INT. CASTING OFFICE HALLWAY - DAY
A line of nervous actors snakes down a fluorescent-lit hallway. At the line’s end, JOEY stands holding a script, running lines under his breath. Behind him, KRAMER slides into place, scanning the room like he owns it.

KRAMER
Whatcha in for?

JOEY
Excuse me?

KRAMER
The part. What’s the part?

JOEY
Oh. Uh, doctor. Guy comes in with bad news, cries a little. Emotional stuff.

KRAMER
(nodding slowly, like he’s diagnosing something)
Mm. Mm-hm. You cryin’ with your eyes, or with your whole face?

JOEY
Face. Look, no offense, but I know how to—

KRAMER
You’re holding the pages like they’re gonna bite you.

JOEY
I’m not holding them like anything, I’m just—

KRAMER
You’re gripping. See, that’s your problem. Gripping.

Joey looks at the script. He IS gripping it.

JOEY
So I should…not hold it?

KRAMER
No, no, you hold it. But like you don’t need it. Like it’s a suggestion. You know your lines, right?

JOEY
Yeah.

KRAMER
Then it’s not a script, buddy. It’s a prop.

Joey pauses. Looks at the script. Loosens his grip.

JOEY
Huh.

KRAMER
(leaning against the wall, arms crossed)
People walk in here sweating, hot to prove themselves. Big mistake. You don’t prove. You...arrive. You know your value. Let them discover it.

JOEY
What’re you here for?

KRAMER
(vague handwave)
Some Internet thing. Piqued my curiosity.

Joey nods, impressed. The line shuffles forward. Joey relaxes, emulating Kramer’s posture.

JOEY
Nice to meet you. I’m Joey. Joey Tribbiani.

He offers his hand. Kramer shakes it.

KRAMER
Kramer. Cosmo Kramer. But what you should ask later, Joey, is…was I even here at all? Or was I…
(points to himself)
…the voice you had inside you…
(points to Joey)
all along?

JOEY
What?

A CASTING ASSISTANT pokes her head out.

CASTING ASSISTANT
Anyone here for SpiderSpeeder.com?

Kramer steps forward.

KRAMER
That’s me. Go get ‘em, pal. Don’t prove!

He disappears through the door. Joey stares after him, then at the script in his loosened grip.

JOEY
(to himself)
Arrive.

INT. YANKEES OFFICES - CONFERENCE ROOM - DAY

CHANDLER stands near a conference table in an uncomfortable-looking suit, a slide of dense spreadsheet data projected behind him, clutching a laser pointer. GEORGE STEINBRENNER sits at the far end of the table, back to us.

CHANDLER
We call this the WENUS. Weekly Estimated Net Usage Statistics. It’s an acronym. Corporate loves acronyms. Keeps meetings shorter and dignity lower.

STEINBRENNER
Is this gonna take long? I’ve got a lunch.

CHANDLER
Well, this next slide is…

He clicks to the next slide. It is somehow even denser. Chandler stares like he’s never seen it before.

CHANDLER (CONT’D)
…the…crux of it. You’ll notice the trendline here dips, correlating strongly with…external factors.

STEINBRENNER
External factors! I like that. That’s good. That’s a real “not my fault” kind of phrase.

CHANDLER
(nervous laugh)
Well, I…

STEINBRENNER
You know who understands external factors? My kid’s ex-wife’s lawyer. Guy could explain away a house fire. Get me that guy’s number.

CHANDLER
I don’t…I don’t have that.

STEINBRENNER
(waving it off)
Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter! What matters is the numbers. The numbers! Do these numbers mean we’re gonna win more games or lose more games?

Chandler looks at the slide. He has no idea.

CHANDLER
...Win more.

STEINBRENNER
That’s what I like to hear! That’s a can-do attitude! You know who I need in here? Somebody to implement this. Get me George Costanza.

CHANDLER
(pause)
Who?

STEINBRENNER
COSTANZA! GET IN HERE!

The door opens. GEORGE enters, mouth full, wiping his hand on his pants.

GEORGE
(swallowing)
You wanted to see me, sir?

STEINBRENNER
(gesturing at the screen)
This fella’s got the numbers. You’re gonna implement the numbers.

GEORGE
(nodding gravely, ignoring the screen)
Absolutely. Numbers. Love numbers.

Steinbrenner storms out, leaving Chandler and George alone in the sudden quiet.

CHANDLER
(gesturing at the slide)
So if you look at the correlation between the Q3 variance and the—

GEORGE
Don’t kid a kidder, kid.

CHANDLER
Do what?

GEORGE
I’ve been doing this job three years. I nod, I say “implement,” I go back to my office and eat a calzone.

CHANDLER
(slowly dawning comprehension)
You mean…you don’t…you don’t know what any of this means either?

GEORGE
Not one word. I thought “variance” was a car rental company.

CHANDLER
Oh, thank God.

GEORGE
I assume the numbers matter. Somebody, somewhere, presumably understands them.

CHANDLER
I’ve been operating under that assumption for five years, and I gotta say, the evidence is not mounting in its favor.

They look at each other with camaraderie. George leans in close to the screen, squinting.

GEORGE
(pointing at a bar)
This one’s taller.

CHANDLER
(nodding)
Right. Right…taller’s usually good.

GEORGE
(straightening up)
Okay. I’m gonna go tell him taller’s good.

CHANDLER
That’s the whole plan?

GEORGE
You got a better one?

Chandler looks back at the incomprehensible chart, then at George, then back at the chart.

CHANDLER
...Taller’s good.

GEORGE
(finger guns, exiting)
Taller’s good. Taller’s good.

However, I found a few angles on this one that struck me as interesting, going for the sort of maximalist approach of crossovers like JLA/Avengers. A bunch of my relatives are big Seinfeld fans (they like Friends okay) and I partly wrote this for them. The full “90-minute script” will soon be available. We begin with a scene that, in retrospect, seems like it should’ve been the obvious place to start.

“THE ONE WITH THE COMEDIAN” (PART 1 of 3)

INTRO

INT. COMEDY STAGE - NIGHT
PHOEBE is onstage, strumming guitar. She finishes to moderate applause.

