In the Boca Raton newspaper one Sunday I saw an ad I thought was both amazing and disgusting: a local jeweler was renting Rolex watches by the month. A rented Rolex would provide a big status boost to an upward-striver of the “fake it till you make it” crowd. The store would even rent you one by the day. I guess that makes sense if the con game you’re working is one of short duration.
`Rolex Submariner watch, courtesy time4diamonds.comThe Rolex Submariner, second-least expensive watch in the Rolex line and retailing at $8100 to $9150, rents for $299 to $500 a month. You’ll need to post a four-figure security deposit.
An article in GQ magazine asks “You Rent Your Apartment. Why Not Your Watch?” One site advertises a rented watch as “An essential tool in every man’s wardrobe … express your personal style and ensure you always have the perfect watch for every occasion.”. Another says “Rent a luxury watch and stand out at any black-tie event.”
Boca was all about luxury. One day we saw two Rolls-Royces parked side-by-side at an upscale mall, one with a designer dog in the driver’s lap, drooling into a tea towel draped over the window sill. A local supermarket, Harris Teeter, had a cocktail bar and a jewelry counter you had to walk past on your way out.
At that time my manager at IBM was a gentleman of first name Lawton, who believed in having the best of everything. He wore expensive suits that always looked fresh from the cleaners, and a woody cologne I assume also was expensive. When you took a business trip with Lawton, you could always spot his Louis Vuitton luggage.
Louis Vuitton Horizon 55, $3400
Monogram detail
Lawton and I had joked about Boca and its superficiality, and when I showed him the ad from the paper, I said “Here’s a great example of everything that’s wrong and phony about Boca.” He said “Well, I have a Rolex, but I own it”, and took it off to show me. It was a nice piece of engineering, heavier than I would have guessed. I don’t remember for sure which sport he said, but I think he said he won it playing football. Fair enough, as far as I’m concerned. I felt embarrassed for bringing up the subject.
It was kind of funny that I sat across from him in meetings breathing his cologne for a year without ever noticing the Rolex sticking out of his French cuff. I’m usually more observant.
This is unrelated to watches, but once Lawton and I had to go to Lexington, Kentucky to visit IBM’s PC printer facility. When we went to get dinner that night, with me driving the rental because I was the junior person, we stopped for a red light at the bottom of a hill. A horse-drawn tourist carriage headed crossways to us was stopped at the crest. With the full moon directly behind him, one of the horses took an extended whiz, hitting the pavement in an explosion of flying, moonlit sparkles – almost like a small fireworks display. I said “Oh, Lawton, isn’t it beautiful?” but he didn’t answer. I don’t understand how he could not appreciate such a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle.
Franck Muller Color Dreams ladies’ watch, courtesy timeandtidewatches.com
Just for fun, here’s a pretty ladies’ watch I ran across while rummaging through the Rolexes. I don’t know if it’s possible to rent one, but you can buy one for $77,000 Australian dollars, $56,315 US. If you ever see a lady wearing one, tell her how beautiful it is and after a while ask if she’s seeing anyone. It never hurts to ask.
Early in January of 2020, I heard a television newsreader use the phrase “Roaring Twenties” to identify the new decade. It wasn’t her fault that it sounded dopey; she was only reading out the words written by some dopey newswriter. Please, anyone who’s trying to make “Roaring Twenties” happen, stop. The world already had a Roaring Twenties – it started a hundred years ago, it lasted ten years, and now it’s over. Based on what we’ve read in books and seen in a thousand black-and-white movies, it was a pretty good time to be alive, except of course for the last few months of the final year.
Maybe a few years from now, let’s say 2026, we can look back to see whether the preceding years were ‘roaring’ or not, then decide if we’ve been in “Roaring Twenties II” all along. Until then, if it really needs a name, let’s just call the decade we’re in now “the twenties”, or “the current decade”.
