Puzzle: "Something Humerus" (Halloweek #1)

We're back from the dead, baby!!

Greetings from scenic South Brooklyn! It is late October, which means every car in Bay Ridge is mandated by law to have a giant skeleton popping out of it:

This jaunty fellow brings good tidings, which is not just that I’ve got a new puzzle for you to solve, but that I have five of them! One for each day of the week leading up to Halloween. One could call this most wonderful occasion “Halloweek.” (By “one” I mean me. That’s what I’m calling it.)

The first of the Halloweek puzzles is a themed crossword titled “Something Humerus.” (Appropriate, given the header image.) It’s a standard 15x15, 72-word grid, and you can solve it online here. Alternately, you can download it as a .PDF or .PUZ file¹, if that’s more your speed. If you’ve solved the puzzle but can’t quite wrap your head around the theme, a brief explanation is available here. (Spoilers, obviously.) Enjoy!

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As for me… well, it’s been a hot minute since I posted on this newsletter, hasn’t it? If you subscribed to Quite Vexing back during ACPT, I wouldn’t be surprised if you forgot it existed.² I’ve had a busy six months — I’m still doing daily crossword content for Slate, and the crossword tournament circuit has given me excuses to travel around the country. (Contra 47, San Francisco and Chicago are both lovely.) I’ll have more to say about my tournament escapades in a future post.

And I will, in fact, be posting more to Substack in the future. Before now I was posting my puzzles on a blog called QVXwordz; I’m now in the process now of porting all that puzzle content over onto my personal website, and having this newsletter serve as Blog 2.0. Lots of reasons for doing that, the big one being that a certain company in the crossword space has recently entered its villain era, and I no longer wish to involve myself with them. (More on that in — what else? — a future post.) A minor one is that the Substack CMS is just… way nicer to write in than Blogspot’s. Did you see those em dashes? Substack automatically replaces doubled hyphens with em dashes. Bitchin’! And even better, it has footnotes, which are my favorite thing in the whole wide world.³ Thank you Hamish McKenzie, very cool.

Anyway, I’ll be back with another puzzle tomorrow (and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow). If you’re not already subscribed to this newsletter, go ahead and do that so you don’t miss it. See you then!

xoxo, Q :’)

1. Since a surprisingly large number of my subscribers are Substack regulars not enmeshed within “crossworld,” I will specify that .puz is the file format for solving puzzles in apps like Across Lite (PC) or Black Ink (Mac) or Cross Your Heart (Android). Alternately, you can upload the files

2. Except for Jeanne Breen, who has patiently awaited another post on this newsletter for seven months. Jeanne, you da real MVP.

3. Letting teenage Quiara read Infinite Jest was a mistake of life-altering proportions.