Spoiler Sunday: The Side Pockets

One extra "bar" twist, just to be baroque.

In a traditional American-style crossword, words are set apart from each other by solid black squares. In a bar crossword, words are set apart from each other by thin bars. This can be a bit more confusing to read but allows more words to fit into the same amount of space. While black squares block words in two directions, each bar blocks them in only one.

I knew that using bars instead of blocks was something I could do, but using them for most of the puzzle seemed like it’d add even more work without much reward. But as a nod to this alternate form of puzzlemaking, the two “holes” in the B section’s capital B do contain bars instead of blocks.

And they have their little sub-theme, as well. The larger B contains bar jokes like “An interior designer, a gardener, an activist, a writer, a flight attendant, a party planner, and my mother walk into a bar…” and “The past, present, and future walk into a bar…” (I edited the first one as a bit of a tribute to one very special subscriber to this feed. Hi, Mom!) The smaller B contains puns on the traditional bar-joke format, as in “Some people walk into a ___, and leave with grilled food sticking to their ribs,” and “A group of distracted people walk into ___ bars, making a gymnast fall over.”

Hopefully, this all adds up to a lot of good clean fun…and slightly dirty fun: this is the bar scene, after all. Though there was one entry that felt a little too grimy for me after a while. I’ll get into that tomorrow, as well as one other little correction I’ve got to make…and some overdue thank-yous.