Oh hey, it's the banana peel in your purse because you can't find a trash can Alleyward. And this is ologies. This is a podcast about things this week crossword puzzles, really crossword puzzles. There's anology for this, Hell yeah, there is so. An enigmatologist is someone who studies and writes word or math or logic puzzles, and enigma comes from the Greek word for a dark saying or riddle or a tale, and enigmatology. It's a real discipline. It's a
real thing. It was found in nineteen seventy four by a guy named Will Schwartz, who created his own major in puzzles at Indiana University. And that guy, Will Schwartz is now the head of the New York Times Crossword And this guest has been a friend for years. He's always been a friend who was cooler than me, smarter than me by a long shot, and capable of pulling acts of extreme evil with the gifts he has, but
is actually a really solid dude. And he graduated from Harvard University, little place named Harvard, where he did a thesis on magic and has written crosswords for The New York Times since two thousand and six, and he also launched this interactive one man show called The Enigmatist, which just had a run last year at the Geffen Playhouse in LA and I caught the show, and I've wanted to have him on for years, but we were both traveling and I was taking care of my dad this summer,
so we just met up at his home in the Winding Hills above Hollywood and we posted up in his living room. But before we get to the conversation, a quick thanks to everyone at Patreon. Hi, thanks for supporting the show at cost a dollar or more a month, and you can submit questions that is at patreon dot com. Slash Ologies Merch is also available at ologiesmerch dot com, including some brand new Spirit of Health or Goblin Damned merch inspired by the Vamprology episodes, So get yourself some
of that. And thanks to everyone who is subscribing and rating and reviewing. I read all the reviews in this recent one by Kansas just got Geyer, who wrote, I've been listening to this every day while I clean houses for my job, and I'm learning so much. I love it. It's making me consider switching up my major to do some ecology alongside animation. Who knows, but anyway, thank you for the show. It truly takes my job from tedious to tantalizing. Thank you, Kansas just got gayer. And also
congrats to Kansas on having you there because you seem cool. Okay, onto the conversation with magician, puzzle maker, puzzle solver, speaker, performer, brainiac, friend and enigmatologist David Kwang. You to check your bike is if you can say, I love that you have a Rubik's cube going already.
I'm David Quong. He him.
I've known you for quite some time yeah, years, Yeah, and this episode.
We've made at the Magic Castle, right.
We did meet it the Magic Castle. Holy shit, I forgot. How hard is it to become a magician at the Magic Castle.
It's quite prestigious. There are a lot of people that aspire to come to la and perform there for a week, and you have to audition your material and then there are the magician members and you do have to do a fifteen minute or three trick routine to a committee to be accepted as a magician member.
Okay, so quick aside, The Magic Castle is a restaurant and a private club in the hills right above the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and it was built in nineteen oh nine, and it has turrets and stained glass and a dress code involving sport coats and you can only get in through a personal invite from a magician. And inside it's red carpet and brass fixtures. Dinner smells like gravy there, and there are magic shows happening in little theaters and corners all over the place. It's truly surreal.
And David has been an approved and esteemed member for thirteen years. So yes, there is a semi secret cabal of Hollywood magicians and he is one of them. Which came first for you magic or puzzles.
Magic came first, at least the home videos show me doing things when I was about six seven years old. I think every kid has that phase thinking a magic trick set. And then puzzles came from my mother, who is the history of professor. So there was this love for word games and scrabble oh triple word Score. And then it wasn't until much later in life where I decided to fuse those two things together. So in twenty ten I threw a thirtieth birthday for myself. That tells
you how old I am. And I and through a party at the Magic Castle and decided I wanted to do a trick for everybody, and I came up with this Crosser puzzle routine that has become my signature effect ever since.
It's absolutely mind blowing. I watched you perform this at the Geffen, and I think about it often. I still am like, how did he do it?
So?
I saw his one man show, The Enigmatist last winter during its run at the Geffen, and it was the most intellectually engaging live show I've ever been to Puzzles on puzzles on puzzles for the audience to solve, and it was thrilling to learn I sucked so bad at them. But David has talked about puzzles and magic publicly before, during his twenty fourteen TED talk.
Puzzles and Magic. I work in what most people think are two distinct fields, but I believe they are the same. I am both a magician and a New York Times Crossford puzzle constructor, which basically means I've taken the world's two nerdiest hobbies and combined them into one career. There's a great tradition of puzzles and magic overlapping. A lot of the books from the turn of the last century.
The magic books have a puzzle section, and then there are famous magicians that Martin Gardner and the mathematicians or mathemagicians, if you will, that feature the overlap of numbers and probability and data and shuffling playing cards, and there's a great tradition in it. For me, it was more that the light bulb turned on that I could distinguish myself, differentiate myself from everybody else in the field by doing a different type of magic.
Have you ever gotten drunk and accidentally told someone how it works?
Not? Really, it depends what it is. I'll say this, My approach to magic is already one that's fairly transparent. The show that you saw at the Geffen, The Enigmatist starts with me revealing how a trick works. I put up on the screen that saw a Lady in Half trick from nineteen twenty one. And I'm not out to ruin anyone's magic show, but I enjoy describing the principles of allusion to people and putting forth that it's all tricks it's all misdirection, and it's a puzzle for you
to figure out. And I don't pretend to have superpowers, and I think that is what makes me a little bit different than most magicians that on some level are pretending to channel the powers from beyond. But there are a there's a small sect of magicians that acknowledge right up front that it's all tricks. Penn and Teller famously for decades, have been doing that. So you didn't read my mind, just that No, there's no such thing.
It's absolutely lies. We did a trick a trick. All that stuff is true.
And you get some real mechanics and practitioners of sleight of hand who also say, none of this is real. I'm just a step ahead of you, and that can be very entertaining.
When it comes to making crossword puzzles. Obviously you must have been very good at it. You did it from a young age. I imagine who writes these? How many people are writing crossword puzzles versus who's doing them. I feel like I didn't even think about crossword puzzles being written by someone until I met you. I got sort of just figured they were just birthed from a stone somewhere. How did you start?
