Crossword Connoisseur

You Don’t Say. . . Friday, June 6, 2014

I'm an old man now and can see that my life has been in a sense one continuous string of enthusiasms that have grabbed my attention and then held on for long periods of time.  Like crossword puzzles, for example.  I can be diverted for stretches of time by Sudokus and online Scrabble, but only crosswords absorb me so completely that time seems to stand still. 
            My mother worked them daily before me, and so I did too as a young man, never thinking while I junior-puzzled that I was becoming an addict.  I wasn't fully hooked, however, until my wife gave me The New York Times Ultimate Crossword Omnibus in 2003, the year it was published.  "Omnibus" in this context turned out to be 1001 daily puzzles, Monday through Saturday, that editor Will Shortz pulled out of the pages of the Times between 1993 and 1997.  These were the first thousand and one puzzles he edited for the Times, "the cream of the crop," he wrote in the Introduction, "of the thousands of puzzles submitted to me until then."
            Shortz tried to imagine how long it would take a person to go through them all.  He thought maybe two weeks of round-the-clock solving would do it, at about twenty minutes per puzzle--and without any breaks for eating, washing, sleeping, or going to the bathroom.  My more modest goal was one a day, which I stuck to from September 26, 2003 to August 6, 2006.  It took two years, ten months, and six days.  It was a crazy-long commitment--and by the end of it, I was indeed an addict.
            But not necessarily to the Times puzzles, even though they are still the gold standard.  The problem is that since 2006, I’ve been living in central Florida and now have just a weekend newspaper subscription—and I’m not a fan of Shortz's weekend work:  Friday and Saturday puzzles are punishingly hard, which compromises whatever wit and charm they may have been aiming for, and Sunday puzzles are bigger than I like.  Monday puzzles are too easy.  But I do like the Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday puzzles, which I usually pick up at the grocery store where I buy the Times for $2.50.  

I tried the online version, but didn’t get along as well with the keyboard as I do with a pencil—or pen.  Using a pen makes the puzzle harder because you have to be very sure before adding words to the grid.  The idea is to make the puzzle as hard as you can but still be able to solve it.  (I read once that Ben Bradlee, legendary editor of the Washington Post from 1968-1991, solved puzzles in his head!)  Every solver has a limit as to how hard the puzzle can be, and part of the fun is stretching yourself out as far as you can in pursuit of that perfect difficulty level.
            Yesterday's Thursday puzzle constructed by Ed Sessa was typically clever, spinning around the answer to 34A:  "1860's novel that is the basis for this puzzle's theme."  The answer was Little Women.  But there were no clues in the puzzle that showed exactly where to find Little Women references.  It wasn't too hard to figure out that they were buried in the four long answers.  17A asked for the "American Moses," which was Brigham Young, but there weren't enough spaces, so I knew at once that one space needed three letters.  It turned out the missing letters were AMY, which provided the pattern for the other Little Women references:  the missing letters in 10D (Shakespeare play setting:  Globe Theater) were BETH; the missing letters in 32D (Ribald humor:  dirty jokes) were JO; and the missing letters in 55A (Baby boomers, with "the":  me generation) were MEG.  And thus the little women were identified and the puzzle was solved.  It's the puzzle within a puzzle that makes all the difference.

Here's another typical Times Thursday adventure, this one by Keith Talon on July 3, 2008.  There are three clues for thirteen-letter answers, each of them with a fiendishly placed error.  20A's clue is "What this answer could use?" which turns out to be PROOFREADINNG.  The clue for 37A is "Like this answer's error," which is TYPOGRPAHICAL.  And the third clue is "This answer contains one":  MISPELLEDWORD.  Not only are the answers ingeniously difficult, they are all spelled wrong.  Brilliant fun.

Thursday puzzles in the Times (and nowadays elsewhere too) are clearly and unarguably the best of the week for me--especially when they contain a puzzle within a puzzle.  And when they do, it's no contest.  They are simply the greatest fun to solve.  Friday and Saturday puzzles are no fun at all, merely being hard for the sake of being hard—and it’s a given that any constructor and his or her editor can make any puzzle harder than anyone can solve--anyone except the Puzzle Prodigies, who walk the earth like mere mortals until crossword puzzles come out and are solved in less time than it takes most of us to sharpen our pencils.  They're a perverse bunch and the less said about them, the better.

It's the Thursday puzzle, then, that packs all the punch, provides more fun per grid than any other all week.  Take it from me, a sort of slightly above average solver--and a genuine, if self-styled, crossword connoisseur.