Served in a brew pub, three letters.
Soccer legend, four letters.
Cosmetics Company, five letters.
Black and white twister, four letters.
A few months ago I watched “Wordplay”, the documentary film about crossword puzzles and Will Shortz. It’s a great movie that, like the movie about spelling bees and Scrabble players, introduces you to some of the top world crossword puzzle solvers. Will Shortz is engaging and, as the puzzle editor of the New York Times, is a puzzle maniac. He’s got a degree in puzzles, something nobody else has, and is also NPR’s puzzle master. I’ve been downloading the podcast for almost a year and it’s a nice five minute treat among the other podcasts I listen to.
At Malloy we print and bind books and not too long ago one of the publishers we serve printed a bunch of Sudoku books. I got sucked in. The Bindery Manager showed me the logic to those nine by nine puzzles and I was hooked. I’d sit for hours and listen to tv doing sudoku puzzles. I did them at breakfast. My friends and I played the Sudoku board game.
Now, my attention has turned to crosswords. My grandmother was a big crossword puzzle solver. I remember she had special crossword puzzle dictionaries and reference books. It seemed really hard to me growing up. After seeing the movie and finding out that the puzzles were easier on Monday and got harder as the week went on, I tried the Monday puzzle in the Ann Arbor News. It took me a couple of days, working on it here and there, to get it. While I was on vacation in January I bought a whole book of Easy Monday Puzzles. They are pretty easy. I can get most of the puzzle in less than an hour (still quite a long time compared to the experts) and the ones I don’t get seem to be really off the wall clues or, I just get off on the wrong track. The other day there was a clue reading AAA supply. I got it in my head that it was a triple A battery and the answer was going to be something about supplying power. Instead, the answer was maps, for the complimentary maps the Automobile Automobile Association supplies. Once I get to the end of the Monday puzzle book maybe I’ll graduate to the Tuesday puzzle. I don’t have any crossword reference books … yet.
The answers to the common easy Monday clues above? Ale. Pele. Estee. And, Oreo!