I guess this is one of the things that old people start doing to kill time, and now it's happened to me. I have always loved word puzzles and games such as Scrabble, but crosswords seemed a bit too time-consuming in my youth. I would see older folks working away at them in an office or on a bus and think, "You have a lot of time on those liver-spotted hands, don't you?" It seems that I have a lot of free time nowadays.
A few months ago, I noticed a big brouhaha in the local paper about the fact that they'd cut down from two crosswords to one. I didn't pay much attention, but the Letters to the Editor were coming fast and furious with a venom usually reserved for topics such as abortion or gun control.
Now that I have become a daily crossword puzzle lover, I wish I knew which one of the two daily puzzles they tried to eliminate, because I can now see clearly that if it was the NY Times one as opposed to the "Universal" one, I'd be threatening to cancel my subscription as well.
There is a pretty darn cool story at the end of all this about a dream I had last night involving crosswords. That's called a tease in journalism as well as tv and radio.
In regards to the Universal puzzle, there never is any difference depending on the day of the week, except Sunday’s is bigger. It's always stupid and it always involves words that you've never heard of. It's created primarily by Jewish folks, if the number of clues relating to Judaism is any hint. It is sometimes difficult to finish, but it hardly ever brings any joy to do so. There is no frivolity or creativity to it. It's as if someone set out with a bunch of blank squares and then used a dictionary or computer to find ways to fill them. There might be a sort of "theme" to it, but it's never clever. The fact that it relies on so many obscure words is the thing that makes it maddening. I won't bore you with examples, but suffice it to say that you'll wind up frustrated with a few of the guesses you've made and when you look the words up to see if you were correct, you'll say, "You have got to be kidding me. No one has ever heard of that term or heard it used in that way." I do not bother working this Universal crossword most days, and when I do it invariable winds up pissing me off. I wish I could go back and find all the details of the great Crossword War when the paper eliminated one of the puzzles for a few weeks. Surely it was this one, and I can only imagine the arguments for keeping this one and doing away with the smarter one.
The smarter puzzle, the NYTimes daily puzzle, is a thing of joy and wonder. As much as I detest that paper and the folks who own and run it, I can only sit in awe at the geniuses who compete to have their own puzzle accepted by them. I know there is one fellow who lives near me who has managed to do so more than once. Here's the way this puzzle works on a weekly basis. Monday's puzzle is easy as pie. You can finish it in 15 minutes. There will be a theme that you'd usually call "lame" but perhaps "cute." Tuesday's puzzle will be a little harder, but you should always be able to finish it in half an hour. Wednesday's is fun and sometimes takes an hour. There are times when I can't complete Wednesday's, but that's unusual. By the time you get to Thursday, it's hit or miss whether I'm able to finish it. If I can, it usually takes at least an hour. By Friday, the answers start being long multiword things that are darn near impossible to work out unless you have all day to work on it with a hit and miss approach that requires a pencil with a big eraser and is frankly more time than even I have to waste. Saturday's is not much different than Friday's. On Sunday, the puzzle is at least twice as big and twice as much fun. You can spend all Sunday morning with it and feel as if you've really accomplished something if you're able to finish it. Once you've figured out the theme of Sunday's puzzle, it's amazing how much enjoyment and sense of brotherhood you can feel by filling in long answers with a pun or play on words just because you have the same sense of humor as the person who created the puzzle.
I obey two personal rules about crosswords. I never cheat (except to check some answers I'm not sure of when I'm done) and I do them in pen.
So here's the dream I had last night. I was completing a crossword puzzle and was quite pleased with myself that I'd gotten the theme figured out early on and was able to figure out some very tough answers. The theme was the = sign which was in several answers. I managed to remember two of them clearly when I woke up, but there were others that were just as good that I couldn't remember; I'm sure of it. It's going to be hard to describe this without actually being able to draw a crossword, but I'll try. One answer across was the = sign in one square and a bunch of —> signs in the next square. The clue for that set of two squares across was "What blacks marched for in Selma." The answer was "equal rights" with the arrows being a bunch of symbols for "right" as in "right turn." In the squares above the —>s, there were six letters, and the clue was, "Plenty of these were left at Custer's place." That answer was "broken —>s" as in "broken arrows."
In another two-letter answer across, it was solved with the = sign in the first square and a crude drawing of a t-shirt in the second. The clue was, "What women suffered for," and the answer was "=t" as in "equality." Above the drawing of the t-shirt were ten squares, and the clue down was "Marlon Brando gear." The answer was "plainwhite(drawing)" as in "plain white tee."
I sincerely wish I could remember some of the other clues and answers with the = sign in them, but that's the best I could do. And I thought that was cool enough, but then I told this dream to a friend of mine who is fairly tuned into the mystic, if you know what I mean. He said, "You know last night was the Supermoon, right?" I said, "Yeah, I went out and looked at it. It was pretty nice." He said, "You know that's the equinox when the length of both day and night, as well as all sorts other things that we don't even understand are exactly equal, don't you?" And then it struck me where the theme of that whole dream and that puzzle came from. I wonder how many times Will Shortz's worker bees dream their puzzles. I will bet you it happens a lot.