Arthur O’Dwyer

Over the weekend I was introduced to a Looney Labs pyramid game called “Color Wheel.”

From the preface to Edward Cook’s More Literary Recreations (1919), page xiii: In [my previous book’s] chapter about “The Second Thoughts of Poets” … I fathered on Babbage a delightful emendation of two lines in Tennyson’s “Vision of Sin,” which I now res…

The following snippet doesn’t compile: struct A { static constexpr size_t size() { return 42; } int data_[size()]; }; The problem is that the size (and therefore the type) of data member data_ can’t be computed until we know the value of size(); but…

Over on the (inexplicably login-walled) site “NewEnigma,” Keith Austin writes: Draw a 4-by-4 grid.

Randall Rothenberg in the New York Times (1988-08-10) writes that although “Puzzle Makers Exchange Cross Words” about the fall of ERNE and ESNE and the rise of XEROX and PEACE PLAN, one Robert Guilbert Sr. was ignorant of the dispute two years ago when he…

In “Varaldo’s Shahrazad and Chiti’s Centunesimo Canto” (2025-08-11) I mentioned the existence of a lipogrammatic translation of Canto I of Dante’s Inferno performed by one Kinton Ford (a pseudonym, as far as I know) for Rick Whitaker’s now-defunct literary

From “Topics of the Times,” New York Times of 1924-11-17: The amount and quality of intelligence utilized in the working out of cross-word puzzles almost precisely equal those that were revealed some years ago when an amazing — and discouraging — army of…

I just finished reading Natan Last’s 2025 book Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle.

C++11 introduced std::function as a type-erased callable-object holder. function was badly designed in a few ways: Its rarely used “go fish” API bloats every user; it advertises operator() const even when the controlled object’s operator() is mutating; it…

Previously on this blog: “The Book of St Albans (1486)” (2026-05-22), in which I made a table of terms of venery, a.k.a. company terms, e.g.