Editorial
Front Page - Friday, February 26, 2010
I Swear...
ACPT Highlights
Vic Fleming
Brooklyn – The Marriott that is now home to the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, is across the street from the New York Supreme Court and Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. A block away is the Brooklyn Law School.
The area evokes memories. When I moved to Little Rock in 1975, the Camelot Hotel sat beside the UALR School of Law, across the street from the county courthouse and a block east of City Hall.
Change was in the air as the nation’s oldest and largest crossword festival’s 33rd annual edition kicked off Friday night, Feb. 19. The biggest change was elimination of Sunday’s awards banquet, a pricey tradition that was anticlimactic and difficult for some to attend, owing to travel itineraries.
So, the finals were held at noon, preceded by awards presentations recognizing all other winners and by a “variety show” tabbed “Crossworders Got Talent”: music, comedy, dance and (surprise, surprise!) word games.
The Friday night session was kicked off by host Will Shortz. A program called “Double Trouble” by Eric Berlin involved a cute concept: In teams of two, the audience solved two puzzles simultaneously from pairs of picture-clues flashed on a continuous loop Power Point show.
Saturday involved the first six puzzles of the tournament. For the second year, I opted to be a judge. With 650 people competing, there is a need for 20 or more folk to hand out the papers, score the solution grids, etc.
Saturday night’s entertainment included a program called “Who Are You? (I really want to know),” a musical quiz conceived by Michael Litman and Marie desJardins, with piano accompaniment, by Jon Delfin. Mike and Marie would sing a few bars of a song, and the audience would then suss out the woman’s name in the song. Much like “Name That Tune.” Answers proceeded alphabetically: Barbara Ann, … Cecilia, … Maggie Mae, … Mrs. Robinson, … Ruby Tuesday, etc.
This was followed by List-Mania led by Greg Pliska, Joshau Kosman and Ken Stern. In teams of four, the audience was given 15 minutes to write as many as possible of several finite lists: stocks of the Dow Jones, characters of the International Phonetic Alphabet, “favorite things” in the song, “ways to eat green eggs with ham” in the book and many more.
From this qualifier, four teams took to the stage, and List-Mania continued orally: books of the Bible ending in “s,” state capitals whose first four or more letters spell a non-capitalized word, state abbreviations that form acceptable Scrabble words, etc.
On Sunday five-peat winner Tyler Hinman was tied for fourth place. He needed to make up a minute on someone ahead of him. Alas, it was not to be.
Winning this year was Dan Feyer, a Manhattan musician. In his first trip to the competition, two years ago, he won the C division. Last year he won the B division.
Second place went to Howard Barkin, a software engineer from Hillsborough, N.J. Howard finished third overall in 2008, seventh last year.
Coming in third was Anne Erdmann, a geologist from Champaign, Ill. She was eighth overall last year and eleventh in 2008.
So, there were new faces in the winners’ circle, but hardly long shots.
Vic Fleming is a district court judge in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he also teaches at the William H. Bowen School of Law. Contact him at judgevic@comcast.net.
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