Transplanted Life
Sunday, February 12, 2006
 
Made in America, dammit!
So, I was out at the mall yesterday, picking up DVDs instead of canned goods because I don't watch the news and thus major storms just hit me with no warning. I go into Borders looking for reading material, gravitate toward the puzzle magazine section, and find "Dell Kakuro Cross Sums Collection Volume 1", labeled "America's Newest Puzzle Craze! From the creators of Original Sudoku Puzzles!"

That's right. Apparently cross sums, which for the uninitiated are sort of like crossword puzzles where the entries must add up to a given sum without repeated digits, have taken the same migratory path as Number Places, which went to Japan, then were picked up by some UK paper that liked the exotic "su doku" name, and finally hit the US and now get just as much space in every freakin' newspaper as the crossword.

I'm not complaining, really, because I have loved puzzles in both my lives, and have often bought some of the lamer Dell magazines to get, like, 10 cross sums. I have completeld roughly 40 in just the past two days. If this will make the darn things easier to find on the newsstand, I'm in favor, although you will never see me calling them "kakuro". It's just that, man, why did these things have to circumnavigate the globe before people started liking them?

And can diagramless crosswords be next?

-Marti
Comments:
I'm getting a woody over this.
 
Hey, if Marti didn't occasionally go off on some totally nerdy tangent, I'd doubt it was actually her. The Memorial Day when Martin and I were dating, we took a long weekend to visit my grandfather's grave, and he ran all over town when we got home trying to find a Sunday Globe because he couldn't stand the idea of missing the crossword. Guy knew the names of the people making it.

It is totally the little obsessive details like that that make me able to think of Martin and Marti as the same person.
 
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Note: This blog is a work of fantasy; all characters are either ficticious or used ficticiously. The author may be contacted at JaySeaver@comcast.net