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It’s a regrettable fact that most of my dreams have not come true. A giant snail has not messily devoured the White House while whistling Dixie. Mel Gibson has not confessed his burning desire (which cannot be hidden any longer in spite of the debilitating Catholic guilt that will result from deserting his wife and ninety children) to spend the rest of his life massaging my feet with scented oils. I have not won the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, the Powerball lottery, or the Kentucky Derby. The mermaids have not sung to me. But I’m okay with that now, because my lifelong dream of creating crossword puzzles in Scottish Gaelic has finally become a reality.
At first my bloodshot eyeballs gazed upon Crosswordz as a scarab beetle would gaze upon a steaming pile of camel dung — with greedy anticipation — and I fell upon this apparent treat without stopping to consider the intestinal health of the camel. I was beset by a maelstrom of complex emotions: pseudo-religious ecstasy; worrying that my words might not be big enough; finally admitting to myself that I don’t know Gaelic from garlic. It was a heady time, a glorious time, and nothing will ever take that memory away from us.
Crosswordz claims to be a “classroom style” crossword and word-search puzzle creator, whatever that means, and is certainly worthy of a modicum of regard from people who create word puzzles for small-town newspapers or mentally challenged children. If by some miracle you manage to figure out the clunky interface, which comes with no instructions, Crosswordz does produce a recognizable word puzzle — eventually. Maybe it’s my fault for using so many words. Maybe I should have listened more.
As partial compensation for its slowness, Crosswordz allows the user to select any color or photo as a puzzle background. What fun! Surely we can agree to be generous and ignore the minor glitches such as the way your crossword clues initially appear in zero-point type, and the button that’s scarily labeled “commit” instead of the less emotionally loaded term “add,” or those buttons that do absolutely nothing. But it seems fair that our generosity in such matters should be directly proportional to the developer’s generosity in pricing.
Pause for suspense . . .
$39?!? Why, that’s $52.62 Canadian — the exact amount you spent on Moosehead beer last week, and a surprisingly exorbitant price tag for a REALBasic puzzle maker that can’t even spell its own name right. In addition, the developer’s site claims that Crosswordz was given a software rating of four cows (out of a possible five) at Tucows.com, but a quick look at Tucows revealed that Crosswordz has no rating on that site. We are much too polite, ahem, to mention the words “BIG,” “FAT,” and “LIAR” at this delicate juncture in our review, so please draw your own hasty conclusions in the space provided below:
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Hmm, yeah. Not much of an artist, are you? It’s impossible to tell whether that’s supposed to be a toy poodle in a blender, a naked Shriner doing jumping jacks, or an overgrown zucchini being used to — okay, nothing more to see here, folks. Let’s move along.
Sol Robots, you have worked your poor little fingers to the bone to bring Gaelic word puzzles to the world, and this is all the thanks you get from us — 6.5.
Posted by naomi at June 12, 2003 07:52 PM | TrackBackFirst post!
Posted by: J. Alfred Prufrock on June 12, 2003 08:24 PMWere I the puerile type, I would be hurrying this along and posting it immediately so as to claim "first post".
Posted by: aussie boy on June 12, 2003 08:29 PMHowever, I am not that sort of person, and besides, the title was claimed five minutes ago. (Curse that gnarled and tangled pile of colonic artifacts that passes for a cache in Safari v74! This site is always at least five minutes in the past for me!)
Instead, I have removed all my clothes and set up the board for a game of nudie-style backgammon. Together with a hot cup of peppermint tea (no sugar today, Belvedere, old moggy -- I'm in a very sweet mood as it is) and a visit from Grandma (a wickedly competent exponent of nudie-style backgammon, though I suspect her main ploy is distraction -- she is very, very distracting in the nude), it is enough to lull me into a sufficiently false sense of well-being and security to ignore the world and carry on regardless.
Belvedere, perhaps you might pack my pipe with some of that wonderful Columbian tobacco! Ah, sweet oblivion!
Hang on a minute! Grandma! A tattoo? For shame! Your unbeaten record looks very solid today, old girl!