I have several photos of my parents taken in the 1920s, when they were in their twenties and in full flower. The photos are puzzling – my working-class parents are wearing what look like expensive clothes, and in one case, special clothes just to ride horses. So, at one time there was money to spare – what happened? Did they go bust in the Crash, as so many others did? I’ll never know. Meanwhile, I love this picture and seeing how happy they were then.
Later, during the 1930s and 1940s, my family wasn’t ‘poor’ – we were far from being Dorothea Lange subjects. Even after my father flew the coop in 1943 and my mother had to go back to work, we got along just fine, maybe occasionally borrowing a scuttle of coal from the neighbors until payday and our next coal delivery. After the next delivery, we returned the scuttle heaped as high as possible. That’s what neighbors do.
I once emailed my brother a long question about our family, and part of his answer was that there was “a lot of history there that we will never find out about because everybody just came and went without doing much talking.” Yep, that’s my family.
Mom and Pardo before the Crash. They would last another 10 or 15 years
After I got the job at IBM Yorktown, I needed a place to stay during the week until we found a house in the area. Someone in the personnel department had the job of finding leads to short-term housing. There were always people living near the lab who were happy to rent rooms to IBMers, for if you can’t trust an IBMer, who can you trust? With my leads came a document that basically said “IBM takes no responsibility for whatever terrible things may happen to you there”.
One of the leads was to a room with private bath in Katonah, a quiet town on the commuter line to New York City and about ten miles from the lab. The room was expensive for the time, $300 a month. On my way over to check it out, I saw lots of roads that looked good for running. When I got there, I saw that the house was in a green, wooded area next to one of New York City’s beautiful reservoirs. The owner, Mrs. Fraser, showed me the room, which had an easy chair, a TV, a table and a bed — what more could I want? It was on the lower level of the house, with a private entry by sliding doors facing the woods. When I drove up from New Jersey the next Monday morning, I brought my suits and my running gear and moved in.
Mrs. Fraser’s husband owned a business in Europe and spent most of his time there, so I didn’t meet him for a few weeks. I don’t know how he felt about having a non-dweebish IBMer in the house with his wife, but I know my rent helped out with the bills.
On the day I have come to think of as BPD, Bachelor Panic Day, there was a surprise, late-season snowstorm, and at 10 o’clock in the morning IBM sent everyone home. Virtual bachelors like myself, who now had nowhere to get lunch, rushed the vending machines, emptying them completely of junk food and canned soup. When I got back to the house, Mrs. Fraser invited me to have lunch with her and her daughter, home from school on a snow day. It was the first I’d ever been upstairs.
Blue Dolphin diner, Katonah Avenue
Normally, there were plenty of small restaurants and diners where I could stop for a meal after work. I had a bottle of port wine I bought to keep me company in the evening, and on general principle I hid it so that Mrs. Fraser wouldn’t see it when she cleaned. I went for a morning run twice a week, saw lots of deer and once got lost in Pound Ridge Reservation – not Hansel-and-Gretel lost, but lost enough that I had to flag down a passing car and ask for directions.
Avery Cemetery in Pound Ridge Reservation. Photo by Howard Dale
For the Fourth of July, I was worried about traffic and decided not to drive home. I drove over the state line into Connecticut, where the town of Wilton was having an old-fashioned Fourth, with beer, fireworks and a parade. Norman Rockwell would have been completely at home in Wilton.
House hunting
The way it worked out, I drove home to the shore on Friday night and back to the lab on Monday morning. The trip took two hours each way and could be difficult, especially the trip home Friday evening. But, at only twice a week for a few months, it was tolerable. During the week, I’d look at houses with a realtor, Irene. She was really sharp, and after a while understood what I liked and what I didn’t, and we generally didn’t waste each other’s time. If she showed me a house I thought was a strong “maybe”, I’d bring Mimi up to Westchester on the weekend so we could look at it together.
One place I was shown was a townhouse in Bedford Hills. It was nice, but as we were about to leave, I realized the kitchen had a clear view of the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, a maximum security prison surrounded by razor wire and only a quarter-mile away. When I said I wasn’t in love with the view, the seller’s agent reassured me by saying “Oh, they can’t get out.”
