Most of the “X walks into a bar” jokes in Ubercross B are borrowed from somewhere. As I’m not much of a drinker myself, I figured they’d be more authentic that way. But after reproducing the joke at B699-Across almost verbatim from some internet source, I started to squirm a bit about its cartoonishly drunk Irishmen.
I’ve known Irish folks who are happy to own this trope, and I know there’s no way to win at social awareness—you’re always too “aware” for some, not aware enough for others. Still, it didn’t feel right, not for me. So I changed it and re-uploaded it. (To be fair, there’s still a faint whiff of Irishness in the answer, but it’s within my comfort zone in a way the original clue was not.)
I’m perhaps a little more conscious of the eyes on me, now that the Ubercross Abecedaria has gotten shout-outs (shouts-out?) from people I admire like Dan Feyer (the winningest champion of the ACPT) and Daily Crossword Links.
I do have to offer a slight correction to them both, though (belated, in Dan’s case): the Ubercross Abecedaria is set to be 25 grids, not 26. As the narrowest sans-serif letters, “I” and “J” will share a room. I did it like this for the sake of the mega-grid: it’s a lot easier to coordinate a 5x5 grid of puzzles than a 13x2 one. So puzzle IJ will be the ninth release, and K will be the tenth.
I hope you all aren’t too disappointed in me for this obvious slacking off on the job. In fact, I so hate the idea of disappointing anyone that I may just throw in a 26th grid after all…sort of a hidden bonus track. Possibly a stretch goal, if we hit the crowdfunding stage. But we’ll see how far ahead I am by then, and how many dumb mistakes I can avoid. (I’ve got some real doozies to tell you about when we get to D and E…)
Apologies for the faulty assumption! I did wonder about the geometry of it all. Trust me, nobody will consider you a slacker, even if the release schedule should slow down at some point. It's not like we can keep up with solving them...