Read Anything Interesting Today?

My fifteen minutes have arrived! I'll comment more about the article later...

...It's later. So how cool is that video? I came into the studio to find three still cameras mounted at different angles. They were planning to have me solve in the actual newspaper, which looks better, but I didn't think that would work because I only use pencil -- a fortunate decision because of all the erasing I had to do. By the way, that's not me playing the public-domain music over the video. They asked if I wanted to record some of my own music to use, but I had to decline because I don't have any music.

As for the article -- a much longer piece than I was expecting -- it's remarkably well-written and accurate. I guess that's not so remarkable, because Denise Grady is one of the top writers at the Times (865 articles!). What surprised me was how much she mined out of a single hour-long lunch (sans tape recorder), a few minutes at the photo session, and a couple of short phone conversations.

I can't really quibble with any of the content, except the implication that I actually knew "the name of Gorbachev's wife (Raisa), a synonym for no-good (dadblasted), the Rangers coach in 1994 (Keenan), a platinum-group element (iridium) and the meaning of objurgation (rant)?" Yes, RAISA was a Tuesday-level gimme, I'm aware of an element called IRIDIUM, and I knew I'd heard of Mike KEENAN but couldn't pull out the name without a bunch of letters. But the others came mostly from crosses -- you'll note that I had a single empty box in the NE corner for a while, because I hadn't a clue what "objurgation" might mean! As you are no doubt aware, crossword skill isn't necessarily about knowing everything, but about making some good guesses that form legitimate answers in both directions.

One other little "correction" in the chronology of my puzzle addiction: I had bought a few NYT crossword books and solved them non-obsessively for about a year before seeing Wordplay, and it was discovering the online community (and plethora of puzzles) that kicked me into high gear. There are two demonstrable factual errors in the piece, and they're both my fault! I finished 45th at my first tournament, not "50-somethingth," as I misremembered; and the sudoku champion's prize is $10,000, not $20,000, which makes it a little harder to complain about the purse at the ACPT.

Also, I feel like I should have my musical-theater-nerd card revoked, because that answer that stumped me in a Saturday puzzle last month? I was reminded a few days ago that it's in a Sondheim lyric. "WIRE-SPOKE wheel in America!"

Finally, how's this for irony? (Seriously... does this qualify as irony? So little actually does.) This afternoon, mere minutes before an email arrived from Ms. Grady telling me the story was posted online, I received another message from the Times. It was an automated message from the billing department, notifying me that my credit-card information was out of date, and my Premium Crosswords subscription couldn't be renewed automatically.