On one of our cross-Westchester drives to see a house, we passed a beat-up Volkswagen bus parked alongside the road, where a woman had set up a sort of flower stand. She may have had other flowers too, but there were roses, lots of them. Mimi said “Oooh, look at the roses!” I said “Yeah!” in agreement, and kept on driving.
Amelia’s not-beat-up flower truck, photo courtesy KT Sura
On the way back, she said “There’s that rose lady again!” and when I didn’t respond, she gave up and said “Can we get some?” Well, I can take a hint, and I pulled over. I bought a dozen roses from the lady, who was acting all goofy, as through love was in the air and I was buying flowers for her instead of from her. I got back in the car and handed the flowers over to Mimi, saying something like “Here ya go.” Yes, I am aware this all makes me sound like a jerk. Mimi didn’t say anything, and both she and the flower lady seemed disappointed in my presentation. For the rest of the day, Mimi called me “Mr. Romantic”.
Driving in New York
Seeing a car with Jersey plates driving around Westchester County was like a thumb in the eye to the locals there. Also annoyed sometimes were the State Police. One Saturday morning out house-shopping with Mimi, I was doing about 75 on one of the expressways, along with everyone else, when a cop pulled me over. Once it became clear he was going to write me a ticket no matter what, I said I couldn’t help but wonder why he hadn’t pulled over the black Jeep that just passed me doing about 90. He replied “I didn’t see him. I saw you.” After that, I decided it was time to become an official New York State resident, and switched my plates and driver’s license from New Jersey to New York.
Westchester signage. It’s actually pretty good
A lot of New Yorkers drive like idiots, and that includes both driving too fast and driving too slow. New York didn’t yet have the common-sense law that says “keep right except to pass”, so I’ll chalk up the slow-driving-in-the-left-lane idiocy as mostly the state’s fault.
After I switched over to New York plates, whenever I was back in Jersey on the Parkway, maintaining my speed in continuous traffic and passing in the left lane like I’ve been doing since I was seventeen, there was always some Jersey jerk coming up behind me and flashing his lights to get me to move over. By definition, if you have New York plates and are in the left lane, you are driving too slow. You just can’t win.
As I often say while recounting Everything That Happened, all good things must come to an end, and one day Mrs. Fraser knocked on my door and said their son would be coming home from school and they’d need the room by the end of the month.
I went back to the personnel department and told them I needed a new place to stay. They gave me the number of a woman in Peekskill who took in transient IBMers, Mrs. Garrison.
Mrs. Garrison
Peekskill is a working-class town on the Hudson River. Mrs. Garrison’s house looked old but was well maintained, with a long set of stairs leading up from the sidewalk. She appeared to be in her early 70s, and mentioned she was a widow. She began showing me around the first floor, starting with the front entryway. On the table there was a framed photograph of two men dressed to go fly fishing. She said the man on the left was her late husband Everett, and the other was Hoagy Carmichael. “Hoagy Carmichael?!” I said. Carmichael was one of America’s greatest singer-songwriters, hugely popular from the 1920s through the 1950s, and I reflexively crooned the opening of his theme song and greatest hit, Stardust:
Sometimes I wonder why I spend
the lonely night
Dreaming of a song…
Carmichael at work
Mrs. Garrison got all teary-eyed, and said “I never thought anyone as young as you would know that song.” I gave her my standard response to people that I somehow favorably surprise, a gentle “Well, I know some things.”
(FYI, Willie Nelson sings a lovely version of Stardust in his familiar, reedy voice.)
She showed me the room and I took it, even though I’d have to share the bathroom with two other IBMers who had rooms there, and pay a few dollars extra for electricity if I wanted the window air conditioner hooked up. Writing about charging for electricity makes her sound like a cheapskate, but she wasn’t; she was just trying to get by on her Social Security and some income from her roomers. She was a pleasure to chat with in the evenings, sitting in her ‘parlour’. The other IBM roomers were basically children, and had no interest in anything an old lady might have to say.
