There’s an article in the Times Online about an art installation going in at the Stanmore Underground station in northwest London.  The installation is part of an Art On The Underground project that is sponsoring installations in a number of stations around London.  What’s interesting about the Stanmore station is that it focuses on crossword puzzles.

Serena Korda, the artist behind the installation, chose crossword puzzles as a theme because the Stanmore station is near where code breaking computer were housed during World War II.  Solving a Times crossword puzzle in less than 12 minutes was a requirement to join the codebreakers at Bletchley Park.  The installation was also inspired by information leaflets handed out in the underground during World War II.  These leaflets featured a crossword on the back.

Along with installation, there are a number of crossword puzzles themed around Stanmore.  The installation itself provides clues for the puzzles.  The installation is called The Answer Lies at the End of the Line.  And, apparently, this is also true for any who can’t solve the puzzles.

The blog The Most Beautiful Things has a post today about the most beautiful puzzle type.  The writer concludes that the most beautiful type is the variety cryptic crssword–a cryptic crossword with an interesting twist.  This is described as the “holy grail” of puzzle types.  There are a lot of great links in the post to variety cryptic crosswords which, as the post notes, can be hard to come by.

Black Ink is a nice little app that I stumbled upon for Mac users who love crosswords.  The basic idea is that it is a unified interface for a number of free crossword puzzles available on the internet.  Black Ink will download the puzzles automatically and save them so that you can play them all in one place.  There is a cost for this app ($24.95), but you can also download a free 30 day trial version.

Found through MacApper.

Here’s a great site for crossword lovers that I found.  Ephraim’s Crossword Puzzle Pointers is a very simple page that just provides links to puzzles recently published in major peridicals.

This is just a fun little blog post that I came across about solving crosswords collaboratively with Flickr.  It’s always interesting to see the various unintended ways that web technology can be used.

My Puzzle Fix is a puzzle blog that offers a daily puzzle for your enjoyment.  Of particular interest on this site are the “Double Meaning” crossword puzzles.  These are crossword puzzles where there are two clues for each word.  Additionally, the clues are grouped by across and down but, otherwise, they are given in completely random order.  So you don’t know, at the start, which clues go with which words.

The results are up for the 31st Annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.  Tyler Hinman wins again.

Will Shortz has written a little blurb about the upcoming tournament for the New York Times.  It serves mostly as a reminder that the tournament is coming up and that it will be in Brooklyn this year.  It also mentions that there will be a screening of a film called “Wordploy,” a spoof of the 2006 documentary Wordplay.

There’s a story in the Yemen Observer about a Yemeni man who may have broken the record for the world’s largest crossword puzzle.  Abdul-Karim Qasem has created a crossword puzzle that has 320,500 squares and an 800,720 word clue book.  The puzzle took him seven years to complete and he needed to spend two days in bed after finishing it.

This story is an early favorite for strangest puzzle-related news article of the year.  (a category where there’s not much competition.)  Qasem claims that the previous record belonged to Tunisian man who had created a puzzle with 1800 squares.  This is not true.  The record setting puzzle that I know of has over 91,000 squares.  Still, Qasem’s puzzle shatters that record fairly handily.  Also, Qasem apparently used burn medication in his pens instead of ink when he was creating the puzzle.  I was unable to determine the reason from the article.

The new record has not yet been confirmed by Guiness.  Presumably when that happens, we’ll hear more about it from other international news sources.

I’ve come across another site for the crossword lover.  The site is BestCrosswords.com.  The site features daily puzzles that are either printable or playable through an online java applet.  It also features daily crosswords from guest constructors.  These puzzles tend to have a little bit more variety and are organized by popularity, difficulty, grid type (British or American), and clue type (straight or cryptic.)

The guest constructor puzzles are also playable in the java applet and really make the site worth visiting.  Currently, there are nearly a thousand of these puzzle available.  Enjoy!

Just Crosswords is another great site for crossword lovers.  It’s got about 300 free crossword puzzles on it grouped into variously themed categories.  The puzzles can be played on the site in your browser, using a web applet that’s pretty well done.  The down side is that most of the puzzle grids are not terrible dense, in that they have quite a lot of black spaces in them.  And, as with most free crossword puzzles, the difficulty level is not terribly high.

Yahoo is promoting their new search engine with a crossword puzzle. The crossword is presented in conjunction with the New York Times and was written by Will Shortz and Fred Piscop. The puzzle is incorporated into Yahoo’s search so that if you get stuck and need a clue, it’s only a click and a Yahoo search away.

It’s a small puzzle (9×9 grid) and it’s not terribly difficult. Expert cruciverbalists probably won’t need the clues. It’s worth noting here that “clues” here actually give you the answer. The real motivation is to show how effective Yahoo search is. When you click to “get a clue”, you are shown how easy it is to use Yahoo search to come up with the answer. It’s actually worth trying on some of them just to see how well it works. Also, any letters that you enter immediately come up in red, allowing the puzzle to be solved by trial and error.

The puzzle has a Hawaiian theme and if you finish the puzzle, you are given the option to enter a drawing where you can win a trip for two to Hawaii. So, there may be more to gain here than a few minutes of fun.

There’s a cute story on Boston.com about Aric Egmont who proposed to his girlfriend Jennie Bass in a Boston Globe crossword puzzle.  For any who are interested in solving the puzzle you can find it here.  A word of warning though… the article above does reveal the answer for at least one of the clues.

There’s an interesting type of “crossword” that doesn’t use a grid, but instead only has a single line of squares to be filled in.  In these puzzles, answers don’t go across and down, but rather left-to-right and right-to left.  So that in one direction, the solution provides the answers to one set of clues.  And in the other direction, you find the answers to another set of clues.

I recently found a good example of this kind of puzzle on a site dedicated to Shakespeare (and so, it has a Shakespeare theme.)  There’s also a puzzle of this kind on Trip Payne’s site.  There, it’s called Spiral #1.  It’s laid out in the form of a spiral, but the puzzle is the same concept.

I got an email from Trip Payne (whom you might remember from such films as Wordplay) this past weekend letting me know about his new site.

The site has lots of information about Trip, including a list of puzzle books that he’s written or contributed to.  It also contains a number of original puzzles.  There are currently 20 puzzles available and are all crosswords or interesting crossword variations.  And there’s a good range in the initial offerings.  There are traditional crosswords and cryptic crosswords.  There are also a number of crisscross puzzles, where all of the words for the puzzle are given and you need to figure out how they fit together in the grid.  Then there are the “variety” puzzles that include some twist.

There are promises of more puzzles to come, so this would be a good site to keep an eye on.