PHOEBE
Thank you! I’d like to dedicate tonight to my uncle. And his many victims. But just one dedication per victim, no matter how many pieces they were found in. Like, I get it, you’re dead, but don’t get greedy, you know?

In the audience are all her close friends: ROSS, CHANDLER, MONICA, JOEY, RACHEL.

CHANDLER
(rising)
That was great. Can’t wait to get home and sit in my feelings about it.

ROSS
We’re staying for the comedian, Chandler.

Chandler looks at the others and finds no support. Reluctantly, he sits back down.

CHANDLER
I don’t see the appeal. Guy walks out, shirt tucked in, giant blazer, mismatched tie—do I laugh at the jokes or the outfit?

JOEY
C’mon, man, he had a TV pilot. He’s successful.

CHANDLER
Success isn’t funny. You want to get laughs, you have to hate yourself a little. You earn them with suffering. This guy doesn’t suffer, he smugs.

MONICA
Oh, my god. You’re jealous.

CHANDLER
I’m offended. There are dues to be paid here! Trauma dues! He’s robbing the treasury and expecting us to cheer him for it.

RACHEL
You have serious problems.

CHANDLER
Yes! And he doesn’t! That’s my point!

ROSS
(sighing, hand on his shoulder)
Look, Chandler…
(leaning in, quietly)
Monica’s worried about her restaurant. Joey’s worried about his audition. You’ve got your presentation for the Yankees. Can’t we relax and enjoy this? We paid for the tickets.

CHANDLER
(muttering)
I paid for the tickets.

ROSS
Even more reason not to waste them.

Chandler grumbles, then nods agreement, but with a jerky, exaggerated motion that shows he still isn’t happy about it.

FADE TO LATER:
The trademark “Seinfeld” bass line plays. Onstage, JERRY is mid-bit, pacing, hands out.

JERRY
(ON STAGE)
...then there’s the “feeler.” You know the guy. Far as he’s concerned, his feelings are the main character in every interaction. “Have I introduced you to my jealous codependency? Shake hands! Get to know each other. You’ll be seeing a lot of this fella.”

The table CRACKS UP. Rachel’s got a hand over her mouth. Monica’s swatting Joey’s arm like “stop, I can’t breathe.” Phoebe’s giggling. Chandler, despite himself, laughs hardest of all, surprised and delighted.

The camera drifts up the row of faces...and lands on ROSS, forcing a smile.

JERRY
His primary form of communication is soulful staring. Date him twice, he’s got your future kids’ names picked out. You ask “how’s it going,” he’s like, “I’ve been doing a lot of inner work—”

Ross reaches for his water. Drinks. Stares straight ahead.

My dad loved the advertising field while he was a part of it. When my age was in the single digits, before Graham came along, it was a point of contention between him and Mom and me how hard he worked. For many years, we had a tradition of a group hug when he came home from work, and I noticed some nights were later than others.

I was maybe nine when I drew a picture of each member of our family doing what I considered to be each of our trademark activities, and there’s Dad in a suit and tie, looking out the window, spreading his arms, and thinking, “Business!”

Later, when my brother and I were watching TV, we’d always make fun of the commercials. Never his commercials, but still, we were adbusters in principle. I remember a time or two when Dad took this in good humor. He took almost everything in good humor, but I think he viewed it as an opportunity to understand a certain part of the advertisers’ audience. The hecklers have things to teach the performer, if he listens. That was Dad. He had an instinct for finding the bright side that served him well in his ad career as in all areas of life.

I remember being startled in 2000 when Dad and I worked in his tomato garden and he disclosed that he’d made plans to retire early. I continued to be surprised when he walked away so thoroughly from something he’d done so well for so long. What I did not understand at that time was that Dad embraced each phase of his life on its own terms. In fact, he embraced just about anything that life had to offer him.

My dad loved art. He loved it when he was a student, he loved it when he was an ad executive, and he loved it when he embarked on his second career as an artist. He especially loved color, a love you can see on display here today.

I don’t know that he had artistic influences, specific artists in whose footsteps he tried to follow. In one of his videos, he says that one of his primary influences was… dogs. Followed by landscapes. He was fascinated by old, broken-down houses… he felt that if you looked at them just right, they might tell you the story of who lived in them, what shape their lives took, what their dreams were.

He might’ve been on to something, because I’ll be looking for him in the spaces that he left for a long time.

My dad loved the beach. He wasn’t born to the East Coast and didn’t seek it out. His academic life and his early career bounced him and Mom around a lot before they settled into an old property of her family’s. But he took to the water like a duck to water. He would guide us through our first years on boogie boards, ride the kayak out to meet the dolphins, then come back and join Mom and others to sit in the sand.

My dad loved video. We were the first house on our block to get a VCR, a DVD player, a TiVo. Many of my memories of childhood have Dad behind the camera, recording whatever we did for posterity, no matter how many times Graham and I expressed irritation about this. We took our cues from Mom as we told him to put down the camera and join the moment already, as he always eventually did. But he lurks in the lower right-hand corner of those memories for me, his camera-wielding figure like an artist’s signature.

My dad loved Mom. That might seem like an obvious observation to some of you, but he modeled a kind of love full of easy humor and unquestioning service that didn’t just teach me how to be a married man, it taught me things about the respect people can simply accord each other without even thinking about that. I didn’t know how precious that was until I got out in the world and met people who knew the lack of it.

My dad loved me.

A lot of people have told me, “I never saw your dad even raise his voice.” Well, I can think of one notable exception to that.

This next story, I’ve told many times, shamelessly plagiarizing Mom’s account of it. It was the day I was to begin my lessons with a driving instructor, and Dad wanted to take me through the basics himself before the instructor arrived. I was nervous about screwing up, so I did everything a bit slowly and overcarefully, but I got all the essentials fine.

Mom was watching us as we drove back, and as she described it later, “the car turned very slowly back onto 69^th Street, very slowly into the driveway, and very slowly into the side of Dad’s beloved sports car.” She reported the frantic gesticulations she saw from the passenger side.