Classic parlour
Mimi and I eventually found a place we liked, an almost-new townhouse in the sleepy village of Croton-on-Hudson. The price was higher than we were comfortable with, and we tried to negotiate. The owner was an IBMer who was retiring, and he would not budge an inch. I think he expected the housing market would improve enough to meet his price if he just held out long enough. We hadn’t found anything else we liked, and now we had an offer to buy our house in New Jersey, so we bit the bullet and signed for the full price. The market was indeed improving, because when IBM cancelled my project eighteen months later and I transferred to Boca Raton, we priced the townhouse high, so high that Irene thought we were delusional, and made a profit.
Jumping back a bit, the day we moved into the townhouse I stopped by Mrs. Garrison’s to say goodbye, and I made sure to bring Mimi along to meet her. Mimi knew the words to Stardust too.
Took a walk on the boardwalk last week and the new wall/ bulwark/ whatever-you-call-it, plus the dune ‘enhancements’, have effectively destroyed any view of the beach (ocean itself is still in view) from the boards. I guess now even the locals will have to pay $8 to get a look.
I meant to post this months ago when I finally accepted I couldn’t be part of normal society without getting vaccinated. I gave up, lined up, and got it done.
I’m now waiting the two weeks it takes after the second shot to be considered “vaccinated”. But it’s starting to look like we’ll be getting booster shots for the rest of our lives, like getting a regular oil change. Covid rules and regulations seem to be made up as we go along, so we’ll see.
There used to be a great donut shop, Hoffman’s, on a side street near the railroad station here . They made long, solid custard-filled donuts they called Hindenburgs, or maybe Heidelbergs or Hindemiths, something like that, even longer than the “Long John” model pictured below. Sadly, Hoffman’s closed years ago due to a family squabble.
Once I can go out into the world again, I’m looking forward to walking into the surviving local bakery and getting a dozen donuts (not Dunkin’, although Dunkin’ is okay in a pinch).
I’m also looking forward to seeing the nice lady who works the counter there. I like how quietly appreciative she is when someone leaves a tip that’s more than just the few coins they get back in their change. Some people don’t leave anything. I’m looking forward to leaving her a generous tip as much as I am to getting some donuts. After all, we’ve been separated for almost two years.
I don’t understand why some people think it’s okay to leave a cheap tip, or no tip at all. They’ve probably never worked a service job. I have a low opinion of cheap tippers like our Canadian neighbor in Florida. He was a CPA and owned his own accounting practice, so why so cheap? What does it take to leave a little extra?
Maybe it’s a cultural thing. Here at the Jersey shore, we get a lot of Canadian tourists, and the locals have always considered the Quebec license-plate slogan “Je me souviens” to translate as “We don’t tip”.
In general I don’t like cheapskates, but I allow some leeway for girls. Girls don’t seem to consider what it’s like to work a crappy job like waiting tables or being a counterperson. Once I had lunch with two girls from work and we split the tab three ways. When we were leaving, I saw they had left lousy tips and I suggested they put more money down because we might want to go back there some day.
Mimi and I and some other couples from Insco went to a restaurant called “What’s Your Beef?”, where butchers help you pick out your own cut of meat from an old-fashioned butcher case. We agreed ahead of time we would split the tab. The bill was fairly stiff and I guess this one couple was economizing, because the husband (not the one that worked with us, the wife did) didn’t want to leave a tip. There wasn’t anything wrong with the service, it was fine, he just didn’t want to. We basically bullied/shamed him into leaving 15% on his share but he wasn’t happy about it. He said “let her dive for it” and dropped his tip into a half-full glass of water.
Well, I started out talking about donuts but ended up talking about tipping, sorry. Actually, I started out talking about the pandemic, but that was mostly a way to lead into talking about donuts and giving people decent tips for decent service.
“Long John” – custard filled, chocolate iced. Courtesy Prairie City Bakery, Vernon Hills IL
Oh, one more thing. Our government, that’s always giving money away to people we don’t know in other countries, says we should limit our mailman’s holiday tip to $25. Say what?! This is a guy who brings us our mail faithfully, never missing, six days a week, rain or shine, Try and keep me from giving him a decent tip. Merry Christmas, Henry!
