Guest crossword by Joon Pahk

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Surprised it took this long to get a guest puzzle from Joon Pahk, one of my buddies who I talk to, oh, just about every day it seems. Do we talk about puzzles every day? Not necessarily. There are voluminous convos about sports. But I’ll spare you those details and just stick with the word-related stuff (mostly) in the interview. Lets do this.

BEQ: How’d you get into puzzles?

Joon: My wife’s aunt gave us the “Wordplay” DVD for christmas 2007. We watched it and I thought, “I bet I could do that.” Turns out I could, and since then, I’ve done practically nothing but. I’m not sure I have any particular inspirations—plenty of constructors whose work I admire, of course, but nobody who really made me think, “I want to make puzzles!” Mostly I’m glad this is my hobby and not my profession. It’s fun, but it seems like a tough way to make a living.

BEQ: You’ve told me once that you like to really shine with your cluing. Extrapolate, please.

Joon: To me, a puzzle with a totally tame theme and so-so fill can still be really fun to solve if the clues really shine, so I like to polish them up to that level, if I can. Occasionally it takes a while to really come up with a good one, but it’s usually worth it. Probably my favorite clue i’ve ever come up with was {Raising support?} for PUSH-UP BRA. As Patrick Berry noted, amazing things can happen if you play around with the apparent part of speech.

BEQ: You used to play a lot of bridge, and now you’re established in the crossword world. Can you check something for me, are you really 75 years old?

Joon: Found me out, did you? Well, no matter. I can still fool everybody else. Asians can age remarkably gracefully. (Well, unless they’re over 7’5″.)

BEQ: One time when I was over at your house, I saw your son Sam “speed solve” a jigsaw puzzle. I was thinking, he’s just like his dad. Has he picked up any more puzzles since then?

Joon: The jigsaws seem to have been a phase. Now he’s really into math. Do other 3-year-olds like solving worksheets of arithmetic problems, 2nd-grade style?

[His sister] Sarah, meanwhile, is now approaching the age Sam was when he got really into puzzles. We’ll see if she takes to them the same way.

BEQ: I hear you wrote some on-line word game.

Joon: My friends and I used to play a simple game we called “Dictionary.” One person thinks of a word, and everybody else tries to guess it. The guessers can only guess lowercase dictionary words, and the teller says whether the word is before or after the guess alphabetically. It’s a decent game for long car rides, if you have nerdy friends. Once when I was bored, I decided to try playing this game on my Facebook wall, and it got kind of out of control. There were like 50 comments in 10 minutes. That’s when I realized that a computer could easily do the part where it tells you before or after. I’m a pretty handy programmer, so I taught myself CGI [Common gateway interface] and coded it up. Every day there are two words you can play: one chosen by me, and one chosen by my college roommate, Mike.

BEQ: I’m thinking of a word right now. Any idea what it is?

Joon: Lecithin?