I was in the car with them. Obviously, at the time, I was worried and upset, but looking back, Dad expressed his anger like a man totally unfamiliar with expressing this level of anger. I’d heard him express mild frustration as “Oh, dammit” or “dagnabbit.” Now he flailed around like Kermit the Frog and sounded like Yosemite Sam. His vocalizations were no swear word or indeed form of language that I could identify. This only lasted for about twenty seconds, and after that, all he said was, “Go to your room.”

I remember a lot of things about that day. I remember walking in mortified, and yet walking out again, with Mom and Dad’s encouragement, for my first instructor lesson about forty minutes later. That was one of the virtues Daddy put into me: even when you’ve fallen on your face, you get up and you go again. But mostly I remember the restraint he showed even at his most aggravated, and I’ve filed that along with a million other tiny kindnesses. He told us he loved us, but he showed it more. And his mellowness was not simply his nature. It was a choice.

My dad loved Graham too. Graham can tell you most stories related to him better than I can, but I do remember Dad coaching me on what my new responsibilities would be as a big brother. Those memories blend seamlessly into him talking to me about my responsibilities as a babysitter, a Boy Scout leader, a pet owner. He had a way of viewing responsibility as not a burden but a privilege, and he made it easy for me to look at it that way, too.

One of the last things he said to Mom was, “We have great boys.” I’ll remember that, Dad.

My dad loved novelty. I think that’s the most important lesson here. When some people reach a certain age, they decide they’re done learning new things, that they don’t particularly need to know or care about some newer song or actress or word entering the language. But Dad was always willing to engage with some new facet of the world, whether that meant toying with a different art style or sitting down with me to watch K-Pop Demon Hunters, just because it had made a big splash and he wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

He always wanted to do one more thing, no matter how many times this resulted in the rest of the family waiting in the car with Mom going back inside to say, “Bill! We’re gonna be late!”

My dad loved doing the Sunday crossword with me. My dad loved doting on his granddaughter with Graham. My dad loved cooking burgers on the grill, my dad loved tinkering with model trains, my dad loved classical concerts, my dad loved blues music, my dad loved feeding koi, my dad loved books, my dad loved movies, my dad loved travel, my dad loved adventure, my dad, my dad, my dad loved, loved, loved, loved, loved…

My dad loved life. It is not fair that he should lose his when he modeled so well what should be done with it. But he lived it all on his own terms, and that example is as much a legacy as his art.

He is my inspiration. He should be an inspiration to all of us.

A couple of contributions to the next Journal issue have arrived already! Many thanks. My apologies for not replying sooner, but I’ll be addressing those sometime before the end of the weekend.

Much as I regret this sort of error, online publication does provide ways to address it! Check out the new addition/edition, and I’ll be back here tomorrow with a puzzle.

My thanks to Don Hauptman for his fertile kibitzing, Janice for her notes and support, Aled Harris for the interview, and Daniel Galef, Darryl Francis, Don again, Mike Keith, and Michael Griffith for their various contributions.

(Tomorrow’s post will also be somewhat later in the day.)

Enjoy!

At one point, I mentioned his “duck poem.” It turns out he had two, very different from one another. To give you a taste of his creativity, I’ll share both here.

More recently, I spotted a third. It’s a concrete poem like the first, but it represents its “duck” on a different scale.

Duck, duck, duck…Say, Aled, want to try a poem about a goose?

Journal readers may appreciate this sneak preview of a grid by Daniel Galef and Michael Griffith. What is its mysterious purpose? Find out…in the upcoming issue!

I have another such preview planned for tomorrow. Until then!

The longest of any candidate is “The Utterance of the Petulant Child” by Nick Montfort, at 40,000 words. It could easily be rewritten as 80,000 or 1,000,000. Here’s the first few lines:

Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom...

However, most people, when confronted with this passage, would say something like, “I don’t know how that’s cheating exactly, but that’s cheating.” It is, in its way, meaningful: any parent who’s dealt with a child’s ego can relate to its inspiration. But even so.

Next on the list is Dr. Awkward and Olson in Oslo, by Lawrence Levine, at 31,594 words and about 104,000 letters. As anyone who’s tried to read it can testify, this is a challenging detective story, with a lot of passages that drift into obscurity, despite the twenty years of labor it represents. The original manuscript seems a bit easier to parse because its handwritten passages have more visual emphasis against the typewritten ones, creating a narrative that’s (somewhat) easier to thread.

If you think of a “passage” as a more unified single literary experience, you might go for Peter Norvig’s attempt, described here with its longest version—21.012 words, a word count that is itself a palindrome—here. It’s a variation on “A man, a plan, a canal—Panama” which begins:

A man, a plan, a caretaker, a moksha, Lufkin, a jacinth, Gile, Daniell, Ivanov, an odor, a negativeness, a tsarevna, melanomas, an ire, Gib, Olga, Lata Narayanan, a meld, an elecampane, an evonymus, an anatase, Rachael, an anabasis…

As a list of people and objects, however abstract, it has a certain thematic unity that Dr. Awkward rarely approaches.

Then there’s Satire: Veritas, whose palindromic text is 17,233 words. The images in this David L. Stephens poem are often easier to visualize—a friend turned me on to a version with (sadly AI-generated) illustrations that is at least interesting at the paragraph level.

All this makes PalindromeList.net’s claim to have “the largest palindrome” a bit sketchy. 4,977 words is still impressive, but the palindrome descends into nonsense fast, not even reaching Dr. Awkward or Satire: Veritas’ levels of narrative cohesion. Shorter works are interesting and sometimes more cohesive, like the “Noah’s Ark” poem in Howard W. Bergerson’s Palindromes and Anagrams or the sex-obsessed 500-word Demetri Martin work shown here. Even these are not exactly straightforward, but their strong and familiar themes encourage readers to fill in the blanks.

But for posterity, I will say that Dr. Awkward and Olson in Oslo is the longest palindromic passage known. Nick Montfort’s work can be disqualified because one can reduce it to “Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom!” and still convey essentially the same information. You can argue that a single “Mom” is sufficient, but a small set conveys the petulant persistence of the child without dipping into repetition for its own sake.

You could likewise make Dr. Awkward or any other palindrome longer by simply repeating its entire text, but doing that would just create other redundant and reducible passages. So pure redundancy is worth a disqualification.

