Solving the Puzzle

A typical crossword puzzle.

Every once in a while I catch a segment of a radio program on National Public Radio that feature a “Puzzle Master” named Will Short. I’m not sure where else Mr. Short might appear with his puzzles, but I’m sure placing his name in a Google search can solve that puzzle. If you’re wondering why I didn’t do this for you that puzzle, too, can be solved by looking for the diminutive italicized print at the end of this blog. In these segments a phone-in contestant tries to solve the puzzle Mr. Short poses over the airwaves. Those players fortunate enough to decipher enough of the problems win a prize—the latest compilation of Mr. Short’s puzzles.

Growing up the most popular form of puzzle was the crossword puzzle. These brainteasers designed to challenge
the developing mind appeared in the original primary school newspaper, The Weekly Reader. Their other location was inside the Green Sheet, a four-page insert containing comics and other important features printed on green paper inside the Milwaukee Journal. Children whose parents moved beyond Priscilla’s Pop, Family Circus and Pogo and attempted to use their minds to ponder what letters fit in seven across or eleven down were more likely to accept the challenge of unraveling the riddles life sets in their path than those whose parents threw out the paper once they laughed at Ziggy for once again doing something even more ridiculous than the idiotic things they did.

Current progress toward completion
of this 550 piece puzzle.

A new form of puzzle using numbers in place of words came into my world sometime during the past quarter century. It is called Sudoku and consists of nine 3X3 boxes arranged in a tic-tac-to fashion. Supplied with a certain group of numbers, the objective is to fill in the empty boxes with numbers so that each box, row and column contains every number from 1 to 9. Although my mathematical processing skills lag behind my verbal processing, I find the challenge fascinating. So much so, that up to this point in time I have avoided taking on these puzzles even once. While some challenges promote a sense of well being others prove addictive. In a thoroughly satirical move I have chosen to let you decide which is which (answers may vary depending on the age, intellectual skills and birth order of each participating reader).

What the puzzle will look like when complete.

For many of us, however, the word puzzle connotes a particular form. Yes, that’s right, the one where a bunch of pieces are jumbled and the player attempts to put them back in the right order to form a design or picture. Again, looking back the ones we solved as children were mounted on boards with an imprint of the outlines of each piece, making it simpler for the child to match the shape of the piece with the marks on the board. Often referred to as jigsaw puzzles because the curvy contours of the pieces appear to have been cut by such a tool, versions for the young are limited to between six and fifty fragments. For the rest of us, the manufacturers of these conundrums present photographs shattered into 137,468,205 shapes to arrange in proper order without a board.

At this point, some readers are nodding their heads but wondering what event motivated this topic. Well, you know the line in the Bob Seeger song, “Take those old records off the shelf”? Well, even if you don’t, I decided to pull an old puzzle—probably 20 years or more—off the shelf. It’s a 550-piece photograph of four young men with somber faces and mop-top hairdos wearing black suits and ties. The picture is iconic in its portrayal of a band whose music lives on long after half of them are dead, but the shroud of darkness in their attire and the blurred background make this puzzle as difficult to solve as the legacy that bears their name, The Beatles.