Crossing Words at Harvard
A couple weekends ago, I rode my bike down the street to the 2010 Boston Crossword Puzzle Tournament. This was my first xword tournament, and there’s a good chance that it won’t be my last. A bit of background:
For my whole life, I’ve hung out in the school library during school free time. In lower school, I read anything I could find. In middle school, I played Counter-Strike and Worms Armageddon (easily two of the most fun computer games I’ve ever played). In my later high school years, my friends and I discovered the daily NYT crossword puzzles and started solving them pretty consistently. Before long, we were making our way through Thursdays and Sundays. (AERIE and OLEO will only take you so far… past Thursday, you need to have a pretty firm grasp on your European rivers and African quadrupeds.)
I never seriously took the plunge into the wild world of crosswords (like one of my high school friends did), but I’ve been doing them on and off for the last few years. So when I heard that there was going to be a crossword puzzle tournament down the street, I headed down to check it out.
There were tables set up outside the lecture hall where the tournament was taking place. I didn’t register to compete, but I stopped to chat with the people sitting there for a minute before wandering inside. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a mustached man walking around. Could it be? No… yes! Will Shortz! The man, the legend, the editor of the NYT crossword puzzle, star of Wordplay, name at the top of every NYT puzzle, and all-around cool guy.
Amazing.
I could have gone home happy at this point, but I decided to stick around and solve some puzzles. There were four puzzles to be solved: a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday that would be appearing in the Times in the coming weeks. I’m operating at a pretty consistent Thursday level these days, and sure enough, I blazed through the first three without much difficulty. I certainly wasn’t the fastest person in the room, but I’m pretty sure I solved them correctly and there was always time on the clock at the end.
I didn’t quite finish the Thursday puzzle, but it was easily the most interesting one of the day. It was co-constructed by a Harvard student and Brendan Emmett Quigley, a local Boston cruciverbalist who writes some seriously cool puzzles. I didn’t quite figure out the theme for this one, but it hit me after the fact and was quite cool: names and phrases that, said with a Boston accent, turn into different names and phrases that were clued appropriately. 17A: “Areas in northern forests?” changed “Tiger Woods” into “Taiga Woods”, 35A: “Time when laboratories came into vogue?” turned “experimental error” into “experimental era,” etc. BEQ was one of the judges at the tournament, too, so it was neat to put a face to a name.
I’m not sure what the California puzzle scene looks like, but there was something neat about being surrounded by so many people so enthralled by the strange, interesting world of crosswords. Good times.