Vagueness and narrative cohesion, however, are often difficult to judge. Literature is full of obscure works like Finnegan’s Wake that some find incomprehensible and others swear by. So, despite its difficulties, Dr. Awkward remains the champion. Make a note of this, high achievers, if you plan to seize the crown for yourselves!

So here’s the next Exercise in Style. One of the simpler ones overall. At one point, I had notes to treat the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, and other religious texts all as separate “styles,” but I don’t think the non-biblical styles would be styles you’d recognize or necessarily that rewarding for me. But the Bible (in its various translations) is well-known and hugely interesting from a literary perspective, so I had to give that one a whirl.

And it came to pass that Ali spake unto me, recounting the tribulations of her dwelling-companions, and how they did fare not well together.

Now Ali had been like unto me as a daughter from her youth, and lo, though I yet beheld in her the spirit of the child of five years that she had been, her limbs had lengthened and her stature increased in a manner that passed understanding. Surely, thought I, she remaineth yet a child? She was yet a maiden of teenaged years still, after a manner, and by the letter of the law.

But I set aside this musing, for Ali had brought unto me a trouble fit for learned men. One among her companions had taken unto herself a lover, and did speak openly of matters most intimate, the which her companions had neither sought nor desired to hear. And this did sorely vex all three who dwelt with her; yet Ali, being least vexed of the three, was made to hear of it the most.

And I said unto her, “Susan supposeth that she and her lover were the first to discover the act of love between man and woman, as one who crieth, ‘Behold this new thing! Let all partake of it!’”

And Ali answered, “Yea, too much information is this.” And she repeated “TMI,” which is the trigram of fullness to those who knoweth it.

I could not lift this burden from her, neither had I need to: for it was but her first season at the place of learning, and already she sought another arrangement of dwelling for the season to come.

And I kept my first commandment, which was, Call upon your loved ones every Sabbath, save they send word beforehand that they be sick or occupied elsewhere. And I held fast to this order of things, for I deemed it good that I should be unto her a steadfast and unmoving presence.

Verily, many among us could bear more such steadfastness in our lives than what we have.

And in the space of an hour thereafter, I came unto mine other Sabbath custom, which was to labor over the puzzle of words of the great Times of the city of New York, together with my father, by means of the seeing-glass called Zoom. And the puzzle was not unto us merely a trial of the mind, but an opening for speech between us; for in seeking the answers, we did come to teach one another, and the words did call forth memories and tales. And I kept my second commandment, which was, Engage thy loved ones in games, that thou mayst know them.

And one clue spake of “a compound that ripeneth the banana,” and the answer was ETHENE. And my father said unto me, “Knowest thou, we did fashion an advertisement for ethene, in the days when I labored at the agency.” And we spake further of his days among the makers of advertisements, before he had taken his rest from labor in his early years.

And as we returned unto the puzzle, I read aloud, “Letters cried out in shame, for knowing things that God alone should reckon,” being three letters, the first of which was “T.”

And from the kitchen, Janice lifted up her voice and said, “Is it not ‘TMI’?”

“Yea,” I began to say, “for but an hour past, I did—”

But in that selfsame moment, the young kittens, Diana and Belle, came running and leaping upon the cushions, and Belle did wrestle Diana down upon the very paper whereon the clues were writ, and they rolled about together in their play.

And upon my father’s side of the glass, my brother Graham entered in, bearing his daughter Lucy, who was of two years. “Ho there!” he called out unto me, and my mother came also and embraced him. And I lifted my hand in greeting.

And as he set Lucy down upon the ground, she went straightway and took up the object of her long fascination: her grandfather’s staff.

And Diana, having fled from Belle, was pursued no more, for Belle now turned her fury upon the paper itself. And I did pluck her away before she could rend it utterly, yet one small scrap fell loose unto the floor, and Diana fell upon it at once.

And so the hour for explaining “TMI” had passed away, and I let it pass.

For I kept my third commandment, which is, Life is better lived when one seeketh not to make it perfect. And in truth, this is the most perfect manner of life that I have known.

As hinted yesterday, I’ve got some further research to do on the information in Monday’s post, plus Journal work and a couple other matters. Posting might be light for the next little while, but it will continue!

In 1948, entrepreneur James Brunot officially trademarked and released Scrabble, though Alfred Butts was its real developer. (We’ve covered Butts’ struggles in an earlier installment.)

There’s a myth that all marketplace successes are immediate smash successes—that when the product is put together the right way, the free market just smells its value. This wasn’t so for crosswords, which did well in the New York World but took some time to spread, and it wasn’t true for Scrabble either. Crossword lovers who craved a good parlor game in 1948 would probably go with I-Qubes instead.

Players rolled letter-marked dice to build intersecting crossword structures within a set time limit, scoring bonus points for shared letters. A little bit crosswords, a little bit Boggle. It seemed like it was everywhere for a bit, and then it was gone, with a failed revival (or rip-off) in 2014.

Books released during the period included The General Knowledge Crossword Book and Nellie M. Sheldon’s My Word: Exotic Dictionary and Crossword Puzzle Guide. It was a different era, one where the capital of Ruritania still fit under “general knowledge.”

Thirteen People—Er—Creatures of Interest

1. Bonnie Adams was driving a topless car when the wind grabbed her crossword puzzle books and they flew into her face. She grabbed at them—and sideswiped two parked cars.

2. Adams was fine, but her passenger Frances Meek was rushed to the hospital for possible broken ribs.

3. Crossword Puzzle the Dog was shown off by the Yuba City, California Independent for adoption, taking his name from his black-and-white coat. Odds are he found a home.

   

4. Deputy Sheriff Elmer Court, off duty because of illness, was the St. Joseph, Missouri courthouse’s outstanding crossword puzzle addict. Margaret Young, another deputy sheriff, made and sent him a crossword puzzle with answers “dealing strictly and not too gently with courthouse personnel.” Somehow, the St. Joseph News reported this; it had also reported Court and Young in acts of actual law enforcement. One wonders if the courthouse Court was being courted.