Okay, Well, my love for word games and competitive scrabble, and it's no surprise that I've found crossword construction known as cruciverbialism m HM, or a cruciverbalist is one who constructs crosswords, so crusa meaning cross like crucifix and verbal meaning word like that. I started just after college, so I've been doing it about twenty years. I had a friend Kevin Chosett, who showed me the ropes and we've collaborated on a number of puzzles. The New York Times
and most other publications are freelance. Anyone can mail one in and if you're listening to this and you're encouraged to do so, reach out and I'm happy to give you a few tips. It's gotten much more competitive now that in the pandemic it exploded. Yeah, so the New York Times, it used to be like you would have to wait six months to hear back. They may still say that, but I just know that they're getting dozens and dozens a day. And yeah, we're in a golden
age of puzzles. There are a lot of independent crossword resources now, crossword publications, New Yorker has one. I think New York Magazine has one. The browser, they're all over the place. A lot of indie blogs feature them, so a lot of places to submit your puzzles.
But what do you think of the word enigmatology. Yes, from an anymological standpoint.
That sentence was very hard to say, thank you. Enigmatology From an etymological enigmatology was coined, I believe by Will Schwartz, or at least he made it famous because he went to college at Indiana University and created this major for himself. So we all bow to the great puzzle guru, Will Schwartz. He's a lovely guy. He's been a friend and a mentor for years. And enigmatology is the study of puzzles.
I took a page out of that book and I combined enigma and enigmatology with an ist type of word, like a hypnotist, an illusionist, a mentalist, and I came up with the enigmatist.
It's perfect.
I mean.
Also, I love that someone who constructs crossword puzzles can just make up words if they want. That's one thing I've learned here.
We made a crucive verbalist, and it's in some dictionaries been not all.
There's no rule. Well, if you're writing them, or maybe you're just solving them, or maybe you're intimidated by them. Do you ever look into the neuroscience of puzzles and magic and why our brains want to solve things?
Sure? What I consider often is that we are wired to solve problems. And I think that the first people had to figure out how to get their food. And if you go left, you'll avoid the saber tooth tiger, and if you go right, you'll be able to cross the river by knocking a tree over and using it as a bridge. It's these puzzles are are we figure things out to survive. So I think it goes back to the beginning of time and it helps us make
order out of chaos. Another way to look at recreational puzzles is that I'm not sure I entirely agree with that, but I'll say it anyway. I've heard some people put forth that puzzles are kind of like pain, Like you are subjecting your brain to this chatchallenge and it's stressful, and you work at it, and you work at it and you work at it, and finally you solve it.
You have that enormous release, this AHA moment of a triumphed I figured it out, and there's a basic human need to overcome adversity like that.
For some light reading on this, you can crack open the Journal of Human Brain Mappings, August twenty eighteen edition for the study titled Ultra High Field fMRI Insights on Insight Neural Correlates of the AHA Moment, which took a bunch of German volunteers willing to get stuffed into a functional MRI machine while doing word puzzles, and they were given simple tasks try to figure out what word connects three other words like house, bark an apple. What's the
common word okay, tree treehouse, tree, bark, apple tree. So when the volunteers figured it out, they were to press a button and then the fMRI was like a brain paparazzi flashing going off seeing what's happening. And the researchers found that no matter the level of difficulty, that solving the puzzle caused robust subcortical activity changes in the bilateral thalmis hippocampus and the dopein emergenic mid brain comprising ventral
attagamental area nucleus, accumbans and cudate nucleus. What the fuck does that mean? It means your brain gets tickled and then you release dopamine and it feels so nice. So yes, we like overcoming adversity, especially in a way that is low stakes. You know. It's not like I'm trying to jump between buildings for I'm like, figured out the word all.
A triumphantday is all I need. Maybe when it starts with a crossword puzzle, and I'm going to admit that I fucking suck at crossword puzzles, And it's one of those things that I don't know why I'm bad at it. I like bananagrams, I like wordle I suck it scrabble, but I have so much trivia and facts in my mind. But when it comes to crossword puzzles, I just stare blankly at them and I don't know why, and I'm ashamed of it.
No, don't be ashamed of it.
Why are you so good at it? How do you.
Start with Monday? That's the easiest day of the week, easiest day of the week. Everyone can do a Monday puzzle.
Everyone in air quotes Onday.
Okay, the new York times. It gets harder throughout the week. Monday through Thursday are themed puzzles. Thursdays when it gets really tricky, things are upside down and multiple letters in a square and it gets really devious. Friday and Saturday are themeless, big open grids. They're much harder, and Sunday goes back to being a themed puzzle. It's sort of
an extra big Thursday, but start with Monday. Everybody can do it, and don't be so hard on yourself, because the crossword constructor's goal is to fool you to some extent, is to hold back the reveal as long as possible so that when you get to it, you have this aha moment and again you have this like explosion of
oh my god, I'm smart. I figured it out. And this is why I think there's so much in common between puzzles of magic, because a good puzzle misdirects you and you think something else is going on and there's a twist to it, and then finally you figure it out. And the clues are meant to be deceptive as well. They purposely use wordplay to mess with your brain, and you get better than when you see those patterns. When
you start to expect that. So every time I see the word hero, I'm immediately thinking this is probably about sub sandwich, and not every time I. And I just learned this over time. You know, if I when I see cream, for example, I immediately know the answer is trio. Eric Clapton's group was cream.
Oh my god.
Right, it has nothing to do with what you put in your coffee. So there's these quick little triggers where I remember it's pattern recognition. And the people that win the crossword tournaments every year for speed right, the American cross Puzzle Tournament in a handful of others, the people that win those are usually math and music people. Really, it's not a verbal thing you are writing down letters, but it is. It's data driven. It is recall. It's pattern recognition.
What kind of patterns are in there?
Well, I think it's it's not so much visual patterns. If you see a S Senna V, then you're already thinking Sven or Svelt or you know. Right, it's quick recall from the clues, and it's not being misdirected by that first layer that's meant to see view. It's cutting through that and it's knowing exactly what they're getting to.
When you're at a gathering or a cocktail party or something and it comes up that you write crossword puzzles, do you instantly have a rapport with someone if they're like, I do it every day.
Yeah, it happens all the time, and more often than not. It's my grandmother does it every single day in pen she does not. No pencil allowed and I, you know, I say respects. You know that's an og solver.
Do you use a pencil or a pen.
I pretty much all computer now, just for ease, though for variety puzzles, cryptic puzzles and things from puzzle hunts, which we can talk about in a second. I am now using my iPad and the digital pencil because there's a lot to keep track of and you're using various colors, and things are hidden all over the place.
And what is a cryptic puzzle?
So a cryptic crossword is it's the British Dial and I think it's the most sophisticated word puzzle out there and it consists of every clue, consists of diabolical word play. The word play, the hint that unlocks the answer is right in front of you, hidden within that sentence.
