My Favorite Comic Strip*

To be honest, outside of the New Yorker, I don't encounter cartoons that much anymore. But even if I were still reading Blondie, I can say with certainty that I would like Six Things much better.

*I'm willing to bet it's not technically a comic strip and is properly called something else. Keep your eye on the comments for the correct name.

On Solving the Crossword With Someone Else

I don’t think of myself as tentative, but my crossword solving habits have led at least one person to apply that epithet to me. It’s true that using a pen makes me more careful. That’s because a cleanly filled grid with no cross-outs is infinitely more satisfying than a quickly filled grid. Pencils, and the inevitable erasures that go along with them, bring ugliness into the universe.

If I were forced at gunpoint to divide the world into two types of people, I would do it this way: there are those who solve crosswords in pencil, and those who use a pen. I suppose pencil and pen people could be allowed to work on puzzles together; however, that way madness lies. Pencil people, even when they use pens out of courtesy, approach the puzzle with a—dare I say it?—a certain recklessness. They've developed this habit because they think everything can be erased. Yes, pencils have erasers, but the mind does not.

Take, for example, this past Saturday’s Times. Once RANTER was there (“One given to diatribes”), it was hard to see the grid with fresh eyes, so that SPEWER could take its place. And it was all I could do to keep from blurting out, “No! Don’t put in ANTHER!! Sure, it may be an ‘Iris part,’ but chances are they’re not talking about flowers, they mean the one in your eye!!!” Crossword etiquette demands keeping such impulses in check. Eventually, we changed the answer to AREOLE. Those potentially right but ultimately wrong answers seared themselves into our brains, keeping the NE and SW quadrants empty for a couple of hours, until finally we rebuilt from scratch.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m the first to admit that my love of a neat, ink-filled grid is borderline OCD. I do think, though, that there is an argument to be made for keeping your options open—the mind, a tabula rasa—until certainty is achieved. I realize, too, that this line of reasoning is headed in a direction that will seem to contradict my previous statements against racing against the clock. Really, though, my complaint has less to do with speed solving and more to do with avoiding the wrong path, which equals unnecessarily lost time. If time does indeed equal money, then pen people rule.