5. W.A. Davis won a crossword puzzle tournament despite an unusual address—that of the Royal Sydney Industrial Blind Institution. He was a teacher, but a blind one, relying on his wife to read him the clues. “Braille isn’t really practicable for crosswords,” he noted, though others have tried.

6. Charles Erlenkotter, author of the first New York Times crossword puzzle, passed away only six years after its publication.

7. Alison Farrar, elder daughter to the NYT crossword editor Margaret Farrar, married George Wilson. Census data would make her 18 at the time, but the median marrying age in 1948 was only 20.

8. Senator Ralph E. Flanders was called out for doing crosswords on the Senate floor. He’d be more alert a few years later, when he became known as one of Joe McCarthy’s fiercest opponents.

   

9. Mildred Jaklon, the Chicago Tribune editor discussed earlier in this series, earned a Tribune tribute that confirmed she was still the paper’s regular full-time contributor, with about 7,199 puzzles on her résumé—and three destroyed dictionaries. And counting.

10. In the 1948 Adventures of Superman radio story “The Crossword Mystery,” Lois Lane deduces a crime syndicate is encoding messages in the Daily Planet’s crosswords. You can tell this is not yet the Silver Age of Superman because she does something useful and intelligent before needing him to rescue her.

11. Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh were starting to have serious problems as a couple, but fans who followed them enjoyed the following lighthearted tale. Touring Australian theaters, they missed the Daily Telegraph puzzles they could get in England, and one friend sent a book of them. Leigh wrote back with thanks, but added: “Unfortunately, the solutions are at the back of the book, and I’m afraid the temptation has proved too much.”

    

12. Gordon Sloan wrote the Times to report that he had finally completed one of their puzzles—after sixteen years, confident he’d set a record…for slowness. To be clear, that’s work on a single puzzle for sixteen years, not just trying his hand on sixteen years’ worth of different puzzles. As they say in the twenty-first century, “Weird flex, but okay.”

13. Kirwan Ward, the colorful Australian editor of the Sydney Daily News, had to disavow any involvement in its crossword puzzles. “If you see an agonised looking character chewing a pencil stub staring hopelessly at a folded copy of the Daily News, it’ll be me trying to think up the name of a domestic animal in three letters beginning with C and ending with T. Still, I find that if you keep up this agonised-look business long enough, some fellow passenger always takes over from you and solves the cross-word in about five minutes. So it works out well.”

Cartoons of Varying Levels of Offensiveness

Warning for…well…varying levels of offensiveness.

Pax Verborum

The Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate reported a first: a monthly magazine for Roman Catholic clergy was putting out the Aenigma Verborum Cruciforme, “crossword puzzle” in Latin. Though not the first Latin crossword, this was the first known regular series of them. And it didn’t take it easy on those poor clerics:

Apart from the difficulty of doing a crossword puzzle in Latin, the authors have given a tantalising twist to the clues. For example, the clue “Victor Sydneyensis” means Victor of Sydney, and, in the double sense of victor, the victor was Victor Patrick. Now Patrick is a pugilist, and the Latin for that is Pugil, and that’s the answer to that one.

Drinking and Striving

Various papers ran this supposedly insoluble puzzle from anonymous commentators:

A CROSS WORD: We were attempting a cross-word puzzle the other evening with our eighth sharpened pencil when we came across a horizontal: “A three-letter word for a fruit drink.” Since then, we’ve stopped drinking anything, trying to fathom that one.

Let the libations flow, for the answer is very likely ADE. (Though GIN is made with alcohol and juniper berries, those aren’t true fruits.)

Say Good Night, Gracie

We started this year’s account with Leigh White sounding the alarm about Iranian communist crossword puzzles. Noted vaudeville and movie star Gracie Allen brought another perspective:

Well, it seems that the cross-word-puzzle craze is sweeping Iran (which is a four-letter word meaning “Persia”). The Communists there are said to be using them to spread propaganda (a 10-letter word meaning “fibs”).

If the people of Iran have the same kind of ability working crossword-puzzles that I have, I don’t think the Communists will accomplish much politically. Goodness, what good would it do them if they slipped a Communist-inspired puzzle over on me calling for a six-letter word meaning the premier of Russia, and I came up with something like “bomple” or “sprugg”?

Personally, I predict a purge in Soviet crossword-puzzle factories which are lagging in production of things like four-letter words meaning a reactionary Greek god. However, those puzzles ought to come in handy passing the time for exiled party workers in Siberia.

The Siberians could not be reached for comment.

By 1948, the Cold War was underway. So was the Second Red Scare, though it would take a few more years to reach the depths of McCarthyism. This led to a new form of media criticism—did the work of art promote the American way of life or not? There was no room for middle ground in it: works were pro-capitalist or anti-capitalist, pro-democracy or anti-democracy, and any “antis” were the works of subversives—or suckers who’d bought a subversive’s line.

The dangers of subversive propaganda were not illusions, as the state of democracy in the 2020s demonstrates. But the backlash could be as hostile to intellectual freedom as Stalin would have been.

Leigh White applied such a lens to crossword answers from Mardom, a Communist newspaper in Iran, back when Americans’ biggest concern about Iran was that it might go communist.

“What do our reactionaries want from the United States?” LOANS
”Signatory of a shameful pact signed between Iran and the United States.” SAYED / SCHWARTZKOPF / GROW

Most Iranians credit our police and military missions with having done a great deal to stiffen Iranian resistance to Soviet nerve warfare, which is precisely why Mardom regards them as “shameful…”

“Name of American warship that recently violated the territorial waters of Iran.” VALLEY FORGE

Mardom means “the people.” Islamic socialism would persist in Iran for decades, helping overthrow the shah in the 1970s but purged in the cultural revolution that followed.

White wasn’t so focused on communist offenses that he ignored low-level capitalist ones. He also reported on Romeo Lemieux, who disguised an illegal baseball lottery as a simple crossword contest—with puzzles simple enough to be no obstacle to bettors. Lemieux, 48, was a small fish in the grand scheme, and soon took a plea bargain.

