How plebeian! Today’s theme was about phrases people throw about to pretend they have some erudition. You know who you are! “Ab Ovo”, “Habeas Corpus” “Semper Idem” on “Terra Firma”. “Sine Qua Non”, “Alea Iacta Est”, “Ecce Signum!”. I’m impressed by the “Iacta” spelling, it’s not the usual misspelling of “Jacta”. We only have 500 [...]

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This Halloween crossword was a real treat to solve. “TS of the Trade”, “Tise”, “Jeane Kirkpat”, “Enty”, “Pretments”, “St Pat”, “Peace Ties” and “Card T” were the answers that made up the theme, which turned out to be “T or T”. The date was a dead giveaway, and the answers make sense once you realize [...]

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This crossword didn’t have much going for it. With a theme consisting of phrases whose first word ended with the morpheme ‘ck’, this crossword’s theme wasn’t as enjoyable as some of the others we’ve seen. “Hardback Edition, “Duck Decoys” and “Buick Dealership” gave us the theme of “Shuffle the Deck”. Ho hum. New words: “Spads” [...]

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Ole! Fans of “The Last Hurrah” will get this crossword’s theme almost immediately. It took me a little longer, but looking back, it seems so obvious now. The thematic answers were “Holy Guacamole”, “Peter O’ Toole” and “Filet of Sole”. All words that end in a Spanish hurrah: “Ole!”. And you thought cruciverbalism was a [...]

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The Human Stain is a diegesis of deceit and pain, lulling us into premature character judgement, only to turn the tables on us by switching perspectives and evoking sympathy for whom we reviled a few pages earlier. Philip Roth masterfully weaves in and out of the lives of his characters, furthering the story one subtly-remembered [...]

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This one was one of my fastest yet, and to be fair, it was easy once I got the theme. The thematic answers were “Grand Poobah”, “Sit Back and Relax”, “Talk is Cheap”, “Blue Whale” and “Boom Shaka Laka”. If you correctly guessed that a phrase can be formed by suffixing the first word of [...]

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What do the phrases “Siamese Twin”, “Make Mine a Double”, “The African Queen” and “The Lion King” have in common? If you guessed that the last word is a descriptor of “Bed Size”, then you’d do well in today’s crossword. That was the theme, courtesy Messrs. Whitehead and Shortz, who is the Errol Flynn of [...]

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Today’s crossword was a bit tricky, since it involved phonology, and not just orthography. The clues were “Meteor shower”, “Country Bowers” and “Farm Towers”. The trick is to pronounce shower like shō-ər and not shau̇(-ə)r, bower like bō-ər and not bau̇(-ə)r, and tower like tō-ər and not tau̇(-ə)r. In short, always like the ‘mower’ in [...]

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It seems no one has written an authentication plugin for Joomla that validates against a Netsuite database. Since I wrote exactly this a while ago, here’s my contribution back to the Joomla community. This plugin works with Joomla 1.5+ and Netsuite 2.50+. It also supports cloning of Netsuite accounts as local Joomla users. What this [...]

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This crossword had its niggling points, but was fairly doable for the most part. The theme was “Just Add Water”, which is better understood when one realizes that the theme answers were “Buffalo Wings”, “Lily Livered” and “Table Tennis”. Adding “Water” to the first word of all those answers gives us a well-known phrase starting [...]

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