Here are my new minimum requirements for anyone captioning film for US television.
1) Native English speaker
2) Minimum 60 years of life experience
3) Minimum IQ of 100
4) Broad knowledge of US history and pop culture
5) Good hearing
I could add more, but you get the idea. Here’s a small example of what’s wrong with today’s captioning.
I was watching Lansky, the 2021 version starring Harvey Keitel. Lansky is about the life and times of Meyer Lansky, often called “The Mob’s Accountant”, and his involvement in the early days of what the press then called the National Crime Syndicate. The film starts off slowly, with little violence of interest, and no new insight into 20th century crime or criminals. As I followed along with the captions, one line of dialog stopped me.
In a New York City nightclub, Lansky and a few other gangsters are sitting at the bar, just generally shooting the breeze. In the background, a woman gives out tickets as new arrivals appear and hand her their hats and coats. According to the captions, one gangster opens a new subject of conversation with “Hey, do you see that half-Czech girl over there?”
Or did a computer do this? That would make it even worse.
“All we ask is that an actor on the stage live in accordance with natural laws.” — Konstantin Stanislavski
Here are a few things that bug me when I see them in a movie. Allow me to get them off my chest.
First off, let’s think about things that are heavy – luggage and packages and other things that get carried, thrown, or otherwise moved from one place to another. The audience can tell the difference between a full suitcase and an empty one, simply by seeing how the actor interacts with it. The audience will not be fooled.
Think about the great actors who have played Willy Loman, the self-deluded traveling salesman in Death of a Salesman. Willy carried cases of samples to show his customers. Arthur Miller never told us what Willy sold; some people speculate it was only lingerie and socks, but whatever it was, Willy’s sample cases were big and packed tight full, and they were HEAVY, you could tell by the way they pulled his arms straight down and rounded his shoulders and put a bend in his back. That wasn’t acting, it was gravity.
Willy Loman didn’t bob along swinging his arms as he walked, he couldn’t. If you are putting on a production of Death of a Salesman or some other work where there’s luggage or bags of ransom money or anything else that has real weight, you need to go and get 60 or 80 or 100 pounds of yesterday’s newspapers to make that weight be real.
Relatedly, in the movie Three Kings, each of the stolen gold bars is roughly the size of a carton of cigarettes, and the actors handle the bars as though gold and tobacco weigh the same. THEY DO NOT. A bar of gold that size would weigh about 60 pounds, so your actors shouldn’t be handing them off to each other as though they’re shaking hands. As a moviegoer, how am I supposed to suspend disbelief when I see something like that on the screen?
The f-word: Whatever happened to the word “hell”? Where has it gone? Scene: A young suburban husband comes home and sees his wife is working on, say, a semi-abstract painting. It is not very good. Instead of having him jokingly ask “What the hell is that? “, or even the softer “What the heck is that?”, he asks “What the fuck is that?” and the joking is over. Point: The f-word does not fit in everywhere. Unless you’re Quentin Tarantino or some other writer with a great ear for dialog, which you are probably not, take it easy with the f-word. Also, remember that in the real world, a person of lesser authority will cut back on f-words when a person of greater authority is present.
Some of the best dialog ever written comes from The Sopranos, but even those writers go over the top sometimes. I have known some real-life lowlifes, and in general they did not use more than one f-word in a single sentence, or more than ten in a single speech. IT JUST DOESN’T RING TRUE. Getting back to “hell”, when’s the last time you heard a Sopranos character say “hell”?
I suggest not trying to write working-class dialog until ypu have worked a while as a member of the working class. Listen closely. Make notes.
Read your dialog out loud. Can you imagine a real person, in the real world, ever saying those words to anyone? People don’t just spout words; they assemble sentences that make sense, it’s not poetry, but it’s an ability we begin developing at age two, and we know when it sounds fake. Does it sound fake? REWRITE. Does it lack a realistic pace and cadence? REHEARSE SOME MORE.
