Rich Mintz  

Yes, it’s here again — the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament begins tonight and runs through the weekend at the Brooklyn Bridge Marriott. About 800 of the best crossword puzzle solvers from all over the world, including yours truly, will be competing for standings, recognition, and prizes (of no material value). 90% of the roughly 100 people on Earth who create crosswords in English will also be there, along with more press than you might expect.

For those who are joining us late, I ranked 364th in the world in 2007, 257th in 2008, and 189th in 2009. My goal this year is to break 150. I’m afraid rising much closer to 100 will be very difficult, as at that point you start to enter the range of the brilliant misfits who dominate the world of puzzling, which (for all my many charms) I am afraid I am not one of. (Or am I?)

After an informal social puzzle competition on Friday night, the winnowing begins in earnest on Saturday, with 6 competitive, timed puzzles (in a hotel ballroom set up like the room you took the SATs in), scored according to an arcane formula (which every single participant could explain to you from memory) that balances speed against accuracy. One final qualifying puzzle follows on Sunday. By convention, puzzle 2 is difficult, puzzle 5 is absolute and obscene torture, and puzzle 6 is an entertaining schmaltzfest by New York magazine crossword constructor Maura Jacobson, who has had a puzzle in every competition since the very first. Interim rankings are posted two or three times during the day on Saturday, so that the obsessives in the competition (i.e., everybody) can micro-obsess about their micro-standings throughout the whole damn weekend.

The top three by rank in each of Divisions A and B will competitively solve an eighth championship puzzle on a whiteboard up on a stage on Sunday beginning around noon, with live play-by-play announcing by NPR’s Neal Conan and crossword constructor Merl Reagle. The championship puzzle has three different sets of clues, of different levels of difficulty, for the three divisions. In Division A, college prodigy Tyler Hinman, professional crossword puzzle contestant Trip Payne, bookish “Wordplay” star/fashion plate Ellen Ripstein, and eternal Catholic schoolboy/crossword constructor Francis Heaney are all favored. (Yes, there is such a thing as crossword tournament VIPs; see “briliant misfit,” above, which most of them would consider a compliment.) This event is not technically open to the public, but security is not tight by that point in the tournament — if you’re in New York, adventurous, and up early on Sunday, it’s quite an experience. (Just don’t expect to see me on the stage.)

Perhaps not surprisingly, crossword puzzle people are very heavy drinkers — I wouldn’t be surprised if tomorrow was the busiest night of the year in the hotel bar.

If you’d like to try your luck, puzzle #1 from last year’s tournament (PDF) is here. If you think you’re good enough to place in the top half of the Tournament pack, you should be able to complete this puzzle with no errors within about 10 minutes without breaking a sweat.

We had a long, long, long drive back from Boston today — counting stops, 6 hours and 40 minutes. We left the city in moderate snow, and hit another even heavier part of the storm system just south of Hartford. Aside from the stop midway at the freeway-close Athenian Diner III in Milford, Connecticut, it was almost unbearable, especially the last 30 miles of I-91 which hadn’t yet been plowed.

We stayed in the Liberty Hotel on Beacon Hill, which is built around and into the old Charles Street Jail, closed in 1991. They did a nice job in the conversion — historically and architecturally respectful, accessible, whimsical without being cheeseball. They named the bar “Clink.” How cool is that?

About Montreal, not much to say except that it still rocks, and it’s even more fun when it isn’t all slushy (as now) than it is when it is (as when we were there a year ago).

From Rob Davis, the leader of Ogilvy’s interactive video practice:

I don’t believe in “viral videos.” The “post ‘n’ pray” fantasy of putting a video on YouTube and having it magically spread to a zillion users ignores the importance of engagement and placement. I guarantee you that the million-views-a-day video has good content and at least one of three other elements: a channel with an existing audience, a strategic placement (paid or earned), and the appropriate level of engagement.

Hear, hear. Dear Interweb: more of this kind of sensibleness, please…

hat tip: Chris Royalty

Marketing consultant and woodworker Greg Payette wants to bring back American manufacturing — and given that I know he’s a New England boy, I’m sure his first concern is states like Connecticut and Rhode Island, which had a 150-year run as manufacturing centers but are finding it hard to compete nowadays. Or take New Jersey, which spent over a century making everything under the sun (remember “Trenton Makes, the World Takes”?). From Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, I think I learned more about the history of the glove industry in Newark than I know about industries like printing and advertising, which I actually work on the fringes of.

Making things with the hands provides a different kind of pride than you get from making things with the brain (or from managing other people, from afar, who are making things with their hands). Handcrafting — even in the context of a factory assembly line — gives you an indisputable sense of accomplishment. You can argue about whether your novel is finished or whether your painting is good enough, but once your factory has produced a pallet of Johnson rods, they’re done, no question — and you did it. The analogy from my own professional life is direct mail (as compared to online fundraising and other channels that don’t produce anything tangible). Mail is physical, it has a look and a feel and a smell, and the responses pile up in a heap where they can be visually assessed and counted and held in the hand. I miss that sometimes.

I don’t want to handwave about the ease of “bringing manufacturing back,” or even about whether it’s feasible to an old-timey degree, in a globalized economy driven by the pursuit of tiny incremental efficiencies. But wherever it is feasible (due to some accident of geographic protectionism, or a tiny quality advantage that the market is willing to support, or just a bullheaded determination to buy local), it should be encouraged — because in leaving behind the old-fashioned ways of making physical things, we’ve left behind something psychological, too.

Matthew Yglesias thinks that Senators get to wiggle out of responsibility for the disruption they cause through inaction and delay. To place a hold on a nomination, he suggests, a Senator should have to stand on his head in the Senate chamber and formally pronounce words like “I, Senator Richard Mintz of New York, wish to postpone a vote on [name] until tomorrow, February 6, 2010″ — and then do it again tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that, or else the hold expires. He would graciously allow the Senator “an assist from staff if necessary,” at least on the headstand part. Now that’s a government reform I could get behind!

Ta-Nehisi Coates put in a plug recently for Yale Professor David W. Blight’s lectures on the Civil War, available free on video. Putting these on my to-watch list…

Regarding Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto — not much to say except it’s very much worth reading. Part of the reason I let the blog go for over a week and backed off from social media is that I finished this book, and was reminded thereby that the human encounters I was putting off in order to spend time online are the whole point.

Technology can enhance human contact and creative expression, or can deflect the one and stifle the other, which is what Lanier fears is happening in various ways acknowledged and unacknowledged. In particular, enthusiasm for the technological future, Lanier says, encourages us to reduce ourselves in order to comply with the inherent limits and non-continuousness of technology, rather than envisioning smarter and better technology that can keep up with us. I can’t say he’s wrong.

Via PaidContent.org — Apple has warned developers that if they use location-based content, they must use it primarily in “beneficial” ways, not primarily for ad targeting. Not clear how this will be enforced or even checked.