What beautiful close-up pictures, Stan! I, too, work on the NY Times crossword every Sunday - I haven't done much on it today, because I've been busy with other things, but I really enjoy it. I can't tell how big the cocoon of the parasitic wasp is, but if it's real tiny, it may be the same !%#!%* insect that parasitizes red admiral cats. I think KC let one live and got a picture of the wasp, which is, not surprisingly, very tiny. I'm presently raising two red admirals from eggs, and both of them are continuing to grow and thrive, so I guess the wasp gets into the nest and injects its egg into the tiny caterpillar - they apparently do this early on, so yours were undoubtedly parasitized when you got them. It's interesting that your butterfly didn't have the white spot in the orange field on top and the pink on the underside. I vaguely remember a poster from Wisconsin saying once that not all American ladies had the white dot - all mine have it, so maybe it's a northern characteristic? I agree that American ladies have some of the most beautiful colors and underside patterns of any butterfly - how many butterflies do we have with pink? And I, too, call them "she" - they are ladies, aren't they? :) Sherry

Very interesting about syndication. Thanks. My friend is a syndicated political cartoonist; his work appears immediately...for obvious reasons. Hub and I didn't realize the syndicated NYT puzzle was a week behind. No, I didn't see Wordplay. Maybe I'll look for it. I love crossword puzzles and am pretty good. But my mother, and her father, well, they had a standing challenge to beat each other every Thursday on the diagramless puzzle that appeared in the old Chicago Daily News. First one to call the other won! After a couple hours, mom worried every time the phone rang - "Please, don't let it be Pop!" she say. My mom is now 86 and has severe short-term memory disorder so she can no longer live alone, or remember any thing that occurred in the past six years, but she can still do a diagramless puzzle. She confounds her doctors. Anyway, I digress. This was fun and helpful. Thanks, everyone. Oh, and I've completed today's puzzle. Ta Da! Sherry

I enjoy the Herald Tribune, Crossword Puzzles Only, "challenging puzzles" crossword books. I used to buy them from the magazine and newspaper shop because they were the only ones to carry them regularly. But often the books sold out, so I would have to hunt them down all over town sometimes to no avail. Finally I opted for a subscription to the book - expensive at $41 a year. I get one appx. every other month. However, I mostly enjoy doing the larger puzzles of 127 and up clues in back so I do those and leave all the smaller puzzles in the front of the book thinking I'll get to those someday. Well, now I have a stack of crossword books that will last me a long time to come. It was just more convenient to subscribe.

I'm an avid crossword puzzler - so yes, I know they get harder as the week goes on. Our local paper saves the hardest crossword for Sunday. I do the crossword every day and set aside the Sunday one (and the NYT one, if I happen to come across one) to work on at my leisure - sometimes it takes me a few days to finish...but I usually do. Don't let the harder ones intimidate you - the more you work on them the more you will pick up on the clues that get used often - which often helps with the longer answers. Also, I had some guy comment the other day that I was "confident" for using a pen to do the crossword. Yes, maybe - but the truth is I cannot stand to use a pencil on newspaper. And like @Bookwoman I just write over any mistakes. I haven't seen/heard of Spelling Bee...I will have to look into that.