So cryptic crosswords news to me. I had never even heard of them, and they're more popular in the UK, where they originated. But typically the answer is hidden in the clue. Like one example I found in a Guardian article. The clue is cooking equipment taken back from airis I tormented? So taken back from indicates it's backwards, and hidden in the words aris I tormented backwards is the word rotisseri.
What I kept looking for cryptic crossword examples. I even resorted to getting asked deep in the Wikipedia page for crypto crosswords, and I just have to share this one clue example. Okay, so the clue is very sad unfinished story about rising smoke. What's the answer? Fuck if I know, But very sad unfinished story about rising smoke is broken down? Lastly, you ready for this? Very sad is the definition Unfinished story gives TL, which is the word tale with one
letter missing because it's unfinished. Rising smoke gives the word ragic because cigar is a smoke and this is a down clue, so rising indicates that cigar should be written backwards. Ragic about in the clue means that the letters of tl The unfinished story should be put on either side of ragic, giving the answer tragical. So very sad unfinished story about rising smoke gives you tragical. And I'm like, I have enough problems in my life. I don't need
cryptic crosswords, but some people love them. David later emailed me a cryptic crossword clue example, saying Ologi's host from a wild wild area, and after a few minutes I experienced robust subcortical activity changes in the bilateral thalmis hippocampus and the dopamergenic mid brain. Because the first wild indicates it will be an anagram because it's wild, and a wild area is an anagram for Alleyward. So cryptics the Russian nesting dolls of puzzles.
But it's anagrams. It's words hidden between other words. It's words going backward. The New York Times runs one about a month now. And then there are brilliant, brilliant puzzle makers that are members of the National Puzzlers League, And I think Mark Halpin is my favorite puzzle designer. He makes the most beautiful puzzles. This past Labor Day, I just solved his annual Labor Day puzzle hunt. It's like
a holiday for me. I do it with my friend Craig Mason, the screenwriter and producer, and we block out the world and spend the entire long weekend solving his puzzle hunt. And what a puzzle hunt is is it's many puzzles, ten puzzles, say, where every single answer is then funneled in to the final puzzle, which is the meta puzzle to reveal the final ultimate answer.
Oh so Mark Alvin, just a side note, has a ton of puzzles on his website and what He's also an accomplished stage designer and an associate professor of stage design at the University of Cincinnati. Mark pick a lane be excellent at one thing only, please leave some accomplishments for the rest of us. Okay, have dare, But yes, he makes extraordinarily complex and really challenging puzzles within puzzles within puzzles. And do you feel like those meta puzzles,
these mega these cryptic ones, these very hard ones. Do you feel like simpler ones like wordle have been a gateway for people in the last couple of years.
Absolutely, gateway is the right term for it. I always say that the mini crossword for the New York Times is the gateway drug to the big one, and it's very successful. And these things that just take a couple of minutes are putting puzzle in the hands of millions of people. I do Wordle every morning. You do.
I was wondering what you thought of it because it's so simple compared to other puzzles. But is there something in that simplicity that you just can do it while you are putting in your contact lenses or whatever, while I'm on the toilet.
Yeah, it's it's It's brilliant. Josh Wardle created Wordle. He took it. He took an old format mastermind, and there's a few other board games, but he he made it so clean and simple and digestible, and the social sharing of it is really what caused it to take to spread like wildfire.
Okay, so real quick. In case you don't know this origin story of Wordle, a software engineer named Jason Wordle created this game because his partner loves word games, and on November one, twenty twenty one, there were ninety daily users.
By Christmas, there were three hundred thousand, and by the end of January twenty twenty two ten million people were playing daily, so Ward sold wordle that month in January, He's like, I'm out, I don't want to manage this for a few million bucks to the New York Times and we all play it every day still on my family, text threat and your podgram. Fancy Nancy has excelled for years at words with friends, and naturally she kicks her
asses at word ale. Do you do the same opening one every time or do you just think of a five letter word that comes in your head.
I change it because I get bored. Yeah. A lot of people like audio audio.
I've never tried that. I tried a twall. Rogue is a good one.
I can get those vowels out audio sa r e sore sarri is a like a type of a hawk or something, a bird. I don't really know, but it works. SI. A lot of people like raise.
Oh, raise is a good one. So a sore means a young hawk or a falcon, which is great if you're just a fledgling wordler. And I think you're right that the social ass inspect is part of puzzles, and you know, being in a cafe and seeing someone doing the same crossword puzzle that you might be doing that sort of shared misery and delight. Yeah, you know what about scrabble? How ruthless are you? Do you win by just hundreds of points?
No, I'm pretty good and I can beat the average player, but at a at a tournament, I would get destroyed because it comes down to what you've memorized, how much of the dictionary you know, and they know all of it. And that's talk about a real pattern recognition game. I know my two letter words, my threes, I think most of the fours. You got to know your vowel dumps, your words that have a cube, I know you. I know all a lot of those.
According to scrabblewordfinder dot org, there are forty seven acceptable scrabble words that have a cue but no you, and a few of them are chi qi, like the Chinese energy for eleven points. There's quite a leaf that's chewed as a stimulant or made into tea, And there's chin qin the Chinese dynasty that build a great wall. And in scrabble, there are also these things called bingo words. And when you use all seven of your letters, you
get a fifty point bonus reward. And there's this one nationally ranked scrabble champion named Mark Abodi, who recommends looking for prefix and suffix letters like un or pre or adding st or ng two shorter words like bingoing, for example, which is eight letters. But you get the point. So yes, some is strategy and skill and some is just memorizing lists and learning to scrabble as a verb to speak and scrabble.
For those of you that want to play scrabble, learn those one hundred or maybe it's up to one o four two letter words and you will double your score.
What are some of them?
Well, it starts with aa ah ah, which is rough sindery lava, oh my god, and goes all the way down to za za, which is pizza, which ruined the game of scrabble.
Oh is that? Even if? How is?
I don't know because somebody Brooklyn said I'm gonna go get some za, and if.
He came with it, I feel like, in like four people on Twitter said it in twenty thirteen or something. You know, I am incorrect. The word za is a form of casual truncation known as clipped slang, and za has been around since the late nineteen sixties. So this one's on the boomers, but it's had Scrabble's official approval since two thousand and six. I mean, how often are they having to change the scrabble Dic Shery to be.
Like, fine, I think it's every four years or so. Then yeah, so it's a big holiday when they when they announced the new words.