Vincent and Jules have a conversation on their way to work. Courtesy miramax.com
In-car conversation: when we see two actors having a conversation in a moving car, we know the car is actually on a low-slung trailer being towed through the scenery by a professional. The actor “driving” isn’t really driving at all, but he needs to LOOK like he’s driving. That means not engaging with the passenger as if they’re seated in a living room somewhere. Drivers, drive! Adjust the steering wheel to stay in your lane. Turn the wheel as you get towed around a corner. Yes, glance at your companion, but keep your eyes on the road, so the audience isn’t always anticipating a collision.
Lastly, our mothers taught us to look for traffic before we cross the street. Teach your actors to do the same. I always think “BAM!” and expect a plot twist in 3 – 2 – 1 when I see an actor walk into the street without looking.
This article is sort of an addendum to Please, no more empty luggage, where I list careless or sloppy things that directors allow, and say “Here are a few things that bug me when I see them in a movie. Allow me to get them off my chest.”
There are several things that can show us an actor is not actually dead, breaking the movie magic; looking dead isn’t just squeezing your eyes shut and clenching your jaw. In fact, those things only serve to prove you’re still alive, and probably not a good actor. First, make yourself comfortable. You don’t want to have to adjust your underwear halfway through the scene.
To look truly dead, relax, completely. Let gravity happen. Let your body lose its tension and fall in on itself. Relax your facial muscles and let your face sag. Let your mouth fall open, let your tongue loll as gravity wills it. Let your eyes go ‘soft’ – look at a single spot on the wall without bringing it into focus. There’s a YouTube video called Acting Deadwhere actor Doug Fahl gives extensive tips on how to play dead on stage or screen, including simple methods of breath control.
I never saw a truly convincing on-screen strangulation until Tony Soprano killed Ralph Cifaretto. Ralph had it coming, both for engineering the racetrack fire that killed Pie-O-My and for beating to death Tracee, Tony’s young friend from the Bada Bing. As Tony strangles Ralph, he shouts in his face “She was a beautiful, innocent creature!”, leaving us to wonder whether he means Tracee or the horse.
When the fight ends, Ralph is dead, and certainly looks it. Not for the faint of heart, here’s a YouTube video of Ralph’s murder.
Hey, special-effects people, here’s an idea: how about a neck wrapper made of flesh-tone Play-Doh so we can see the killer’s fingers really digging in?
If a script requires a captive be kept quiet, remember that gagging someone with a rag or article of clothing does not work in real life, no matter how you do it. “Mmmmglurrrgg!” Hello, we can still hear you!
This leads us to duct tape.
Lifetime Movie Network is the primary offender against duct-tape reality. On Lifetime at least twice a week, weeping kidnap victims wear a neat rectangle of duct tape barely wide enough to cover their mouth. Is there a shortage of duct tape? I’ve never kidnapped anyone, but when I do, they’re going to get at least two yards of duct tape wrapped around their head to keep them quiet.
If I ever get to be a Lifetime director, we’ll have rolls and rolls of fake duct tape, standard gray on one side but no adhesive on the other, and you better believe you’re going to see the bad guy walking around his prisoner at least twice, tightly wrapping their head, mouth and hair. Sorry if this disturbs anyone, remember it’s only a movie.
Neptune Blue 2020 Kia Soul EX, somewhere in Colorado
My car was recently in the shop but I had some appointments to get to. Based on everything I’d read and heard, Uber was the answer. I was a new rider, although I’d installed the app on my cell phone “just in case” two years ago. Using it was a little confusing at first, but I managed to schedule a ride to my favorite destination, LabCorp, without embarrassing myself.
Uber sent me a text twenty minutes before my ride arrived, then again about five minutes before. My driver was a pleasant woman of about 40, not that that makes any difference. I sat in the back on the right-hand side, as recommended by Uber and common sense for everyone’s safety in these days of the pestilence. When you schedule a ride, the app asks you to check a box stating that both you and the driver will be masked up. I wore the shoulder belt on all my rides, because I’ve seen some highway carnage.