Black and White Squares, Black and White Broadcasts

Television schedules needed filling in 1948. Simple crosswords had been read aloud on the radio for decades with reasonable, dependable popularity. Listeners tuned in to Crossword Caravan and Crossword Quiz, the latter with host Allen Prescott, a prolific radio emcee best known for The Wife Saver.

Prescott was too busy for more than occasional TV appearances. Two different productions of Crossword Quiz went to different outlets. New York viewers like Charles Stolberg saw Merle Miller, fresh off his hit novel That Winter, as a “quipping, ad-libbing quiz-master conducting puzzle sessions aided and abetted by a smartly videogenic girl assistant.” (The name of this 1940s precursor to Vanna White is unknown. Miller disliked working women, so it probably wasn’t an easy gig for her.)

Miller’s inaugural guests were Virgilia Peterson, literary critic of Harper’s Bazaar; critic and writer Basil Davenport; Agnes Rogers Allen, co-author of I Remember Distinctly and later founding editor of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and Eugene O’Neill Jr., a Greek and classic scholar.

In Atlanta, WSB-TV gathered two academics for its first two Crossword Quiz broadcasts: Lillian Lee of Emory University and Dr. Floyd Baskett. Baskett beat Lee, but his seven-year-old son often outperformed him when watching the broadcast s at home. The emcee here was Bob Van Camp, barely a year out of the Air Force, beginning a career that would make him a hall-of-famer in Georgia broadcasting.

Barbara Smith of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution recounted the action:

The puzzle is just like any other crossword puzzlę, only it is large. mounted on the wall and made of sand-blasted, frosted glass. The squares not to be used are marked off with tape. When a contestant guesses a word, Van Camp writes it in with dark red lipstick. A bell from the scorekeeper means a correct answer.

But too bad if the buzzer sounds. That means time’s up or the answer’s wrong.

The studio audience does its best to help the contestants when they’re stumped. The spectators get so eager sometimes they even shout their answers, It doesn’t help anybody’s score one way or the other, though. The double-pane glass that separates the audience from the show doesn’t let any sound through…

The program lasts half an hour, but usually the puzzle isn’t completed by then.

This description may be all we have to go on. Video of early television broadcasts is scarce. They weren’t taped for rebroadcast until I Love Lucy introduced the concept of reruns. Both versions of Crossword Quiz would last until 1950, though the anticlimactic structure—with Camp or Miller reading unfinished clues at the end of each half-hour broadcast—might be one reason this early game show isn’t better remembered today.

Black Shares of Black and White Squares

The Chicago Defender published a letter by Richard Watley, Jr. that throws a social issue from the 1940s into sharp relief today:

I am one of the thousands and thousands who reads the Chicago Defender each week and I find it to be really nice. And I also read other Colored papers from out of town. But I have found that the Chicago Defender is the most interesting of them all.

Out of all the colored papers I have read I haven’t noticed a crossword puzzle in any of them. I know that the crossword puzzle isn’t very much, but they are really nice in a way… As for myself I called them self-education because they can help you at times. So if I am not asking too much would you try and see if you can have one put into the Defender each week. I have several friends who are also interested in different crossword puzzles and every time we want to look one up in the white papers.

I do hope that you might understand and put one into the Chicago Defender.

The Chicago Defender had published crosswords during the craze, only suspending them after 1930. It would resume by 1956. This is not a criticism of Watley: he was an interested everyday reader, not a news historian. But he raises interesting questions about crosswords in Black or African-American newspapers. How many were there? How challenging were they? Did any reflect Black culture?

Answers are elusive. Even modern digital resources tend to ignore or underrepresent this demographic. Newspapers.com, often this series’ primary resource, archives The Chicago Defender but not other famous Black papers like The Minnesota Spokesman-Reporter, The Chicago Bee, The Richmond Planet, or even the most popular in 1948, The Pittsburgh Courier.

This isn’t a full indictment of Newspapers.com either; it can only present preserved archives, which don’t exist for every paper. One of the few resources it does present that mentions such papers—in an irony Leigh White would not appreciate—is the Communist paper The Daily Worker.

Intuition indicates that Watley was correct and that few crosswords existed in Black publications of the day, whose audiences were less likely to be traipsing through dictionaries for cultural and economic reasons. But intuition is a poor substitute for data. At any rate, the impulse that’s led to the creation of features like Black Crossword and modern discussions over puzzles’ “whiteness” might have its earliest recorded expression here.

It’s not quite as simple as “any story with a long journey,” though. I’d argue that any true quest needs a McGuffin, something for its heroes to journey toward—even if, as in Mad Max: Fury Road, the original goal proves unsatisfying and unachievable and a new one must take its place. The real journey is the friends we made along the way, et cetera.

At any rate, I could have gone with something more mundane here, but doing it this way felt more fun.

The Monogrammatic’s Map

The letter arrived on a Sunday. T the Monogrammatic considered this suspicious. Important communications always seemed to arrive on a Sunday. And some communications, you’d rather not get.

He turned the envelope over in his fingers. No return address. No postage. Only his initial, a single, elegant T, pressed into the front in ink the color of a bruise. Like a single letter filled into the blanks of a word puzzle, daring him to complete the rest. He opened the envelope.

Inside was a map.

The map felt older than the paper it was printed on, older perhaps than paper itself. The routes it described shifted faintly when he didn’t look directly at them. At its center, drawn in a red so deep it was nearly black, was a small illustration of a fruit he did not recognize. Yet he knew, at once, what it signified.

Beneath it were three words in a hand that did not belong to any living person he knew:

You’ll need help.

🗺️🗺️🗺️

He found Lucy of the Bo Staff in the yard behind the grain merchant’s on Cord Street, putting a man twice her size through a wall. This was not unusual. Lucy had a way of filling a space, not with noise or size, but with the certainty that things in her vicinity would go as she intended. Back when she was even more reckless and youthful, she’d once borrowed her namesake staff from her old grandfather, who had decided it was hers and carved another.

The staff itself was unremarkable to look at: smooth, unadorned, with a slight crook useful for hooking limbs. Her movements were sentences; the staff was punctuation. The man through the wall groaned and did not get up.

“You’ve read the old accounts,” T said. He did not phrase it as a question. “The Fruit of Ultimate Knowledge.”