Can I ask you questions from listeners? Yeah, okay they I just want to get into it because they had great ones. Okay, some very specific and some wanting strategies. But before we solve your puzzling queries, let's first send some cash money to a cause of David's choice. And David told me that he frequently performs magic for children's
hospitals via this great program called Lollipop Theater. It's a five h one c three organization that brings movies to pediatric boards, as well as a music program, entertainment themed arts and crafts, activities, and of course magicians if David is around, so to learn more about them, you can go to Lollipoptheater dot org, which is linked in the show notes. And that donation was magically made possible by sponsors of the show. Okay, let's get a clue and
answer some questions. Okay, I thought this is a great question. Someone whose name is ms Palindrome and Stephanie Leski, they wanted to know those games where the first word that jumps out with you is the word that is supposed to tell you something about your psyche? Are those accurate? You know when you look at like a word search and then suddenly you're like, oh, those are those three words I noticed.
I don't think they're accurate. But you're also talking to a magician who is a Magician's are the great skeptics, So we kind of know how all the tricks work, which is why we don't believe in psychics and fortune tellers. If that worked for you, go for it. People get a lot of answers and piece out of consulting things like that. But for me, I'm aware of the tricks. I know there are words that are positioned strategically so
that you choose them. I'll just say this, I'm always looking for a word that they did not mean to hide in there. Uh huh, Like what can I find on the diagonal? Oh? I guess the word panda is.
So a cursor research will deliver word puzzles that promise to predict your whole year, or your weekend, or your personality, even your hair type based on the first three words you'll see. So I am about to have a voluminous, luscious and full weekend with my hair looking hopeful and strong and genius. I took a lot of those word search tests, and I figured people were playing word search
games on like Roman tablets, But nope. They emerged around the same time as the word za, around the nineteen sixties. And the inventor of word searches is kind of a point of disagreement among historians, and one guy had his puzzles ripped off by a publisher he submitted to. But others think that word searches originated from the Spanish enigmatologist Pedro oconnde Oro, who called them Soapa's de lettres or soup of letters. But did the soup have any eggs?
Shelby Reardon, z Shirogaine, Kevin Wilson all use the term Easter eggs. They wanted to know, are there ever hidden Easter eggs and crosswords? You ever sneak things in there, like a little nod to your family or friends just for you, like a Wilhelm's scream. But in puzzles.
I try to put family members' names in all the time, but the cardinal rule is that the puzzle has to operate as normal. So it might just be like, my mother's name is Joan, so if I have a chance to put you know, Joan of Arc in a clue, or you know, my dad's name is Tie Tai, so it might be my Tie or something. But you can't mess with something that millions of people are going to solve right now. That said, I am in cahoots with low Shorts and Will has let me hide things in
the puzzle for my own purposes. My my Ted talk, if you're interested, that really changed my career. That was timed with the New York Times crossword. So when I finished the Ted Talk, I say, ladies and gentlemen, we have today's New York Times. Many of you in the first couple of rows have it underneath your seats as well. Really dig we hid them under there. See if you can fish out the newspaper and open up to the
arts section, and you will find the crossword puzzle. And if you open it up, you'll see there's a hidden message in it. Now that hit message echoed what I was doing on stage, but Will made it very clear to me, this has to be a normal Wednesday puzzle. Yeah, so this is a bonus thing if people find it.
You got married three months ago, did you?
Nope?
Nope, you didn't. Obviously you didn't propose with a puzzle. You didn't, did you? Did you try to hide anything?
Right? I kept the magic and the puzzles out of it. I've helped a lot of people propose with puzzles, and I've and I've used magic tricks to help people propose. But I just I separated work from personal life.
I wonder if she would have been expecting that. Does she do puzzles at all?
Well? I do have to throw her off the scent all the time. Okay, My wife is very clever and she's on to me. So I am using every bit of misdirection I can to make it so she doesn't see things coming.
Nice. I guess I bet you'd throw the best surprise party.
When I proposed, I threw a surprise engagement party, and uh yeah, it was all set up. She didn't see it coming. It's great.
It's all the misdirection. It's the excuse to get you somewhere else. That is what it all hinges on.
Right, So misdirection, I'll give you a fun, little technical tidbit. There's a great Dutch magician named Tommy Wonder.
Real name you know, his actual name, jacobis Maria Bemmelman.
And he said that misdirection is the art of giving people something of greater interest to pay attention to.
Right.
So, like bad misdirection in a magic show is I want you to look somewhere else. So somebody comes out on the stage with a platter full of cookwaar and they drop it on the ground and it clangs, and everybody looks over and that breaks the moment, and everybody knows that you were trying to distract them.
Right.
But if you, if you can bake the misdirection into your routine. So if I want to steal something from my pocket, I'm going to reach up with my hand and pull a coin out of the air, a shiny coin. Everyone's going to look up at that and enjoy that moment, and my other hand is going for my pocket. So you're giving people something else to enjoy while you sneak the next thing. So I guess when it comes to like a surprise party, give your partner another reason to get excited about something else.
Yeah, you know, instead of being like, oh, we got to pick up the car from the shot, we got to go pick up a bunch of dishwaar that I dropped in a parking lot. Oh that's great advice. Okay.
A lot of people had questions. For sure, I will list them in and aside Looking at your Brain's Elijah Francis, Quinlan, Eli Jonathan Ruby, Bray when He's a Witch, Brandon J. Willis, Olga, Sam Moody, Becky This as Seagrass, Scientist, Grazie's Rain, Alison Mason, Leshatz, Grammond's Will Kingen, Kylie M. Smith, dantween Horn, Lannibauer, and first time question askers M and Taylor Clinton, all of whom wanted to know about brain health in Pavka thirty four.
First time question asker's words are puzzle games used to help people with dementia, and Eli Jonathan wants to know do word games actually help preserve or improve cognitive abilities.
I don't have a scientific answer, but I think the studies are pretty clear that it works. And I could tell you that my father just retired and he immediately started doing logic puzzles and he does them all the time, and I think it does keep the neurons firing.
Okay, So I looked into this, and several studies show that doing daily puzzles can keep your melon sharp. And in twenty fourteen, there was a paper published called Association of crossword puzzle participation with memory decline in persons who developed dementia, and it found that late life crossword puzzle participation was associated with delayed onset of memory decline in
people who developed dementia. And then there was a twenty nineteen study in the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry and that reported that the frequency of word puzzle use is directly related to cognitive function in adults over the age of fifty. But these studies tend to be observational, so they can't determine the cause and effect. Can the crosswords
stave off dementia? Neuroscientists think it might just be that daily puzzles keep you sharper overall, so if you do develop dementia, you'll be starting from kind of a higher cognitive baseline and the effects of dementia wouldn't be noticed for on average, two and a half years according to the Bronx twenty year Longitudinal Aging Study. So puzzles come for the dopamine, stay for the tenuous grasp on reality
and all that you've ever known or love. Matt Thompson asked what are some lesser known word puzzles that we should be doing well.
