Meanwhile, it’s a very odd Tuesday puzzle, with 39A: What you might do after some financial training … or in this puzzle? (CORNERTHEMARKET) acting as our revealer. I’ve often complained about circles or shaded squares in the grid, because it makes obvious what might otherwise be fun to figure out. But in today’s puzzle, I don’t think I could possibly have figured this one out. In each corner, the letters that make up “the market” are jumbled in a 3x3 square.
It’s impressive that the letters are never the same in any direction from one corner to another. That’s some combination mathematics at work. Actually, I have no idea if that’s a correct application of the science. I suspect it could be done with an algorithm of some sort. Of course, what you get are things like SHAK (an abbreviation I think we can agree is not likely to catch on), ETH, awkward partial ARED, and Bible celebrity HAMAN (the source of hamantaschen cookies, a Purim favorite).
We could all do without PAYPAL or SPRINT raiding our wallets, and I’m no huge fan of Game of Thrones, so WESTEROS doesn’t make me light up with joy. But I do like SERAPHIM, a great word, and ROSIN and DMINOR are pleasant reminders of music.
An odd bird, today, perhaps more suited to Wednesday.
- Colum
I didn't mind this one. Agreed that SHAK was kinda SHAKy. Always nice to see an appearance by my guilty pleasure GREASE.. :) 3:32 when the dust settled...
ReplyDeleteI think of SHAK (often punctuated as "Shak.") as kind of old fashioned. Like you know there are only a few authors in the canon so you might as well abbreviate them. Whereas now some quote you see could just as easily be from WESTEROS.
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