That first ride was in a small, older Honda, or similar, that rattled going over every bump. When arranging my rides I chose the least expensive, smaller-car option. The cars were decent; they were all clean, inside and out, and fairly new. I used to laugh at the television ads selling the undersized, semi-fluorescent Kia Soul, but my ride in one like the one above was the smoothest and most comfortable of the seven rides I had during the week.
When you’re ready to go home, just select “Now” for the pickup time and your next ride will soon appear. I never had to wait more than ten minutes — maybe there are a lot of people trying to make a living, or just earn some extra money, driving for Uber these days.
My rides were all short, under five miles, with fares ranging from $13 to $17. Uber takes a variable booking fee of 15 to 20% out of the fare, and the driver gets the rest. The charges go on the credit card you signed up with; you’ll get an email receipt later in the day.
At the end of each trip, the app asks you to rate your ride on a scale of 1 to 5. It’s rare for anyone to rate their ride less than 5, resulting in a sort of grade inflation, with every driver carrying a 5 rating or just a shade under. My rides were all 5’s anyway; the drivers drove safely and were friendly but not chatty. In general, a driver will only chat if you initiate the conversation. I thought for a moment about rating my rattle-y first ride less than 5, but the owner-driver already knows her car isn’t brand new, so what’s the point.
When you are asked to rate the ride, the app also asks if you want to tip the driver. I prefer to do that in cash rather than through the app. I try to tip enough that they’ll be happy to see me again. The fact is, most Uber riders don’t tip at all, and the drivers don’t expect it. I think when a driver picks up an old guy like me, they expect it even less. They seem surprised when they do get a tip, and genuinely happy if it’s halfway decent.
I used to consider crossword puzzles a waste of time, but now that I’ve got lots of time to waste, I enjoy them.
Instant feedback on an iPad: black letters are correct, red ones are wrong. Courtesy bestcrosswords.com
I was never crazy about newspaper crossword puzzles. Too much erasing and let’s-try-this, sometimes looking for the answer page to cheat, or worse, having to turn the puzzle page upside-down to see the answers. With instant feedback, when you enter a wrong letter it shows up in red, meaning keep trying, or come back later when the neighborhood is better populated.
I wanted something to kill time while giving my brain something to do besides read and watch television. I Googled for best crosswords online. The top result was a site called bestcrosswords.com. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but there are companies on the internet claiming to be “the best” at something that actually are not. These guys are.
They have lots of high-quality, free puzzles and they add more every day. If you’re the sort of person who cheats, just click/tap “Reveal letter” or “Reveal word” – it’s up to you. Personally, I’m not going to spend an hour looking up or trying to remember “The instrument George played on Norwegian Wood“. (I cheated, it was the SITAR.)
You can solve for free. If you like the site, for $4.95 a month you can get rid of the ads, save your settings between sessions, and more. I won’t list every feature; go over there and look around. I don’t get a commission on this, I just happen to like the site.
The site’s puzzle writers have different personalities. My favorite is Barb Olson, who is Canadian and writes puzzles that are fun and interesting, and on occasion Canada-centric. At first these annoyed me, but I’m learning a lot about Canada. Right now I’m learning the province names from left to right – there’s British Columbia, Alberta, some other ones, then Nova Scotia.
I don’t know any prime ministers or hockey stars or famous Mounties, but it’s fun trying to fill in their names from the words that cross them. Canadian surnames are pretty vanilla, and there seem to be only about twenty or thirty of them, so “Smith”, “Wilson” and “McKenzie” are always good guesses.
A Barb Olson puzzle last year had a clue “Explosive that can ruin a dinner party”, with solution FBOMB. I recently looked in the archives for a copy to send someone, but it had been disappeared.
…but Garfield the cat. Someone asked me if I read Garfield; I said that sometimes when I’m reading the comic page in the morning, I’ll read the first panel, but then I realize I’m reading Garfield.