I have to go back again and recommend the cryptic crossword. But they are very tough and very fun and very clever. And a good puzzle makes you feel smart, right. That's That's like the mantra that comes from Will Schwartz and trickles on down to all of us, is it should be an enjoyable experience. And when you crack a good cryptic crossword, you feel really smart about yourself and you also simultaneously respect the person who came up with a
clever ruse that you just overcame. So cryptic crosswords are great. We talked about wordle, but if you want more of a challenge, there's chordal and octortal, and there's even sixty fodal, which is sixty four wordles at the same time. And every morning I wake up and I guess one word in the sixty fdal to try to hit it, because I've never gotten a perfect score on that and one day I'm going to so.
First time question asker Hannah Boyd, who wanted to know his favorite alternate version of wordle. Let's direct our attention to the landing page of sixtyfordal dot Au, which says six agenta quatu ortle a monstrosity perpetrated by Catherine Cowie, based on seta Chordle by Brad Bednar, based on Octordle by Kenneth Crawford, based on Quardle by freddie Meyer, based on Dortle by Glaire Mate s To's based on wordle
by Josh Wardle. So I hopped on there and I tried solving all sixty four wordles at once, and after five minutes I experienced a kind of brain vertigo that made me physically nauseated and my throat was swelling with cortisol. So the tagline of this giant daily freeword puzzle is quote play as much as you dare. Every sex agenta
quatu ordle is a nightmare. But maybe in an increasingly boiling planet with an ongoing pandemic and just the star of the next presidential campaigns, A playtime nightmare is preferable. Do you stay off social media in a healthy way because you're doing puzzles? Uh?
No, everything's a juggling act. Okay, yeah, yeah, I'm on there just like everybody else.
It's probably so much better for you to be doing a quordal that it is just to be like, oh.
There's a great puzzle community online. So oh that's lovely. Yeah yeah yeah. Spelling Bee, sorry, the spelling Bee. I can't believe this slipped my mind. The spelling be I do every day with my mother on the phone. We started it in the Pandemic. It's the loveliest tradition. It's another New York Times word game, and it's great. You have seven letters and you have to use the middle one and make as many words as you possibly can, and it's awesome.
Now that is not an anagram then though, right, Yeah.
Well, a pangram pan meaning all uses all the letters. Right, So there are sometimes several pangrams, which means those are all anagrams of each other. But anagram is just mixing up letters.
Yeah, because some people Paul Srilio, Miranda Panda, Fuzz Goddess, Davis Bourne, Sarah matthew Anna Thompson all had questions about why is it like in Sarah's words, why is it that some people like filling empty space like wordle or crosswords, while others like moving letters around like word scrambles. They are an empty space filler themselves. But yeah, is it a different part of the brain that fills things in versus unscrambles?
Wow? Good question. Right, it's a similar muscle. But when you're filling in the blank spaces, you are using logic in a different way to know what your possibilities are, right, And with every letter it narrows the possibilities down and you're drawing on your database of words and know what can still fit in there. Whereas when you have all the letters in front of you, it's a little more of a physical exercise of moving things around and recognizing
the patterns that are right in front of you. I like doing both.
Yeah, I feel like I have to really let my mind be more flexible and elastic, because sometimes if I see a word scramble and it starts with a thh, all I can think of is thh words and I have to force myself to split the t in the age or you know what I mean, And you're like, I can only see it as this one thing, Like my brain gets stuck in that loop. You know.
Well, there's a new word game that came out of fun little thing you can do every morning that Adam Wagner made. It's called anagrams okay, and it's animal oh stop sort of. I mean, these are the levels you can get to al giraffe, dolphin, I already love it, parrot, octopus, all the way to the goat, and you try to get to the goat. So basically you have these letters and you have to make words out of them.
Ooh, okay, this one is just a difficult delight and it has nothing really to do with anim We'll Sti't let that throw you. It's just spelled anagram A n I g r M with an I and the levels go up to goat or greatest of all time, and it starts with a four letter word scramble, and then it adds a letter each level until you've got nine letters to work with. And the emojis of cute animals are just kind of a visual bonus. So that is anagrams dot us. I like this game already. This is a new one.
Yeah, I think you put it out a month ago, a couple months ago.
Do you feel like since wordles, Yes, yeah, people are like it's exploded.
These daily games have exploded. There's really all sorts of spin offs. A lot of them are play plays on the word wordles. So you have hurdle, you're listening to things, and you have world all where you're looking at the world trying to recognize countries. I think there's a movie recognition one that people are into now from movie scenes. I just give you like a still and you have a number of guesses to figure out what movie it is.
This is called framed dot WT And I played one round and based on pictures of a jungle and a guy in a cape and some ogres and a sword, I guessed Lord of the Rings, and then Eternals Avatar, and then I don't know, I just typed in the word winter with a question mark, and finally I gave up and I was just trying to burn through my guesses and I just put in like magic mic. It was the fantasy movie Warcraft. So my bad framed WTF. Indeed, do you think that people are doing it out of
a sense of play? Or out of a sense of oh maybe I can have the next big hit.
Making them both both. Okay, I mean sixty four to sixty four wordles is not trying to be the next big hit.
And it's just that's a very good point. Yeah, Kate Munker wants to know. Okay, David, so you might create the Sunday crossword, but can you do them yourself? Oh?
Yeah, I get I can sell them. I'm not the fastest. I would say the Sunday Near Times puzzle takes me about twelve to fifteen minutes.
That's it.
The world's best are doing it in seven maybe less. Gosh, people were posting this this Monday past Monday puzzle was all like Hollywood references. It was like Shonda rhymes. Was the things that rhymed with Shonda, like Honda ugh huh. And I saw people on Twitter posting times that were under two minutes on the computer presumably, but like, you know, a minute thirty Monday puzzle can blaze right through it.
People who suck at crosswords, people who are scared of crosswords. I am your people, and I did this week's Monday puzzle and I finished a whole crossword. It took me twenty five minutes. Twenty five minutes, Okay, some people get it in like two minutes. But let me tell you that when I finally got that Caesar dressing with a question mark was a clue for the word toga, I was like, y'all got me? That was a good one.