Lucy unscrewed her water canteen and drank without looking at him. “Myth,” she said.

“I have a map.”

She looked at him then. “Let me see my father first.”

🗺️🗺️🗺️

Graham the Tool-Speaker lived above the cooperage, surrounded by instruments that had outlived their purposes and found new ones. Marbles ringed the property, easy to avoid but a trap for any who would rush in with violent intent. A buckled saw hung above the door as a wind-chime. Three broken theodolites had been arranged on a shelf with such care as to become an altar.

When Lucy called him, he replied with a jaunty, repeated greeting syllable and emerged, carrying a large compass on his hip like a small child. As if he had known, before T had even approached, that there would soon be need of one.

“Tool-Speaker” was not a courtesy title. Graham spoke to tools, and tools, with patience, answered. Not in words. In the grain of the wood. In the give of the metal. In the particular way a chisel refused a knot or a compass needle hesitated before settling north. He listened, and from that listening, he could tell you things: what a lock had kept, where a blade had been, whether a mechanism had ever been used for its intended purpose.

He held T’s map for a long time.

“This was made under duress,” he finally said.

“By whom?” T asked.

Graham set it down with care. “By someone who would have preferred to keep it secret.” He looked at his daughter. Lucy met his eyes, and he looked away first, though not from weakness. Some permissions are given without argument. “You’ll need navigators,” he said, moving to the window. “The good ones.”

🗺️🗺️🗺️

Meg and Bill had been married many years, and had grown to complement each other in many ways. Bill took on the role of being fearless, almost reckless, as he sought to explore any given direction. Meg was the voice of caution and reason, marking each part of the journey for when backtracking became necessary. In truth, they were far more like one another than these roles would indicate, but the minor arguments the roles produced granted them something like binocular vision.

They were arguing now, in the small, shared office above the cartographers’ guild, about whether the staircase they’d climbed to reach it had fourteen steps or fifteen.

“Fourteen steps, wouldn’t you say?” asked Bill.

“No, I wouldn’t say. It’s fifteen. You skipped the landing,” said Meg.

“Well,,,the landing’s not a step. It’s more of a bump.”

“Is it part of one floor? Is it part of the other? Because if not, then it’s a step.”

T spread the map on their worktable. They stopped and looked it over. Twice, they glanced at each other, and both times, their gaze then returned to the map.

“This route doesn’t exist,” Meg said.

“Yet. But it will,” said Bill. “We can make it happen.”

🗺️🗺️🗺️

The last member of the party found them, emerging from the kitchen of the tavern where T had stopped to make a final accounting of the group. She surveyed them, taking in everything about the group with the air of someone who had already mastered practicalities of their journey they hadn’t considered.

Janice was broad-shouldered and wore a wizard’s hat. On her right shoulder sat Bolo, a winged familiar with fur in black and white pools, her spotted wings folded as she curled into sleep. On her left sat Dia, who was fluffier, gray and white with a smudge under her nose like a moustache, her wings fluffing themselves like a bird before settling into a fold. Dia was looking at T with patient confidence. So was Janice.

“Cat-Mistress,” T said.

“I know where you’re going,” Janice said. “Dia dreamed it four days ago. Bolo confirmed the heading last night.” She glanced at the map under T’s arm. “You’ll need more food: the cats can hunt some. You’ll also need a launderer. The journey’s longer than you’ve reckoned.”

T looked at Lucy. Lucy shrugged her lack of objection. Graham had already begun talking to Janice’s hat, with the focused attention of a man who has just found something very interesting to listen to. Hats are not normally tools: this one apparently was. Meg and Bill were fussing over Bolo, who had flapped down to the floor: Bill got onto one knee to pet her properly.

Beyond the gate, the road ran east and then, according to a map drawn in fear by someone who had been there before, began to cross other roads in a vast network.

He shouldered his pack and walked through the gate, letting the others follow as they would. When walking into the unknown, there was no perfect way to make the journey. The perfectest way was simply to begin.

Founder and co-producer Brian Cimmet is a camera-shy sort, so no pix of him, but I've included a shot of leftover puzzles and flags from after I helped a bit with the cleanup.

Also, my phone took this opportunity to remind me that it was important to stay in touch with my family!

Thanks, Samsung. Thanks loads.

For some people, anything outside one’s own universe would never be learned. But in the Crossworlding, all was revealed.

Alison Marsh had gone to sleep in Victorian London. She had awoken in her room, but beyond its walls lay a patchwork environ pulled from pieces of many different places.

Now she watched as new neighbors from various worlds settled in with each other. Or failed to. The comet Susanjaden streaked across the sky, visible even over the rising sun, while Hercule Poirot and the ghost of Raymond Queneau walked toward the Bananarama restaurant, seeking breakfast. Elsewhere, several Lucys feuded over a single walking stick, their fathers moving to separate them.

By Alison’s reckoning, the calendar indicated the Year of Our Lord 1903, but most of the pieces of this world came from later eras, a few earlier. Somehow, the impossible was now possible.

Alison put the thought aside. Attacking the impossible was a witch’s sort of problem. While the Crossworlding had made a hopeless mishmash of local geography, the city she was in was still identifiably a city, with restaurants and apartment buildings and an astonishing number of fruit stands.

It was to one of those apartment buildings that Alison’s locator spell brought her now. Here, in room 218, was Alison’s own Susan, not one of the dozens of other Susans (and Suzes, Sues, and other such variations) to be found here. There were elevators in Alison’s time, but the one in this hotel had no operator. Not trusting it, she made her way up the stairs, found the room number, and gave a brisk knock.

“Susan, it’s Alison. The proper one, your fellow in the Arcane Investigative Society. Are you decent?”

“Not particularly.”

Alison rolled her eyes, opened the door, and immediately wished that she had not.

Susan was nude, but that was sadly not a novelty to Alison’s eyes. What was novel was that she was in a pile with—at least three other Susans. One, an apparent identical match, slumbered peacefully upon the bosom of the Susan who was Ali’s colleague. Another two were kissing beside them: one wore her hair in a fashion a hundred years out of date, while the other was lean and muscular, her hair cut short. The clothing of several eras lay strewn upon the floor. There may have been a fifth concealed in a lump on the bedsheets. Ali had no incentive to investigate.

