The New York Times Crossword

For some, inexplicable reason, I’m addicted to the New York Times Crossword. For the past three-and-a-half years, I’ve sat down every day and found 10 minutes to attempt it. Some days I finish it, and some days I don’t. Well, for a lot of days I don’t. What’s most peculiar about my addiction is that the New York Time crossword is incredibly slanted towards, well, Americans. There’s copious questions about baseball players, college football teams, rivers in sparsely-populated states and US daytime soap operas. So why the hell do I subject myself to it?

There’s a couple of reasons, I guess. The first is the reason that I suspect most people attempt crosswords: bragging rights. Well, not directly bragging rights, I suppose, but the ability to stretch oneself mentally sufficiently to finish a crossword is a most enjoyable feeling that can manifest itself in myriad ways, the least of which isn’t adding a little pep to your step. Many a times I’ve walked, nay swaggered, down the street, having polished off the Wednesday crossword in 10 minutes, looking incredulously at people who don’t seem to realise that they’re in the presence of crossword genius. The poor fools. I offer them the hem of my garment to touch and they don’t even know.

I suspect that feeling of awesomeness at completing the New York Times crossword doesn’t have the same impact in the suburbs of Leeds as it does on a commuter train out of Manhattan of an evening, or of finishing the (London) Times cryptic on the overground to leafy Surrey at home time. No matter, the New York Times have us covered. The iPhone app with which one can solve the crossword is Game Center enabled, meaning I can compare the size of my wang, sorry, my time for the day with all manner of people around the world. Unfortunately, this isn’t as satisfying as I’d have hoped for. It would appear there’s nefarious work afoot with the iPhone app – suspiciously low times (3 minutes for the Sunday puzzle that took me over an hour? Come on…) imply someone solving on paper and merely entering the answers in to the online version for kudos. The cads.

So I guess I don’t get bragging rights, then. So I guess the real reason I do the New York Times crossword is that’s it’s a thing of beauty. Yup, I said it – it’s beautiful. Whilst each puzzle is generally designed by a different person, the puzzle editor is Will Shortz, who ensures that each puzzle, whilst wildly different, keeps to the high standard of its forebears. Most of the time, the puzzle is an engineering miracle. Most crossword puzzles require you to know every answer in order to complete the grid; not so with the NYT puzzle. The grid is laid out such that each answer can be revealed by simply knowing a number of answers in the opposite orientation that cross it. It’s in this layout, and the skill required to pitch the level of difficulty of these crossing clues, that the genius lies.

Add on to that the usual panoply of crossword tricks (themes, pangrams, rebuses (man, I hate rebuses), word ladders etc.) and the NYT crossword is remarkable. The difficulty level of the puzzle increases as the week progresses: Monday’s is a gimme, 7 minutes tops. Thursday is just about the limit of my solving ability, and I usual have to cheat only a little to finish that. Friday and Saturday puzzles are ridiculous. I’m constantly in awe of the crossword puzzle sites (yes, there are websites devoted to solving the NYT crossword, with my favourite being Rex Parker) that manage to post sub-10 minute times on Fridays and Saturdays. I’m lucky if I manage a handful of answers. Sunday is the doozy. Sunday is a substantially larger grid, and is comparable in difficulty to a hard Wednesday. It’s usually heavily themed, and the finesse of the theme (and it’s familiarity to me) usually dictates whether I’m going to solve the Sunday puzzle. It usually takes me slightly more than an hour, and finishing it is always exciting as it sets me up for a potential 5 puzzle streak, if I can successfully complete and submit the Monday-to-Thursday puzzles. A 5 puzzle streak week is a good week in my books.

So that’s my confession. I’m a tragic New York Times Crossword geek, who now knows the following:

• Mel OTT was a famous New York Giants baseballer.
• EMIL Jannings was the first Best Actor Oscar winner.
• The ESPYS are an ESPN award ceremony.
• An OLIO is a mix of things.
• NABISCO make Oreo cookies.