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I'm not going to talk like a pirate, but I am going to talk about wordplay. Or, rather, Wordplay, the documentary about the New York Times crossword puzzle. I watched it in hopes it would answer for me the abiding mystery of crosswords. I understand how people get addicted to solving them, although I'm not very attracted to them myself. What I couldn't understand is how you make one. The answer appears to be that you take some "theme" answers, lay them all out in the same direction in various spots in the puzzle wherever it looks good, and then come up with whatever words go in the other direction that you can, regardless of their relevance to the theme. That's a lot simpler, though more tedious, than I'd thought.
The most ingenious puzzle described in the film was the one run on election day 1996. It had the clue, "Tomorrow's headline," covering two blocks of spaces, which could be correctly answered either as CLINTON ELECTED or as BOBDOLE ELECTED, because the words crossing the first block could go either way. First space, "Black Halloween animal," CAT or BAT; sixth space, "Trumpet," BOAST or BLAST; last space, "Political initiative," NRA or ERA. Clever, clever.
Many interviews with crossword-puzzle fans ranging from Bill Clinton to the Indigo Girls. The latter say, "It's much more about the words than it is about the music," and if the "it" in this is their own work, that might explain why, despite my fondness for musicians very like them, I've somehow just never gotten into the Indigo Girls.
Much footage taken at a session of the annual US crossword puzzle tournament, which though it is a contest rather than a convention, has a lot of similarity to an SF con. A lot of slightly geeky, highly verbal people with a lonely hobby who get to be among folks of their own kind for a weekend, a lot of BNFs and neos, a lot of warm memories of the same hotel year after year, a lot of silly clothes on the theme of the conference, and even a filksong. The chorus goes, "If you don't come across I'm gonna be down," get it?
I have the personality and interest in minutiae to make a crossword puzzle person, but there is one essential thing I don't have: I lack the knack at manipulating individual letters. Although I'm faster at filling in the blanks than the average Wheel of Fortune contestant, that's still pretty pathetic by crossword puzzle standards. I'm not much good at Scrabble, I'm hopeless at constructing anagrams or palindromes (although I love to read them), and I have never been able to completely solve a full-size adult crossword puzzle in my life. I deal with words as a whole, and I'm better at knowing trivia that involve memorizing individual units of information.
The most ingenious puzzle described in the film was the one run on election day 1996. It had the clue, "Tomorrow's headline," covering two blocks of spaces, which could be correctly answered either as CLINTON ELECTED or as BOBDOLE ELECTED, because the words crossing the first block could go either way. First space, "Black Halloween animal," CAT or BAT; sixth space, "Trumpet," BOAST or BLAST; last space, "Political initiative," NRA or ERA. Clever, clever.
Many interviews with crossword-puzzle fans ranging from Bill Clinton to the Indigo Girls. The latter say, "It's much more about the words than it is about the music," and if the "it" in this is their own work, that might explain why, despite my fondness for musicians very like them, I've somehow just never gotten into the Indigo Girls.
Much footage taken at a session of the annual US crossword puzzle tournament, which though it is a contest rather than a convention, has a lot of similarity to an SF con. A lot of slightly geeky, highly verbal people with a lonely hobby who get to be among folks of their own kind for a weekend, a lot of BNFs and neos, a lot of warm memories of the same hotel year after year, a lot of silly clothes on the theme of the conference, and even a filksong. The chorus goes, "If you don't come across I'm gonna be down," get it?
I have the personality and interest in minutiae to make a crossword puzzle person, but there is one essential thing I don't have: I lack the knack at manipulating individual letters. Although I'm faster at filling in the blanks than the average Wheel of Fortune contestant, that's still pretty pathetic by crossword puzzle standards. I'm not much good at Scrabble, I'm hopeless at constructing anagrams or palindromes (although I love to read them), and I have never been able to completely solve a full-size adult crossword puzzle in my life. I deal with words as a whole, and I'm better at knowing trivia that involve memorizing individual units of information.