Posted by: aussie boy on June 12, 2003 08:34 PMIt's interesting to note that their four cows from Tucows are stacked at their website. Tucows scores these days are always leaning linearly. Also, they had no score as of 5/31/03. Maybe they need a link to this score. Or maybe they're big fat liars.
Posted by: Leibnitz, N. on June 12, 2003 09:45 PMBelvedere, just don't stand there licking out your master's pipe! Start the videotape equipment! Fifteen minutes of Mr. Boy, Granny, and the iguana should provide the necessary funding for Naomi's absolutely essential Convert Mel to Wicca Project...
Hell, maybe we could get Garbage to do a benefit concert for that one.
Posted by: Leibnitz,N. on June 12, 2003 09:54 PMLeibnitz, you salacious gibbon, do you think your the first to think of such a nefarious scheme? Many has been the would-be blackmailer who has tried such underhanded skulduggery. And many has been the sobbing wreck of a human being who has left Chateau Australie sobbing into their handkerchief, having been told by the unflusterable Belvedere -- stout fellow! -- that such a scheme is worthless.
Indeed, ever since Rupert Murdoch paid me a contractually undisclosable sum for the rights, Grandma and I have screened nightly on the Nude Backgammon Channel on Fox Cable, if not as participants, then at least as umpires, adjudicators or measurers. (You'll just have to watch to find out about that last one -- let's just say size can matter in the all-male strand of the competition!)
I admire your chutzpah, however, and am FedEx-ing you a bucket and a copy of the full-colour illustrated volume that was produced out of Grandma's colonoscopy, which was later turned into a three-part mini-series. Congratulations! (And trust me, you *will* need the bucket ...)
Posted by: aussie boy on June 12, 2003 11:58 PMCrosswordz makes me as chuffed as a ponderous harridan doing the fandango with a grandiloquent halibut. That sucktastic vagabond of a developer really has some moxie, if not the other kind of spunk. He will not, however, be receiving any spondulicks from me in exchange for this oligotrophic coprolite.
Posted by: Flatulent Bandicoot on June 13, 2003 01:13 AMI have a question, me. Do I need a credit card to use "Safe Place"?
No, you don't need a credit card, just some information about a credit card....aussie boy's, for example. I doubt he'll be very forthcoming with such, though. You'll have to come up with a better plan than Liebnetz's to extract it out of him.
Posted by: Robo on June 13, 2003 11:22 AMAllow me to point out that, in keeping with the general decay that seems to be associated with this site, the movies are inaccessible. www.macxtc.com is whining about time-outs or some such drivel. Is it really all so difficult? And such a pity, as movies about feet and wigs sound quite interesting.
Posted by: Mike on June 13, 2003 02:30 PMThis particular page of comments has too many posts by Aussie Boy.
Posted by: fuddes on June 13, 2003 04:32 PMBecause the management here at PvT has a strict policy of always responding promptly and courteously to all reader complaints (ha! ha! HA! you don't really believe that?) I have deleted the duplicate comment and subsequent apology from aussie boy, thus reducing the number of his posts on this page to three.
And to those who may think that's still three too many: you are pinheaded philistines who are unworthy to grovel in the presence of the Absurd. Now go ye forth and sin no more.
Posted by: naomi on June 13, 2003 05:46 PMApparently fuddes, this site now has one too many posts from you too! That makes us even, compadre. Now go forth and darken some other door, preferably at microsoft.com. They deserve you!
Posted by: aussie boy on June 13, 2003 10:52 PMLast post!
Posted by: Slowpoke on June 16, 2003 03:07 PMIt was a naked Shriner -- it's been a while since I've played Pictionary, but I'm a pinheaded philistine.
Posted by: Rob on June 16, 2003 03:49 PMSeein' that there reference to the last post reminds me of the time my best buddy Kuwalski was kilt in Viet Nam. He was bit on the dick by a viper when we wuz lined up outside the medical tent on clap parade. I done tolt him he shouldn't orta be hangin' it out like that on clap parade. He never lissent ter me, an' it kilt him. They played the Last Post at the funeral. Gave him a Purple Heart, too, which wuz kinda hironic, cuz it matched his purple dick ...
Posted by: Corporal Grabowski on June 17, 2003 10:47 PM