Word: crosswords
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...When you imagine Crossword Guy," says Jon Stewart, "you imagine he's 13 to 14 inches tall, doesn't care to go more than five minutes without his inhaler - and yet [Shortz is] a giant man. He's the Errol Flynn of crossword puzzling...
...What might give Sudoku brain cred to a veteran puzzle-solver like me? Two things. About a dozen of the book versions of the game carry the august authorship of Will Shortz, editor of the New York Times crossword, and star of the spiffy new documentary Wordplay, which opens this weekend in select cities. And among Sudoku's greatest fans is my sister-in-law, Pat Thompson Corliss...
...next Tuesday celebrates her the 45th anniversary of her wedding to my brother Paul (note to readers doing math computations: he is waaaaaay older than I am, though it's said he looks younger), was the person who introduced me some decades back to the crossword magazines put out by Dell. At the time, Dell was the gold standard in puzzle publications (as well as a leader both in mass-market paperbacks and in comic books, especially those produced by Disney). I was hooked, instantly and eternally, not so much by the crosswords as by the number and word games...
...Those of us who wasted fruitful hours filling in the blanks in all these publications determined that Number Place was a pleasant enough diversion, if not nearly so demanding or compelling as Cross Sums (aka Sum Totals), a crossword with numbers, or that sublimely torturous form of the crossword known as the Cryptic, about which more later...
...study. The results, which were published in 2003, showed that reading and playing board games or a musical instrument was associated with a decreased risk of Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia. Intriguingly, those with the strongest habits demonstrated the greatest benefits. Participants who solved crossword puzzles four days a week, for instance, had a 47% lower risk of dementia than those who do the puzzles once a week...