“I did warn you,” her Susan said, making no attempt to conceal her amusement.

“I thought you were referring to your usual licentious thoughts,” Ali replied. “I had no reason to expect you’d use this situation to invent a new kind of depravity. We have worlds to disentangle, Susan, and I would have you begin by disentangling yourself from this narcissist’s harem.”

“Oh, pray don’t judge me too harshly, Alison. I saw an opportunity and took it. Wouldn’t you?”

Alison stared openmouthed at her for a full ten seconds before responding.

“No!”

🌎🌎🌎

A few hours later, the meeting began. The puzzle of restoring the mixed worlds to their prior unmixed state seemed insoluble, but Ali knew that all things began with beginning a conversation.

Taren was also a magician, though she hastened to describe herself as a mid-level one and not of Earth. Her dress was humble, and though of handsome stock took no particular pride in her appearance. Still, she spoke clear and plain.

“We had an incident of crossing between worlds when I studied at the Athenaeum of Woven Arts. Another world intruded on our own—the mages sealed the first portals but more kept appearing. We determined the best way to maintain our reality was to focus on the minute, repeated tasks of the week. Once we did, the intrusions stopped.”

“Does that mean, then, that we can restore normality by acting normal?” said Susan. “I should call out in embarrassment if it were so easy, but also in relief.”

“It’s not about ‘restoring normality.’ It’s not like the entirety of each world is here,” said Corin Wix, a young man in an octogenarian’s body with his own world-crossing experience. “It can’t be. The world of my birth has a small population, but most of the worlds represented here have billions of people. Most of our old worlds are as they were,” and here he looked a bit wistful, “going on without us. We just have to get ourselves back home.”

“If we can inform everyone,” said Alison, thinking it through, “perhaps with these kinetoscopic telegrams, these…’teleconferencing apps’…”

“That’s too much information for most people,” said Janice Hoffer, stepping forward. Janice was a witness to something she called the Day the Dominos Fell, about which she would say little except that it dedicated her to the reconstruction of “Newer York” and left her well acquainted with certain forms of hardship.

“For some of them, the Crossworlding is an improvement over where they were. They won’t want to go.”

“That’s true,” Susan grinned. “A mere few hours ago, I was enjoying the rare opportunities afforded by living with these…altered circumstances.” With visible delight, she opened her mouth to provide more details.

Ali wished that something, anything, would intervene before Susan further elaborated. Her wish was granted.

Diana and Belle, goddesses of war in cat form, chose that moment to attack the fabric of reality, bringing the Crossworlding to an abrupt end.

Shards and smithereens floated through the void, carrying each of the participants back to its home reality. A version of Graham from an alliterative universe waved to other shards as they passed. “Hey, hey! Homeward ho,” he hollered.

Alison thought she glimpsed a baby universe grabbing at the support structure of a larger one, and then she was back in London, London as it was and should be, lit by gaslight, shrouded in fog. Susan was near her, picking herself up.

The experience had passed, and even its remnants felt like discarded paper shreds in Alison’s mind. She let them go.

Some resolutions are anticlimactic. Sometimes you’re not the hero, just the bystander. But there is a kind of heroism in accepting this fact. It was, Ali decided, the heroicest thing she could do with her present circumstances. Tomorrow might bring a chance to be heroicer.

And if so, that was a blessing to be grateful for.

The Secret Lives of Color is a book published in October 2016, just before my feelings about orange got more complicated. I picked it up on one of our rambling bookstore visits, read it on the lawn of the Manassas Museum while waiting for Fourth of July fireworks, and thought more than once, This feels like Daddy’s thing. It’s a book that filters all human experience through one color after another. I toyed with a similar book idea myself.

Some of the stories tie to Dad’s career as an artist, coverint the popularity of different hues in the painting community of different centuries. But painting is only Kassia St. Clair’s most frequent topic—she pulls in anecdotes from other realms of art, fashion, science, history, any relevant subject. That lined up with Dad’s preferences—a special interest in painting and visual arts but a robust interest in almost everything.

I could have planned to give this to him on his birthday or Christmas, but I decided on a belated Father’s Day gift. (For belated Mother’s Day, we got Mom a sequel to an earlier gift: an Agatha Christie-themed jigsaw puzzle.)

We met up with Mom and Dad on our way to Ocean Isle, a family vacation they’d planned to attend until a couple of weeks prior, when the biopsy schedule conflicted.

(We’re tempted to second-guess everything. Mom wonders if we should’ve pushed for more aggressive treatment sooner, once the leg started swelling. I wonder if we should’ve encouraged Dad’s impulse to go to Ocean Isle rather than talk him out of it. By then, the swelling was reaching a point where he might not have really enjoyed it—but his zest for life was so formidable, it’s hard to say. Likewise, different treatment might’ve given him a little more time at home—or less. In the end, all we can say is that we made the best choices we could. Janice and I did bring prints of one of Dad’s beach-vacation paintings, to be appreciated by our aunts and uncles and cousins. It made him happy they were well received.)

Anyway—we met up before Ocean Isle, and I gave Dad the book, directing him in particular to the “Electric Blue” section, which has a memorable passage on the unholy hue released during the Chernobyl meltdown. Awful, yes, but also fascinating. Dad got excited and when Mom came over and asked what we were doing, he shared his enthusiasm for that story and the book as a whole.

I don’t know if he finished it after I left—it’s the kind of book you pick up and put down, off and on—but I know he enjoyed it. I’m glad I didn’t wait.

… … … … …

This Saturday, Janice and I will be at Lollapuzzoola 19 (the crossword tournament, not the music fest, look carefully at the spelling). Well, it’s more like I will be there and Janice will say a quick hi-bye at the beginning and end of the day. I’m looking forward to seeing some old friends. Janice will be enjoying her old stomping grounds, some conveyor belt cheese, and a tour of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, which Google hilariously describes as an “animation company.” We’ll be calling home after to report on those adventures. Mom wants to hear about them. Dad would’ve, too.

Now, here’s a puzzle!