Strange Brew by John Deering for February 22, 2025

Give him a “mammal gram”.

These “times” are a ….. changin’

;-)

It irritates me when I pickup a crossword puzzle book that says edited by Charles Schulz and I find the puzzles are for crap. He was a god.

That coffee mug … Miami Dolphins … good one!

Real ‘cross word’ puzzles are for crabby people.

Won’t matter the Vogons are on their way.

My wife thrives on them. For her, it’s Will Shortz or nothing!

I have trouble DOING crossword puzzles. I don’t know how people MAKE them.

Although I do have to admit, it does increase my vocabulary with useless words.

When he’s stuck, it really smarts.

It’s not the Sunday crossword that’s the toughest, it’s just the biggest. The Saturday crossword is the booger.

Takes too much time for that puzzle. I like quicker games, like how many words can you make with seven chosen letters!

Reminds me of one of my favorite lines from that man,

““For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’

It has less to do with intelligence than the ability to remember the conventions associated with certain clues. There are many that are always associated with one word.

NY Times crossword puzzles might as well be the game Jeopardy for me.

I take puzzle books along when I know I’m going to be waiting and I’m tired of looking at my phone. What irks me is the “pop culture” words they throw in, like “Star of some 80s TV show I vaguely remember but have no idea who was in it.” Sometimes I’ve looked up a name I don’t recognize and discovered it was a celebrity from the 1930s or a politician from the 1950s and it makes me wonder when the puzzle was created…