Monday crosswords are designed for children, marine mammals, or maybe Martians who landed just a few months ago, or me and I loved it. Felix Wolf wants to know who decides what are easy, medium and hard clues.
It starts with a constructor in that when you think of a theme, you kind of envision what day it might be on. So if there's multiple letters in a square, it's certainly going on a Thursday or a Sunday. If you're doing a very easy bit of wordplay, it's probably
a Monday puzzle, and you write the clues accordingly. But the clues are changeable, and the editing staff at the Times will change the clues to calibrate the puzzle and maybe make it a Tuesday instead of a Monday or oh and then also they're changing clues because they want to avoid what might have just been used. Because the words are repeat all the time, so you know, Oreo's in the puzzle all the time. It was in the day before and it was clued as you know, black
and white cookie. The next day it's going to be like, you know, double stuff Company.
I mean, I don't know, pedloc says I heard the puzzles that appear in newspapers are easier to do later in the day because people use solutions from the puzzle more in their chit chat during the day. Is there something to that. Do words get implanted in us subconsciously?
Yeah? Oh, I mean I hear that point that people are talking about things around the water cooler and you hear some answer, you know that it's going to be in your subconscious and you can put in the puzzle. I think more on that line of thinking is this idea of tip of the tongue memory, and that is when you're trying to think of something and you can't recall it, and you can't recall it, and then it just pops in your head an hour later. That's tip
of the tongue memory. And that's a very real thing, and your brain is working to solve problems like that and crosswords even and you're not thinking about it.
So is that why if you put something away and you come back to it, you might have Does that help with your work life balance knowing that, like, let's say you're stuck on a problem or something that you could go and go to the beach or go to a petting sew or something and come back and be better at it.
Well, certainly for puzzle construction, something will just pop into my head, and it will I was I'm searching for some word or some pattern that I could use to get out of some corner of a puzzle that I was stuck in. It'll just pop in. So it helps constructors as well.
Patrons Justus Bears, Christa Jones, Marin Prophet and Shelby Mills wanted to know about sources for inspiration and if he starts with the solutions or the clues, how does he do it? Do you have something on your notes app or some sort of tiny notepad that you write ideas as they come to.
Yeah, I have, let's see my computer's open, so like I love it on Crossword ideas, Yeah, like.
They're in a spreadsheet. How did I expect anything less? Oh my gosh, this is yeah.
Esp and el don't use any of these, by the way, listeners, but no, you can't whatever, Like, look at Kumail nan Gianni. That's got to be in a puzzle. Yes, come on, those letters are insane.
Absolutely. You may know Kamail Nanjiohnny from The Big Sick or Eternals or Chippendale's great actor wonderful dude. And I'm absolutely bragging when I say that he has been to my birthday party. So I've known Kamail for probably a decade socially, and back when he hosted The Meltdown, this comedy show in the back of a comic book store on Sunset Boulevard, I remember Camail telling this story about how his last name was slang for a couch, and I was like, what is that story? Well, folks use
something called rhyming slang. For example, why call the steps stairs when you can call them apples and pears with more syllables and no relation to stairs. A joke might make you bubble bath rather than laugh. And if you're in between paychecks, you're not broke. According to UK slang, your coals and coke, satin and silk means milk and rats and mice are a paradise. I'm like, what is this slang? I had no idea anything about rhyming slang.
So back to Glasgow, Kumil Nanjianni happens to have a second cousin who was an esteemed Scottish broadcast journalist, and in the local rogue Scharen nan Giohnny rhymes ever so slightly with her word of fanny, which is your front put so a charene nan gianni means a baby maker. There, So different parts of the world have all kinds of linguistic angles. On that note, Joe Portofito wanted to know how much consideration is given to the diversity of the
puzzle solvers. Some people would be more familiar with certain words than others.
For example, we're in a revolution right now. Yeah, the Crossword, just like everywhere else, has really tried to become more diverse, and they've done a great job. Over the New York Times, you're seeing fewer, fewer puzzles that are just themed on like you know, old these songs from the nineteen to sixties, right, and then cluing can be adjusted, so again instead of referencing just you know, white people from the nineteen fifties.
They've just done a great job over there, right, And then they're trying to really democratize the submissions process, so it's not just constructors of old but anyone can go through the poral now and submit a crossword, and you're seeing people from all walks of life submit crosswords, and that leads to more diverse content as well. So, you know, hats off to the New York Times, they've done a great job with that.
It kind of dovetails to Genevieve Jellybean, who committed an assault by asking why are they all geared toward old people? Sincerely a twenty five year old who likes old people games except for the eighties trivia parts? They said, perhaps I'm looking the wrong places, but the crosswords often always contain pop culture trivia from the eighties, which is an automatic no because I wasn't alive then, yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you, trivia from the eighties.
I'm like, I hear you.
I get it.
It's changing. It's the and the crossword audience is getting younger and broader, and I think the New York Times is hitting a wide demographic. So there's a mix of stuff. But if you go to the indie crosswords, they are skew much younger.
There should be crosswords for what year you were born, because I know that if I tried to do a gen Z crossword, I would not get it. But then again there were probably The Cream trio is not something I would You should just curre itus like kay cream.
Yeah, that's that was the reference of a band from a white band from six.
So where does the youth of today go to? Crossword? David likes Rex Parker's blog. He trusts the links there. There's also crossword Fiend and avx words, which bills itself as crosswords for the not faint of heart. And I'm starting to realize that word puzzles have kind of the same vibe as hot sauce, like a variety of pain levels that people can find infigurating and use as a badge of survival, and then for others they're just a
horror show to be avoided at all costs. Hot sauce people are just hot sauce people.
Why do they make those sauces so hot?
Do all of the enigmatologists do? They all kind of know each other.
It's a very small community.
Yeah, are you guys like on a WhatsApp thread, that's like, hey.
Guys ripping each other's puzzles apart is that's not fair. It's actually a very supportive community.
Well, on that note, Hannah Nolan said in the New York Times puzzle this week, one of the answers was shade tree. However, the entire word shade was in one square? How why now?
I missed that one? But shade, like you were just shade in the square as a black thing, and that was probably the as a black square.
I don't know. I mean, however, the entire word shade, I remember, I.
Remember it was. Yes, that was in the lower right hand corner. What's what's the question? How? Why is that allowed? Yes?
How how why it's it's allowed.
