Prominent puzzler presents evening of games
Will Shortz tries hard not to sound omniscient, but sometimes he can't help creating the impression that he is.
Shortz has edited The New York Times crossword puzzle since 1993, and the first thing he checks before publication is the accuracy of the clues and the answers.
In the process, he has absorbed a lot of information, most of it in tiny bits of trivia.
"All knowledge is useful, I think," he said Wednesday evening at the Flourtown Country Club.
Indeed, he said, the crossword puzzle is the ideal entertainment for the 21st century. It might be a low-tech pastime, he said, requiring no other tool than a pencil, but because it consists only of brief clues and one-line answers, it appeals to anyone with a short attention span.
Shortz drove to Flourtown from his home in New York Wednesday to appear at a political fundraiser for Doug Heller, the Democrat running for Springfield Township commissioner in Ward 1 against Republican Roy Hanshaw Jr.
Heller is himself a former puzzle editor, and he and Shortz have been friends for 30 years.
Guests at the country club sat down to a buffet dinner and tried to solve a crossword with a Springfield theme as they ate. The evening ended with a screening of "Wordplay," a documentary film about Shortz and the crossword puzzle competition he founded.
In between, Shortz acted as quizmaster in the sort of puzzle he plays every Sunday morning on National Public Radio's program "Weekend Edition Sunday Morning."
He selected a member of the gathering at random and gave her a series of clues. The answer to each was a two-word phrase beginning with the letters D.H.
A long-shot political candidate?
Dark Horse.
A Bruce Willis movie that spawned several sequels?
"Die Hard."
An opening in a bakery?
Donut hole.
And so on. The player, Gina Sullivan of Philadelphia, performed well, though at one point Shortz had to caution the audience not to shout out the answers.
"If you know the answer," he said, "smile, nudge your neighbor, make sure they know you know."
"God, that was embarrassing," Sullivan said afterward, repeating a sentiment surely felt by many of Shortz's radio contestants.
While his victims may struggle with his crosswords and anagrams, wordplay comes naturally to Shortz. He sold his first crossword when he was 14 years old, he said, and ideas for games suggest themselves to him constantly, without struggle on his part. He sees them everywhere, he said.
But the ability to create a good puzzle does not necessarily make a great player. A good editor must be at least a fair solver, he said, but in reality, the two skills are actually mirror opposites of each other.
"I wouldn't win my crossword championship," Shortz said.
He has seen puzzles he could never solve, but they are easy to write, and in any event, they are not very interesting, he said. All it takes to create an unsolvable puzzle is a talent for obscure, incomprehensible clues.
The best puzzles, he said, as his eyes began to glitter, are the ones that tease you, push you beyond your routine mental boundaries, take you to the limit.
"That's the sweet spot I try to get as an editor," he said.