
What a weekend it was. Sixty-four teams of who knows how many people each all in Cambridge to solve the hardest puzzles of the year. When you think about it, it’s pretty crazy that the thing ever gets solved at all.
While I was a part of Team Luck, the writing team for this year’s Hunt, I sadly had very little to do with the writing of the puzzles. I did testsolve several of the puzzles involved, and now I’m still learning more about the puzzles that were released.
As the author and creator of the USC Puzzle Hunt, I guessed I was surprised that not more people on the writing team knows more of the answers/structure of the Hunt than they do. In order to have people “untainted” by answers, only a handful of people knew how most of the answers went. Hell, even the website was largely unseen by most of the members of Team Luck until weekend itself. But that was a huge gift.
Here is the website: http://huntception.com/ This is certainly worth your time exploring and discovering all the puzzles that were published and all of the amazing digital graphics employed to make this Hunt work. Rip van Winkle actually moves! The shower in the Pam Ewing round is actually running!
The overall theme of the Hunt is “simple” enough. What begins as a dog showed-themed Hunt (the MIT MUTTstery Hunt), turns into a Hunt where everyone is sleeping and dreaming Inceptionally. Each round involves a sleeper who must be woken with a kick. Each round’s meta was that kick, so KISS AURORA WITH GUSTO would be a kick for Sleeping Beauty, and DO COCONUT HOOFBEATS would be a kick for King Arthur. Once the rounds are solved, you solve a Limbo round, which lead to a final phrase ROUSE THE SLEEPERS NOW USE KICKS AT EXACT SAME TIME. At this point, the teams go on a final runaround, where they must use all the kicks previously learned, take pictures of them, and submit back to HQ. Eventually, the teams were led to the Alchemist, a noted statue at MIT in front of their student union, where it’s revealed that he was the one sleeping during this Hunt. The coin was found inside, and Setec Astronomy won 6:53pm Sunday evening.
This year’s coin (or token) was designed by Mark Halpin, and is certainly a beaut. The dog show runaround led to small coin earned by many teams, with the hilarious caption “Top Dog”, and the actual Hunt coin is larger, with the first one found in gold in the center.
This year’s Hunt ended at 6:53 pm, which by my notes is the fourth longest of all time (with 2013, 2009, and 2008 taking 1st, 2nd, 3rd, respectively). HQ was worried for a while, but everyone on the writing team came to the single collective thought that this Hunt’s length was fine. If this is a weekend dedicated to puzzles and puzzle solving, why should a winning team finish up in the wee hours of Sunday morning? Honestly, I like this ideology, since a winning team ought to have the grit to last to Sunday afternoon. 48 hours of intensive solving seems like the right amount of time needed to win the Hunt.
It’s definitely worth it to look at the tweets with #mysteryhunt (you may have to scroll past some unrelated stuff). Someone at MIT noted that there’s never been a hashtag that used only 3 days a year, but it used SO MANY times in that 3 days that #mysteryhunt. There was some criticism about the Hunt / HQ on Twitter during the event, but those criticisms were certainly not a part of the majority, and were the exception to the event.
Since all answer submissions to this year’s Hunt were submitted through Google Docs, we have the entire collection of everyone’s guesses. I operated the phones for most of the entire event, even having a stretch of 9pm to 6am Saturday-Sunday where essentially only Jeremy Horwitz and I were making the phone calls. My favorite answer of the entire event must have been a meta answer that was supposed to be AUSLANDER DINGOES, but the team instead submitted ASSLICKER DINGOES. Genius.
Also, check out the blogs of teammates Joseph DeVincentis and friend-of-the-show Tyler Hinman, as they recap the Hunt is several ways I didn’t in this post.
I’ll end with some more pictures, but for all of you who participated in the Hunt this year, I sincerely hope you enjoyed it, and I look forward to solving again when Setec Astronomy puts on the 2017 Mystery Hunt, which will presumably include Duck Konundrum VII.
Also, USC Puzzle Hunt will kick off March 21st, so keep your eyes on that site for more updates!
I hope to post more concept art later. It should certainly be noted that one of the letters in that last picture is not the image that was used on the final website.
Oh, and that was me in the very first picture, where I was running the Sports and Leisure event at the “Trivial Pursuits of Walter Mitty” event, where teams had to volley a ping pong ball by spelling one letter at a time the answer to a trivia question.
Thanks everyone, and I’ll see you on Sunday!
Chris
Hey all! So, there’s no new puzzle this week, since I wanted to take the week off, especially after going 6/6 through the winter break.
However, my meta from last week is still live, and you still have time to submit! Follow that link in order play along.
Instead of a puzzle, I’m posting my personal recap of the 2016 MIT Mystery Hunt. And, since I wanted to do it right, I’m taking another 24 hours. With this, I’ll be able to gather a bunch of photos for all of you to enjoy. In the meantime, be sure to check out Todd McClary’s recap as a member of the winning team.
And as an appetizer: the picture above was *part* of the shipment generously donated by Red Bull to the MIT Mystery Hunt. I’m not sure how people can drink it, but I’m to understand that a bunch of this stuff was downed over the course of the weekend by both HQ and by the various Hunt teams that was given some.
See you tomorrow!
Chris
Hey everyone, and welcome to Week 60! This puzzle is coming to you live from Cambridge, Massachusetts as Team Luck puts on the 2016 MIT Mystery Hunt. This puzzle was surprisingly completed the Tuesday before, and it’s great that I didn’t wait last second like essentially every other Chris Words puzzle. If you are at MIT this weekend, let’s try to meet up! I’ve met a few of you (some for the first, some as a wonderful reunion), but would love to see anybody else.
And, since this puzzle’s number ends with a 0 or 5, it’s time for a meta, in case you need more for this weekend.
For this twelfth meta of the blog, I’m looking for a popular British TV show. When you think you have it, email me at cking.gow(at)gmail.com with your answer. I’ll accept answers all the way to noon ET Saturday, January 29th. This is a two week puzzle, since some of you might not read this due to other puzzling reasons.
Next week will include a bunch of pictures of the Mystery Hunt, so be ready for that. And, I’ll be back at USC, and back to normalcy.
Other than that, I can’t think of anything else. Happy solving, and happy hunting. Thanks everyone, and enjoy the puzzle. Be sure to email me your answer!
Chris
Hey all, and welcome to Week 59!
About a year ago this week, I wrote a tribute meta puzzle to Casey Kasem, as he passed away in 2014. My tribute puzzle this year is dedicated to the great Ernie Banks. No meta, but a nice little theme that might be WAY out of baseball season, but a fine puzzle nonetheless. Also, this puzzle is a 13×13, a first for Chris Words.
More importantly, I’m going to be in Boston this weekend! As a member of Team Luck, I might be calling your team this weekend telling you that your answers might be right/wrong. No spoilers from me, but it’ll be a blast for all of you playing! Of course I’ll be working a lot during the event, but I’d love to meet up with anyone who’ll be on campus for the weekend.
There will be a meta puzzle next week! Grid is made, and I just have to write the clues before I get on my 7:00am Thursday morning flight.
Good luck, and happy hunting!
Chris
Chris Words 
