Page 1
Sixteen down: a four-letter word for “move along on foot.”
March? No, that’s five letters, stupid.
Walk? Hike? Race? It could be any of them. The clue is unfairly broad.
It was your New Year’s resolution to do the New York Times crossword puzzle every day, and it’s January 8th. If you give up now, you’ll be no better than Quade.
Quade is your idiot neighbor who, last year, resolved to become a vegetarian and go to church every week. The first Sunday morning of the year, you happened to look into his window to see him watching a Judge Judy rip-off called Smut Court while eating a live hamster. Though Quade is a failure at keeping New Year’s resolutions, he’s got one thing going for him: he’s good at crossword puzzles. He’s damn good.
You know that doing a crossword puzzle every day is a pointless resolution. It won’t make you any smarter or improve your life in any way. But at least it’ll give you something to rub in Quade’s idiot face. Well, it would, if you were anywhere near competent at crossword puzzles.
You entered the world of crosswords with little experience and no strategy, and you are paying the price for it. On January 1st, you finished the puzzle (rated at a difficulty level of pre-retarded by the North American Crossword Syndicate) in a shameful six hours.
From there, it only got more pathetic. In the first seven days of this year you’ve spent fifty-six hours on crosswords. In that time, you could have gotten around to repainting your bathroom four times. You could have composed a symphony. You could have watched a hundred and twelve episodes of Smut Court while eating two hundred and twenty-four hamsters (assuming a rate of four hamsters per hour, but you could top that if you really tried).
That’s beside the point. This crossword isn’t going to figure itself out, and you’re underqualified. It’s time to bring in reinforcements…
To use the internet to find the answer, turn to page 2.
To ask Quade for help, turn to page 3.
2 years ago • Notes