Pitched Battle Between Pencil-Pushing Dweebs
Forget the conflict in the Middle East; there's a more pressing struggle being waged right here at home. It's a fight between the crossword geeks and the Sudoku nerds. In a revealing American Prospect essay, Matt Gaffney limns the hostilities between the warring tribes. The Crossworders look down upon the Sudokites, finding their puzzles to be inelegant, mindless, and, worst of all, computer-generated. The Sudokites, on the other hand, can hardly hear the complaints of the Crossworders, insulated as they are behind giant walls of money. The double-dealing Judas of the piece is NYT crossword editor Will Shortz, who is now making a small fortune slapping his name on Sudoku compilations. How this battle will play out and what it says about the state of American gaming is unclear (who, for instance, speaks for those who prefer the jumble?), but we're pretty sure there's a name for the kind of person getting so upset about it: It's a four-letter word that starts and ends with a "t," and is the kind of vulgarity you may see on certain t-shirts.
