It’s been a week full of frustrations, to be honest! I’ve had to make some changes to how I think about my career, I’ve so far failed to find an IPA-transcription app that’ll meet all my needs.
And of all the Ubercross Abecedaria releases, “N” is the one I find the most frustrating. There’s plenty of good stuff in there, but if I had it all to do over again, I might’ve just gone with a neologism theme instead of a number romp.
I’ve always been interested in special numbers. “42” as the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. “65” as the blue sapphire anniversary. “1.618” as the golden mean. Number titles like Catch-22 and 1776 and 11.22.63.
I’m not the first to try putting numbers into the crossword square spots that are normally reserved for letters. Cross-number puzzles are their own thing…
…and there’s precedent for mixing a few digits into a mostly-letter-based crossword too. Still, the Ubercross is a place to take crossword ideas and really go hog wild with them. I looked forward to making the inside of the “N” a big, beautiful canvas where numbers and letters could interact in all kinds of crazy ways.
Following a sort of “license plate logic,” I let digits substitute for both their letter counterparts… turning, say, PHONEY-BALONEY into PH1Y-BAL1Y and FANCY FOOTWORK to FANCY FOO2RK… and their phonetic counterparts, so that FINALLY WON ONE (“Broke the losing streak”) could be FINALLY11 and IN TUTUS could be IN22S. If you want to read those as FINALLY ELEVEN and IN TWENTY-TWOS, well, that’s just another meaning to play with.
Even wilder, I decided that since a simple line could represent “1” or “I” in shorthand, and the same could be said of “0” and “O,” those two pairs would be interchangeable for the purpose of this puzzle. That might’ve been one twist too many, but I needed it in order for the puzzle to shift freely between numerical and lexical answers. There are only so many answers that have both letters and numbers naturally… your 30 ROCK and APARTMENT 3-G.
This allowed me to stick in some more number trivia, since big round numbers could easily cross with O’s, as in IOOOOOOOOOSANDIOOOOOOOOOS, “Billions and billions” (“Carl Sagan-ism”). That’s not an answer I actually used, but one of the answers I did use is even more extreme. Hint: it’s 101 spaces long, and the clue is defining a homophone of the number, like “fore” for “four.”
But I have to say, a lot of the numbers that I entered turned out not to have interesting trivia associated with them. At least not trivia I could expect anybody to know. There’s an old paradox that says every natural number is an interesting number. That might be true for devoted mathematical theorists.
But to the rest of us, it turns out there are plenty of three- and four-digit numbers that are stone boring.
I’m hoping solvers will at least find clues like “67 - 8 * 9,” “900 - 139,” and “Sum of the first four cubes” to be a refreshing change of pace, a chance to flex some mental muscles that crosswords don’t normally challenge. But still, cluing this one was more of a slog than any of the others, and since this project’s way too big for me to retain test-solvers, I can only guess how it’ll play.
But oh, well. Enough brooding on that! Tomorrow: some of my favorite number things that I couldn’t include.