Nothing Up My Sleeve

by George Barany and John Child

This Sunday-sized puzzle will, we hope, appeal to the child in you. If you spent enough hours of your youth engaged in a certain activity, you may find this pretty easy and be able to fill in each theme answer with a giggle. If you have to uncover the theme answers from crosses you will find this medium to challenging. We hope you will still giggle. After completing the puzzle (spoiler), learn more about the puzzle by clicking here for our "midrash." This puzzle first appeared in the holiday (December 2015/January 2016) issue of Natural Selections, as accessed here.

Click here (two pages) or here (one page, for those with good eyesight) to view or download the puzzle in PDF format; here to download it as a puz file; here to download it as an ipuz file [requires the free Puzzazz app to solve]; here to solve the puzzle interactively (thanks to Jim Horne); here for the solution. We thank beta testers Tim Croce, Charles Flaster, Todd Gross, Brent Hartzell, and Martin Herbach for looking at two very different grids for this puzzle and improving the fill and clues with their excellent suggestions.

If you want to tell others about this particular page, refer them to
http://tinyurl.com/sleevepuz

More puzzles here (all) and here (tributes).

E-mail barany@umn.edu to be added to a bcc distribution list.