Flagging Down the Double Es

Newsday Puzzle 4-28-14

Good morning! It just doesn't want to warm up here in NY. I am usually without a jacket by this time of the year.

We start off with Gail Grabowski's usual Monday puzzle called "Solved with Es." All the answers contain two words "ee." For a bit of nostalgia, Double E locomotives were once the largest trains on American railroads. Double E also refers to an extremely wide shoe size. I believe that it was also a line on the NYC subway. Many of the lines used to have double letters, but it was extremely confusing. The MTA has since narrowed them down to single letters. Here are the theme answers:

20A: St. Patrick's Day bar serving (GREEN BEER). Hmmm. Haven't had a chance to try this and probably never will.

Beech Tree

50A: Hardwood source (BEECH TREE)

10D: Sever cold snap (DEEP FREEZE): The winter of 2014. 'Nuff said.

27D: First Amendment right (FREE SPEECH)

Alphabet Soup: 

37A: Point opposite WNW (ESE)
38A: Numbered rd. (RTE)
53D: Suffix for kitchen or luncheon (ETTE)
55D: Sailor's help (SOS)

Yehuda Bauer

Today's cryptoquote is by the Czech-born historian and scholar Yehuda Bauer (b. 1926):

Thou shall not be a perpetrator, thou shall not be a victim, and thou shall never, but never be a bystander. 

Yehuda Bauer is the professor of Holocaust studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His words are inscribed at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. This is probably the most intense place I have ever visited. You would think that current world leaders would learn from the Holocaust, but similar events are happening in the Ukraine, where Jews are required to register their religion and occupation. 

Enough about politics and onto the JUMBLE. The picture shows workmen installing a solar roof that a couple just purchased. The caption reads: "They installed solar panels on their house because it was a ______.

Word list: 


VINEG = GIVEN
CHUNB = BUNCH
RUYNIJ = INJURY
SAJDUT = ADJUST

Scrambled solution = GIEBHIRADT
Solution = BRIGHT IDEA

Tribeca Film Festival ended with a bang. The movie we saw on Saturday, "When the Garden Was Eden," was about the Knicks championship teams of the early '70s--Bill Bradley, Walt ("Clyde") Frazier, Phil Jackson, Dave DeBusschere, Earl ("The Pearl") Monroe, Cazzie Russell, Dick Barnett, and Willis Reed. What I didn't know was that back in the 1960s, many of the NBA players had real jobs. Basketball was their second income. Quite a contrast from today's overpaid, underutilized players who sit out on the bench for a splinter.

Yesterday, we saw four wonderful shorts: "My Depression," is an animated movie about Elizabeth Swados' struggle with this mental disorder. In "70 Hester Street," the filmmaker recalls the loft on the Lower East Side where he grew up. His parents bought it for $6,000; the selling price was $3 million! Once a synagogue, it will now become a cafe called Nibbles, along with a gallery upstairs. In "One Year Lease," a gay couple made a film around voice-mail messages left by their former landlord. It was hilarious and won the prize for best short. Finally, Chelsea Clinton was the executive producer for the film "Of Many," which chronicles the friendship between Rabbi Yehuda Sarna and Imam Khalid Latif, spiritual leaders at NYU.

My goal is to open my Etsy shop--called Gold Star Puzzles--by June 1st. I will be offering custom, printable puzzles for all occasions from word searches to matching games to crosswords. There will probably be some changes to this blog as well. Stay tuned!

Till tomorrow. . . .

Signing off,
The Puzzlechick