Word: crosswords
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...Bill Clinton says he would work on a Times crossword in those White House lunch breaks - when for a few moments, he would be disturbed by neither aides nor interns. Our last smart President found a life lesson in puzzle-solving: "Sometimes you have to go at a problem the way I go at a complicated crossword puzzle...You start with what you know the answer to and you just build on it, eventually you can unravel the whole puzzle... And I think a lot of difficult, complex problems are like that: you have to find some aspect...
...faces to revered names, the heroes of puzzleworld: constructors Payne and Reagle, Stanley Newman, Mel Rosen and Fred Piscop. (I wish I could have found '90s phenom Patrick Berry, to whom Maltby and Galli occasionally sublet their Atlantic cryptic page, and Henry Hook, the dark prince of cryptics and crossword editor of the Boston Globe...
...Solving a crossword takes brains and patience. Solving it in a few minutes, standing on a stage filling the spaces on a large board, with hundreds of people watching, demands poise, steel nerves and a killer instinct. These requirements strictly limit the number of serious competitors at the Stamford stampede. The same people tend to be finalists; in a 13-year stretch from 1988 to 2000, the top three slots were filled by only six players...
...small pool creates stars within the crossword galaxy. One of these is Ellen Ripstein, a researcher for a TV game show (could it be Jeopardy?) who, after a dozen or more years in the top five at Stamford, was profiled in a front-page Wall Street Journal story in 2001, and won the tournament that year, to chants of "El-len! El-len!" The lifelong New Yorker describes herself as "a little nerd girl," but she knows her worth. "I had a boyfriend once" - once, she says - "who would sort of try to put me down. And I would...
...Throughout the weekend tournament, Shortz bustles around, announcing the rules and the winners of each of the seven puzzles. On Saturday night there's a talent show - the search for an "American Crossword Idol" - at which Ellen demonstrates her baton-twirling expertise. Another conventioneer, Vic Fleming, sings and strums a cruciverbalist's country lament: "But if you don't come across / I'm gonna be down...