WHAT CONDITION MY CONDITION IS IN

Forgive me Father for I have sinned, it has been nearly four months since my last post. Jesus, on how many levels can a nice Jewish boy like myself blaspheme!

I continue to lurk and occasionally post on several different crossword blogs, particularly on Rex Parker's, if and when the spirit moves me, mixing pieces of my life when they intersect with things that are related to the puzzle at hand. I couldn' t resist when Minot North Dakota reared its head one day last week and a Commenter posted that his grandfather was a rabbi in that community in the 1910s and he couldn't imagine a Jewish enclave in that part of the world.

Well, it just so happens that I have first hand knowledge on that subject as that was where my family was stationed after we returned to the United States after spending five years in Japan as part of the US Occupation Forces. My father was a career military man in the Air Force and we were one of the first families to accompany a serviceman to the Orient in the 1950s.

My father went over first and that left my mother, a 27 year old mother of three sons, ages 7 (me), 5 and 2 to get our household goods packed up, shipped to Japan, and to drive from Dover Delaware to Seattle Washington to meet the USS Gaffey, a refurbished troop ship, and sail away with her three children to meet her husband in Yokohama Japan. All this in the pre-Interstate days in a 1952 Mercury. Not bad for a country girl from Easton Maryland!

After our tour of duty ended in 1958, the emphasis in the world had shifted from containing the Japanese to confronting the Russians. Since my father's area of expertise was aircraft maintenance, sending him to where the airplanes were made a lot of sense. Minot (the natives pronounced it MY-nut) Air Force Base was part of the nuclear umbrella that protected the United States. My family had spent the majority of our time on the East Coast which meant we were surrounded by Jews. We believed that being in the Upper Midwest would leave us cut-off from our people.

We were right and wrong. The Jewish community was sparse, true, but, we found out, close-knit. We joined Temple Beth Israel in nearby Eastwood Park and found people who were just like us - far from home and disconnected. The natives were sympathetic to our plight and friendly.

This post was prompted by a random comment posted on RexParker's blog that sparked a memory.

Go figure.

FAREWELL LINDA G

To the crossworld, Linda G wrote about the New York Times crossword puzzle every day in her blog Madness ... Crossword and Otherwise and, incidentally, about her family and her job. Or was it the other way around. We learned this week that she will no longer be able to continue her blog. She had gone into hiatus earlier this year and came back just a little shaky because job and family were more important to her than writing about crossword puzzles but that she would try to keep all three balls in the air at once. She apparantly lost that battle.

She used a photo of Ava Gardner as her avatar and, since I never met her, that is how I pictured her. A celebrity photo has never been put to better use.

I solve the Times puzzle every night before I go to bed and my first stop to check my answers was her blog. She was not one of those Super Solvers who blew through the puzzle in less than 5 minutes. As a matter of fact, I have no idea how long it took her to complete the puzzle - she never said. I learned the expression " I declare this puzzle solved" when she reached the end of the line and could not finish. This didn't happen often but enough to humanize her. I shamelessly appropriated the expression for myself .

I was introduced to some other blogs through her site, most particularly Robert Loy's Green Genius where he wrote about his family and country music, Anna Southward's A View from my Window where she presented her poetry and graphics (N.B.: A Crossword Pantheon Moment this blog) and Wendy's I estivate, therefore I am a blog about the music of the Boomer Generation and my youth.

So Goodbye Linda. I hardly knew ye. And every time I see Ava Gardner, I will think fondly of you.

A CROSSWORLD PANTHEON MOMENT

We in the crossworld are Word people. We like the look of them, the feel of them, the way they roll off our tongues. They are old friends.

Certain words tend to re-occur frequently in puzzles and are known to the community of solvers as "crosswordese." They are usually 3 to 5 letters long and have more vowels than consonants which are helpful to those who actually construct puzzles.

Anna Southward has constructed a graphic that deliciously displays these words in a beautiful variation of a traditional crossword puzzle grid. Some of these like ABIE, ESAI, ENO and EERO are proper names unfamiliar to most people. And others like ASIA, EEL and TIARA are familiar to everyone.

Depending on how many of them show up in an individual puzzle, what they all have in common is the way they bring a fleeting smile or, perhaps, a grimace to the faces of those among us who work a lot of puzzles.

Anna's website is called "The View From My Window" and features not only graphics but poetry that illustrate the graphics. There is something about the interplay between the two, particularly in a haunted pair entitled "LIPS."

It is a wonderful place to visit and I have done so many times. She describes her site as "random musings in words, pictures, and color. Just for fun." I am hoping the site will be updated soon as I am looking forward to seeing which direction her work is going to take.

Here is the link for you to visit for yourself. Enjoy

CROSSWORDS REVISITED

Well, I am part of a community now. I am a regular contributor to Rex Parker's blog on the subject of crossword puzzles . As a result, the number of rules that I had no longer exist.

Granted, I still use my trusty Cross pen. But the varying difficulty of the puzzles throughout the week obviate the need for some of the other rules. I am not as strict as I once was on where I start. The difficulty of the Friday and Saturday puzzles forced me to try to find a toehold anyplace within the body of the puzzle. I still use my trusty Cross pen for Sundays when I still do it in the newspaper.

Tradition, don't you know.

I like the idea of being able to discuss puzzles with others. We are all language mavens to some extent or another. I like being part of this community which is mostly about language itself and reading the comments of other solvers is truly a wonderful thing.

The tangents we go off on!

During this past week there was a discussion on the need for a new word to describe what I like to call meta-cluing, that is a clue that points to the language of the clue itself rather than what the clue describes. Recently we had a clue which was BIT OF COCOA? and the answer was SILENT A, which is an example of this kind of cluing.

So, come on over if you have an urge to participate - or just lurk around the edges - of a spirited discussion of our native tongue!

CROSSWORD PUZZLES

I like to do crossword puzzles. No, I LOVE to do crossword puzzles. I started doing the daily puzzle in the Washington Post when I was about 10 years old and was absolutely thrilled when I first finished one. I graduated to the New York Times Sunday puzzle about 10 years later.

Crosswords are the most idiosyncratic of pursuits because of their solitary nature. Over the years I have developed "rules" for solving: I do them in pen, my trusty gold Cross pen my father gave me for my high school graduation. I must start at the very top or I don't start at all. I do not go below the lowest point I have reached in the puzzle. I do not look up answers.

In the last 15 years I have totally completed the NYT Sunday puzzle all but a handful of times.

My personal best time is 41 minutes for the Sunday puzzle and 3:45 for a daily one.

More about Puzzles at another time.