When there is a a consistent rule to explain what's going on? Okay, you can't just throw a curveball in there. But if the whole puzzle has one consistent tricky rule in it, then it's up to the solver to figure that out and unlock that and have that aha moment and hopefully you feel smart when you figure it out. That was a very weird little corner I remember, kind of raising an eyebrow when I saw that, I don't
think it was my favorite. But you know, look, constructors are always trying to push the envelope a little bit right.
It just feels like we got one rule here, and it's one letter per box. Is what I think?
You can do multiple words in a box. That to me, that's called a rebus r.
E b U s oh, someone a rebus.
So I am here. I'll show you some the ribus puzzles I've made, shall we.
Yeah, I'm learning new vocabulary. Has rebis ever been a clue in a puzzle? Do you know what I mean? Like, just the word ribus is the answer?
Answer? Yeah? Yeah, sure, let's see. Ready, I'm on the database.
You can scour past puzzles at the website x wordinfo dot com, which I will link for you, my nerds. A ribus of a ribus.
Ribas has been in twenty five times.
Oh my god.
Oh that's Will Shorts took over database inclued, most recently on July second, twenty twenty two as image problem question mark. Okay, like an image puzzle, image question? Yeah.
See I would see image problem and I would instantly be like a publicist.
The question mark is what tells you that's the that's the nomenclature for there's some word play going on here.
Really, I didn't realize that that was the tip of the hat. Speaking of tip patrons, Audrey Lloyd, Beca Christensen, Melissa Burger, Jesse Dragon, first time askers Beca Van Tassel, and Carolyn Colin wanted to know, in Carolyn's words, what are some tips, tricks and strategies for tackling a crossword? Are there any other things like that that are Once you do puzzles a lot, you'll go, oh, okay when they.
Yes, if there's an abbreviation in the clue, there's an abbreviation in the answer.
Okay.
If there's a first name in the clue, they're usually going for a first name in the answer. So if it was let's see, what's a good movie to reference.
I keep thinking of volcano movies. How about Jurassic World?
Okay, Jurassic World. So that was Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, right, So if the answer were Bryce, it would be Chris's co star in Jurassic World.
Oh, but if it were Pratt's co star, it might be Howard.
Yeah. Oh, and it's a little tricky there because she's Dallas Howard.
Okay, that's a good point. That's a good point. Okay, that's super helpful.
Got my rigidity. I'm just like, no, you can't.
Do that's helpful. This is helpful. Calysta Donah wants to know, are there any clues that you're particularly proud of where you're like those A good one.
I can tell you puzzles I'm proud of. It's probably the easiest way to do that.
Okay.
So I made a Sunday puzzle with my friend Kevin that was a Mad magazine folding, so you would, oh my god, fold the page on the dotted line, so the right side linked up with the left, and there were words that ran across that that took a couple of years to make.
Oh my god. This one was co written with Kevin Chose at New York Times Sunday, January twenty fourth, twenty ten. Should you dare attempt it?
This one I just called up here. We were talking about Rubis's and this one is grid art. This this is made to look like a panda in the black squares, Oh my god, and then running across the middle there's panda. But as you saw the puzzle, you start to realize that that parses as P and A and there are P and A squares around the puzzle.
Oh, my lord, So that there's a lot of ribuses in that.
Yeah, there's probably a dozen.
Wow, I know what a ribus is now.
But you can see that it's it's all cohesive, right. It says popular zoo attraction or a hint to eleven squares in this puzzle. Oh my gosh, panda.
How long did you take to work on that?
Oh? I'd probably spend a week on that. I don't know when when you get really into it and you feel on the groove and you unplug everything and just work on that, I probably took a week.
It's funny too, because I remember earlier you mentioned, you know, if I were to put in a word panda, which clearly this was on your mind. Is that's similar to how the subconscious works when you get people to guess certain things in a magic act, or when you lead someone, you kind of implant something in their brain so it's at the top of their mind.
So what do you mean exactly?
I need you to rephrase, like you had mentioned an example of a word earlier, and you use the word panda.
I'm always looking for a word that they did not mean to hide in there. Oh, I guess panda.
And clearly panda has been on. The word panda has been on.
Oh I did say that before. It's a go to word. I guess.
I'm always But is that similar like how you kind of subconsciously get someone lead someone to say an answer by putting it in their mind enough times where it's something on the tip of their tongue.
For magic or for magic, for magic, for mentalism. Yeah, you can. You can get people to say things by influencing them. It doesn't always work, and you take risks to I hope somebody will fall into that trap, but and you always have a back up planning in case they don't say what you want them to say. But that's just fun for us to to try to pull that off.
I was wondering earlier when you said panda, why the word panda was on your mind? And now I know.
I don't know why.
That's great. I think that that it proves so many points. But back to the puzzle he loves the most.
Let me show you the puzzle. I'm maybe most proud of. This was a Halloween puzzle. Well, the year was it twenty thirteen. You have in the upper left hand corner the word Wolfman, right, and then in the middle of the puzzle vertically you have the word mirrors. Oh my gosh, so Wolfman's on the left hand side of the puzzle. On the right hand side it says Wolfman seen through mirrors, and you have to write it backward in the yeah on the right then, and these are all Universal Monster movies.
So then you have Universal Studios Role of nineteen thirty one. It's Monster from Frankenstein's Monster seen through Mirrors is Retznam which is Monster backward. Right. There's then here you have Phantom right, and over here you have Phantom backward from Phantom of the Opera. But then in the lower left hand corner you have Dracula seen through the mirrors. And there's nothing on the right hand side. There's no so no reflection for Dracula. So there is a blank space
in the puzzle. And what's fun here is right as you as you look at this, you think everything is one and letter longer than it really is. Because there's a blank space.
You have to account for oh, oh my gosh, so all of those downs.
Yeah, evil. So you so it's a little story, right, and it's a little you take them down this path and they see what's going on and they figure out what the initial trick is is. But then, like a good matter trick, there's a twist and you get to the bottom of it and you try to reflect Tracula and you can't.
Oh my gosh, the setups, the punchlines, the long game, then that sweet sweet dopamine at the moment of a payoff.
It is storytelling, and we tell our lives through narrative, and it's how we make sense of the world. And it's set up and pay off, it's it's foreshadowing and reveal and conclusion. And I think we run our lives through that. Yeah.
Absolutely, our brains are wired to love that. Somehow we work.
We like completion, right.
Yeah, you know you were saying that we're geared toward completion and and how satisfying that is. But there there must be something that is not satisfying. There must be something that sucks about writing puzzles. Is it is it hire from the public, is it anxiety? Is it what sucks?
