ribble's New Obsession

I have a new obsession: the New York Times crossword puzzle.

I've been a diligent Times reader since I was old enough to read. For years, I would ignore the puzzle because I knew my mom did it and she's always been smarter than me.

There's nothing that changes one's life like finishing a movie. Once I finished Proud Mary, I immediately went to sleep for a week, and then I started getting bored.


Now, I've seen Wordplay, but I am not one of those who ran out and bought a book of puzzles right after. Those guys made it look easy, and that just made me think crosswords looked awfully hard.

But we'd done a movie-related puzzle on set at Mary and just destroyed it, and I'm a deliberate but veteran Sudoku player, so when I blundered into the Monday crossword in the arts section I took a look. Like that first, free hit from your local dealer, I immediately got hooked.

Times crosswords get harder as the week go on, and I was very impressed with my ability to consistently make it through the Monday and Tuesday puzzles (not bad, right? Maybe Mom isn't that smart after all!) By Wednesday, of course, I'm generally worthless, and Fridays - forget about it.

I am, then a crossword amateur, and not even a very good amateur. For one thing, it takes me at least two 45-minute train rides and one long lunch to finish a Monday or Tuesday puzzle, and for another, I rarely give up.

Upshot: there is now a stack of half-solved crossword puzzles in my apartment. Also: I no longer follow the news except on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.


For awhile, the punchline of this post was going to be that after discovering my new obsession, I went out and bought a book of Monday puzzles, only to find that those were (counter-intuitively) much harder than the Monday puzzles in the paper. Luckily, my mom provided me with a much better ending.

Yes, it turns out my mom had never done the daily Times crossword at all - all this time, she has been doing the Acrostic in the Sunday New York Times Magazine.

For those unfamiliar with the Acrostic, the player is given various clues and puts the letters of their answers in to a given order to form a quotation. Or at least supposedly, because I've tried a few and it's kicked my ass every single time. So, friends and family, rest assured - my mother is still smarter than I am.