Cheatin' and a Challenge

My level of crossword solving, even after all these decades, is around about the Times Wednesday point. I can often finish the Thursday puzzle; once in a while the Friday puzzle yields up its answers to me; and on Saturday ... well, on Saturday, I count it a victory if I can place a correct entry or two without resorting to the dreaded google "cheat" ...

Of course, long before google was a verb, much less a website, puzzle solvers were looking for answers wherever they could find them. I know I saw my first crossword puzzle dictionary on my parents' bookshelf, and considered it a welcome find. In those days the puzzles were unabashedly replete with words only crossword solvers ever heard of, and I wasn't such an avid solver that I had any of them memorized. They could be found in the puzzle dictionary, along with all sorts of foreign words and phrases, the names of months of many calendars, gods and goddesses of bygone times, and so on.

But is "looking it up" cheating? I remember that question being asked of Will Weng, who smiled and allowed as how that all depended on the solver's own sensibilities and expectations. "It's your puzzle," he said, "and how you solve it is up to you."

Which makes perfectly good sense to me. So. People. It's Saturday. There's quite a bit in the puzzle today that I would have no way of knowing about, if not for the good offices of google. And, still, even with looking things up, I didn't manage to fill in the grid.

My puzzle googling took me to this site where I re-learned the name of the tone-blending technique that DaVinci used for his wonderful Mona Lisa. It's always good to be reminded of these things, to gaze again in awe and appreciation at this masterpiece.

I didn't need to go to the web to fill in the places for Sir Elton (John), which brought me to guess that it was probably Annette whom Disney himself chose for Mousketeering, and I even managed to think that the legendary athlete of 1975 could maybe be Pete Rose, but the landslide election winner of 1945 totally escaped my ken (the answer so was not Truman -- my excuse is that at the time I was less than a year old), and I would certainly not have thought of the UK and of Churchill (who was the landslide loser) without turning to the Web.

As for the challenge: my friend Ellen, who commented here about the Harper's Magazine cryptic crosswords, tells me she enjoys the double acrostics when they appear as the alternate puzzle in the Sunday Times, and really I should give them a try again. So I promised to give tomorrow's acrostic a go.

I will be visiting with friends tomorrow afternoon ... but I'll devote the morning to it, see how far I get, and will report back tomorrow.

Methinks the Monday Times puzzle will be all the sweeter for Sunday's anticipated struggle.