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Recent The Legion of Doom Video Rating Other Lore Sites |
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PENCIL PUZZLES Crosswords You know you've reached a special point in your path to adulthood when you start doing symmetrical crosswords. For the first decade or so of crosswording, your crosswords have no discipline, halfhazardly crossing "duck" with "bunny" and "chicken," giving you words with only one crossed letter so if you can't think of a "birthday treat" you only have a single sad "a" to cue you in. Then, at some point you graduate to the symmetrical crosswords and suddenly you have know what country Khartoum is in. It's a rite of passage, or at least a passage of writing. B Cryptic Crosswords I am told that the British version of crosswords are a different breed, although I've never been to Britishania to see for myself. If the rumors are true, the British have a masochistic streak of Chunnelesque proportions. Sample clue from Games magazine: "Tabloids covering premiere of Muppet Babies." The answer is "Pampers." Seriously. Isn't that insane? The answer is arrived at through a combination of anagrams, wordplay, and trafficking in the occult. It's wonderfully twisted. A Word Find I did a lot of word finds as a kid, but I eventually realized that they were only marginally more interesting than sorting my socks, and that's only because I had the one pair of He-Man socks. If I had a couple more pairs, maybe some Transformers socks too, the socks would win. Word finds, in their most basic form, are just a matter of dogged patience. If you just look at each letter very carefully in turn, you'll eventually find all the words, but your zest for life will be tattered and limp. D+ Logic Puzzles My favorite part of the logic puzzles were the little cross charts where you put the X to indicate that you've figured out that Mr. Brown's favorite food is scampi. My second favorite part are the stupid things you have to figure out, like, you know, Mr. Brown's favorite food. And whether he eats it with a fork, knife, spoon, chopsticks, or antique olive tongs. The logic part is fun too, but it runs a distant third. If I really cared about logic all that much, I'd be doing something useful with it, like either ending hunger or finding a way to make it more fun. C+ Cryptograms For years I avoided cryptograms because they seemed stupidly impossible. How the hell am I supposed to know what "cvxrwhi" is? It could be "lizards" or it could be "panties." Any time I can't tell the difference between lizards and panties I feel disadvantaged. But after I tried a couple I realized they aren't that tough after all. The bit in English where "I" and "A" are the only single letter words is very handy. If I had to do a chat room cryptogram, where "r," "u," and occasionally ">" are all words, I'd be screwed. B
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