In springtime, so they say, a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of baseball. By October, when every team has played 162 regular season games, it’s time for the playoffs and for a crossword puzzle honoring the nation’s oldest major American team sport.
Since about 1400, the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem in London has served as a lunatic asylum. In local parlance, the institution is known as BEDLAM, from which we get the “Pandemonium” sense at 4 Down. Does that make it a toponym? Let’s not open that Diet of Worms again.
If you’re old enough to remember when there were television shows that everyone watched, you’ll have no trouble recalling “Laura’s 1960s sitcom hubby.” You can watch the first episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show on YouTube, but you can’t fast-forward through the ads.
Shakespeare had a way with insults, didn’t he? In the first scene of The Tempest, Prospero shouts “Thou liest, malignant thing!” at Ariel. In the very next scene, Trinculo echoes the sentiment by spitting out “Thou LIEST, most ignorant monster” at poor Caliban.
The trickiest letter today is where “Botanical angle” crosses “Dendrite’s counterpart.” In anatomy, a dentrite is “the branching process of a neuron that conducts impulses toward the cell” and an AXON is “the appendage of the neuron that transmits impulses away from the cell body.” AXIL is “the angle between the upper side of a leaf or stem and the supporting stem or branch.” Those definitions all come from Random House.
The symmetry of a baseball diamond must appeal to constructors because there have been a few similarly memorable grids. This past spring, Peter A. Collins and Joe Krozel gave us this puzzle: Across Lite, Solution, blog. In 2007, we got this crossword from Nancy Salomon and Bill Zais: Across Lite, Solution. They’re variations on the same theme but with completely different executions.