Alex Eylar author page
3 puzzles by Alex Eylar
with Constructor comments
See the 7 answer words debuted by Alex Eylar.
Alex Eylar is a writer from California, born of musicians, raised with a love of Lego, failed backwards into the movie business after college, and now assembles black-and-white grids for money while chasing the Hollywood dream.
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57-Across seems like a good enough segue as any, so here's an old anti-joke about jungles.
It's high noon in the Amazon jungle, and the heat is inescapable — a sweltering, thick soup of hot air all around. The monkeys lay still on their perches, fanning themselves with palm fronds, lazily napping because it's all they have the effort to do. The jaguars search the high tree branches for a cool breeze, looking for any reprieve from the crushing humidity and suffocating heat. The alligators sit submerged in the river with just their nostrils above the surface, unwilling to let any other parts of their bodies touch the hot air. The capybaras roam the jungle floor, hunting out shady glens but finding no escape from the humidity. The jungle is, for once, quiet — the chirps, the roars, and the howls have all been silenced by the overpowering heat.
On the shore of the river, one hippo turns to another and says, "You know, I just can't get it through my head that it's Thursday."
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This puzzle was my Mount Everest. That enormous swath of whitespace in the center was the ultimate challenge — I can't even count the number of minutes I spent watching my crossword software automatically fill it in, while I ate some pasta.
That's what I didn't know about making crossword puzzles: it requires a LOT of effort and battery power for the computer to do all the work. As the ultimate cruel joke, I actually had to reach under my desk at one point and fetch the power cable, to charge my computer and prevent it from succumbing to sheer exhaustion.
Somehow, the puzzle came together (I'm not sure when; I left to play GTA for a while), and the end result is this beautiful piece of crosswording for which I obviously deserve the credit. Accolades are accepted, in both written and monetary form, thank you.
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I dedicate this puzzle to the early morning Logic 101 class I took for a course requirement, that I totally didn't fall asleep in every single week.
You're welcome, Prof. Clifford.