What sucks? When Yeah, when people don't get it, when they don't when they don't appreciate what you wrote. So I had a New York Times Sunday crossword that I joke was the Sunday cross word America hated and and I'll show it to you. It was.
It was the date. Do you remember the date on this?
Yeah, I'm gonna get it right here, let me look it up.
Did you know that it was going to be a tough one.
It's not that it was tough, it's that people did not get the extra level of complexity to it.
They didn't get you.
Yeah, so okay, so here we go. It was called could you repeat that number? New York Times Sunday Puzzle September sixth, twenty twenty. Okay, have a ball, guys. It's and the way it worked was the clues with double numbers eleven, twenty two, thirty three, forty four all the way up to ninety nine. You you have to picture the clue. There's the number, and then the clue follows it, and you would read that number as the word double.
So for clue thirty three, it read thirty three seven film and it reads as double O seven film and the answer was you only live twice. This is really I thought, very clever and mean. But for forty four across, it's you the letter you proceder, and I wanted everybody to write the letter T, which comes before you. But if you read it correctly, it's double U proceder, which is V. I'll just give you a couple more examples. Day competitor was double day competitor publishing House, Little round
In Company was the answer. Oh my god, so a tree alternative. Double tree alternative was intercontinental.
Oh my god.
But what happened is is you can miss that layer to it. There's no apparent trickiness to the answer. Right when you have an answer that has a bit of a joke to it, or there's letters kind of mixed up or replaced, or a funny phrase that comes out of it, then you know that some transformation happened and something occurred. But people took seven Film and they wrote down they solved for you only live twice. And they thought, Okay, well that's a movie and that's a real phrase, and
I guess that answers the clue. Oh seven film. But they didn't think, like, why it's not really a no seven film. It's a double O seven film.
It's like when you laugh at a joke but you don't fully get it. And who among us hasn't done that every day of their lives? Yeah?
I think I was asking to much. The title was could you repeat that number? And what kind of feedback do you get?
Did you get some people who are like respect?
Man? I got. I got respect from certain constructors that I think. Mike Sealinker is an amazing puzzle writer wrote on Twitter, do you realize how hard it was for David to get these thematic answers to fall at the double clue numbers? It was really really hard? And the second half of that question was and does anyone care? I mean you kind of pointed out that it was like a feat of construction that's not really worth it, right,
Like only a few people noticed. I don't know it was the puzzle America hated, but I just had to point out that for fun at one to eleven across the clue is a suggestion double as suggest answer is root. Oh and the reason it is root is because you read that as triple a suggestion. It's at one eleven. So that was a bonus little answer.
Oh my Goshugh, I have no idea how that works. And that's okay.
I mean it's a good puzzle people.
I think that if you've if you've stumped some people, that is a job well done. A bit, you know, you just push them a little bit past their limit. That's good. I think it's good. What about a favorite word or your favorite thing about the job?
Uh, let's see favorite word? I like quicks a tree, which is of related to quixotic. That was the highest scoring scrabble word of all time. That was something like three hundred and eighty points or something. No, maybe it was like, let's look it up, sorry quick sitry score three hundred and sixty five points.
Yeah, dang out of one word. Someone's got to have that tattooed on their body.
Cause it it hit two triple letter, two triple word scords at the same time, which is like your holy Grail trip trip scrabble three hundred sixty five points.
Yeah.
Nice.
So that might be a favorite word, quicksotic.
Yeah. And what was the other question? What do I dislike about the job?
And what do you love the most?
Oh? I love performing the Enigmatist and I hope to hope you get a chance to come see it at some point. It's it's me just doing what I love on stage, and I've had so much fun talking about all this with you and doing a deep dive on these puzzles, and the puzzle fans come out for it and people that want to learn about puzzles, and the whole show starts with kind of like an escape room that you have to solve to get into the theater,
and it's just nerd fest. It's just like it's a great time to love puzzles and games and it's such a good shout.
I had to cut out part of the interview here because of spoilers, but let's just say follow David Quang on social media and hope that The Enigmatist has a theatrical run in your town.
And it's a very fun, interactive show and as I said before, hopefully it makes people feel smart and that's the ultimate goal.
Thank you so much for doing so fun. Wow, So ask brainiacs some basic ask questions, because apparently learning keeps our lights on. So follow him at David Quang on Instagram and Twitter. He is wonderful. I'll link that in the show notes. His website is David Quangmagic dot com and he also sells this gorgeous card set called Enigmas, which features four of these special puzzle cards. He says, or not too hard. They just require you to think outside the box. So solving all four puzzle cards in
that deck unlocks this online puzzle hunt. So those are at his website. It's an Enigma's deck and that'll be linked on my website in case you need a really great gift idea. They were co produced by David Shucan and Chris Chelco and David is also available for speaking gigs through his agents at CAAA. And he's the author of an upcoming kid's book of magic tricks called How to Fool Your Parents, which will be out in twenty twenty three, so look for that. So look him up.
He's great. We are at ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Ali Ward with one L on both. Oligi's Merch is available at ologiesmerch dot com. We have socks and sweatshirts and topeaggs and shirts and stickers ologiesmerch dot com. Thank you Susan Hale for managing that and doing so much more for us. Aaron Talbert admins the Ologies podcast Facebook group with This is from Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltis. Emily White of the Wordery makes our professional transcripts. Caleb
Patten bleeps episodes. Those are available at aliwar dot com, slash ologies, dash extras. Kelly R. Dwyer does our website and she can make yours. We have kid friendly and shorter episodes available called smologies. They're right in the speed or you can find them all at alleyware dot com slash Smologies. Thank you Mercedes Maitland and Seagredriguez Thomas of mind Gem Media for editing those and extra editing this
week was done by the wonderful Dave Christiansen. Thank you so much, sir, excellent job and also by Jared Sleeper of mind Gem Media, who is both puzzling and magical in the best ways. And a huge, huge, Happy birthday to Noel Dilworth who is my right hand lady. Do not know how I would live without her. Happy birthday, Ballerina,
You're the best. And if you listen to the end of the episode, you know I tell you a secret, and this week secret is that we just went to Tucson, Arizona for the Thanksgiving holiday, we visited Jared's fam, his aunt Emily, his grandma Sue, who's amazing, and we sat around. We played some board games. They love banana grams, as do I. His grandma is so good at banana grams man and we were playing and all in a frenzy, and then she shouted banana and she finished her tiles
and looked over. She played some great words. One of them was cunt c U n T And I was like, you, treasure, I love you, So get out there, play some games. Good for your brain. Okay, bye bye.
Oh you should see the crossword puzzle