ACROSS LITE PUZZLE: [ “I’LL HAVE THE #2”] 
PROGRAM: [Across Lite]

PROGRAM: [Java]

PRINTOUT PUZZLE: [ “I’LL HAVE THE #2”]

PROGRAM: [Adobe Acrobat]

If you ever have a conversation with me about my job, let me tell you now it’s going to be fairly rote. The same concepts/ideas/exchanges keep coming up. I’ve said the same stories for over a decade now. It’s cool. I’m used to it. One question I get asked a lot is how do I come up with my themes? And my usual responses are: “I dunno,” “lot’s of drugs” or “I just rip off Patrick Berry.” Laughs generally ensue. The conversation moves onto something more interesting.

Sometimes, however, the conversation doesn’t stop there. There are some who offer me unsolicited theme ideas. Typically, these brave and creative souls are people who’ve never solved a puzzle before in their lives. The results can get interesting. Their suggestions fall into one of two categories:

1. “I found a great word the other day you might consider using in a puzzle. CAUDAL. It means ‘having a tail.'”
2. “I was reading ‘People’ the other week about the Gosselins and was thinking maybe you could make a puzzle about them.”

The answer to those are: I’m only using CAUDAL in a pinch, and a “Jon and Kate Plus 8” puzzle probably wouldn’t be much fun to make or solve.

(Quick side bar: I made a point of encouraging the readers of this blog to give me suggestions for themes/entries, and I stand by it! Do not stop giving them to me! I love what’s come in over the transom! Okay back to rant.)

The reason I’m bringing this up is that today’s puzzle comes from an unlikely but seemingly untapped resource: my wife Liz. She came up with the germ of it last weekend, and it’s now developed into what we have here. This isn’t the first time I’ve got theme ideas from her. But what’s interesting is that she has ZERO interest in solving and/or making crosswords herself. But she’s got the one thing a lot of unsolicited ideas lack. She has a sense for what makes a puzzle fun. There may be another puzzlemaker in the family just yet!

Having said that, I cannot reciprocate. There is no appropriate time that I can offer suggestions for Liz’s work. If I did, I would sound like the people in the above examples. (For the record: she’s a research psychologist, specifically, childhood development, which might explain the juvenile humor in the puzzle). If she wants to continue to be taken seriously, and she damn well does, we’d best leave the science thinking to her.

Okay, share the puzzle. New one on Monday.

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