Crossword

An old friend has come back to please your puzzling mind and intrigue your intellect. Beginning this week, Wayne Robert Williams, highly regarded for constructing and editing shelves-ful of puzzle books and magazines, is again the man behind the crossword puzzles that appear Monday through Saturday in The Inquirer. His name might be familiar to Inquirer puzzle pencil-pushers: The paper published his crosswords for years until 2009, when Tribune Media Services stopped distributing Williams' work.

Games and anti-games, from the mundane to the insane, come under our scrutiny this week. TV GUIDE MULTIMEDIA CROSSWORDS Trivia Works/InterMedia Windows / $19.95) You don't have to be a genius to get a perfect score on TV Guide's new multi-media crossword game. In truth, you really don't have to be very good at crosswords, at all. This new-age CD-ROM puzzle disc invites struggling players to cheat like crazy. If the text clue "He played Potsie on this show" isn't enough to clear your cobwebbed memory, just tap on the "multimedia" logo and get extra help in the form of a video clip, photograph or sound byte - in this case a still photo of "Happy Days" actor Anson Williams.

Faithful workers of crossword puzzles already know that a miscellany of table spreads is an olio of oleo. They know that a Herman Melville novel is always - Omoo. They know - how could they help but? - that an aloe is a South African lily and medicinal herb, that a century plant is an agave and that "osier" refers, somehow, to any one of a number of related willows. Crossword puzzles are a four-letter-word world without any four-letter words you wouldn't want your children to hear.

'Philadelphia ends with the same five letters it starts with," says Merl Reagle. "Not too many cities do that. " And not too many people walk around with those kinds of lexicological distinctions in their noggin - dissecting words, analyzing vowels, looking for syllables that do things apart from just being syllabic. "And D-E, which is what links those same five letters in Philadelphia, that stands for Delaware, which is right across the river there," he adds. Reagle, 56, constructs crosswords for a living.

What a difference an inch makes. That's what a Bucks County reader said, who called to say how much she liked the new, leaner look to The Inquirer. A week ago today, the paper began using a new page size that is one inch narrower than before. We began by printing about 75,000 copies a day of the new-size paper on one press. It will take until early August to convert all nine presses to the new paper size. On the first day of the changeover, the paper received about a dozen calls and e-mails from people who said they liked the feel of the narrower page.

Want to know how to do a New York Times crossword puzzle in ink? For a puzzle enthusiast, that just might be the ultimate. So 25 of them showed up at the Montgomery County Library on Powell Street Saturday for a presentation by Jim Myers, a crossword designer whose puzzles have appeared in TV Guide and USA Today. The gathering was an opportunity for puzzle-doers to meet their real foe: the puzzle-maker. "The game is that you're trying to beat the author," said Joan Lundy of East Norriton, who has been doing crossword puzzles for 55 years.

Entries in the Inquirer Editorial Board's annual Year-in-Review crossword puzzle contest are due Saturday. To solve the puzzle online, readers may go to http://go.philly.com/yearcrossword.

Dementia and its evil twin, Alzheimer's, may have moved ahead of cancer on the list of most feared diseases, especially among baby boomers, who have begun to believe it is their inescapable fate if they have the bad luck to live too long. So we grasp at any news about aging, hoping that medical science has indeed found a way to preserve that most essential part of who we are - our memories. Do we protect our minds by doing the New York Times crossword puzzle or by doing aerobics?

About 200 readers from across the region readers tried their hand at The Inquirer Editorial Board's 2002 year-in-review crossword puzzle. Most came close to solving it - but only close. That means the 34 readers who solved every clue should take pride - in their grasp of the events of 2002, as well as their crossword skills. Special kudos to three winners drawn at random from this group: Nancy Rauscher of Lower Makefield; Robert D. Garber of King of Prussia, and Ronald Lidondici of West Chester.

So, did you know your 2002? Was the year-in-review crossword puzzle (with clues and answers written by The Inquirer Editorial Board, and formatting done by puzzlemaker supreme Merl Reagle) a challenge or a piece of New Year cake? Either way, here's hoping the puzzle was fun. Check your answers with the solution provided here and online at http://inquirer.philly.com/opinion/. We'll announce winners next week.

Dementia and its evil twin, Alzheimer's, may have moved ahead of cancer on the list of most feared diseases, especially among baby boomers, who have begun to believe it is their inescapable fate if they have the bad luck to live too long. So we grasp at any news about aging, hoping that medical science has indeed found a way to preserve that most essential part of who we are - our memories. Do we protect our minds by doing the New York Times crossword puzzle or by doing aerobics?

IF ANYONE KNOWS what Emily Guendelsberger might be feeling right now, it's Tom Fitzgerald. Guendelsberger, 27, is in Hahnemann University Hospital awaiting surgery on the leg she broke during last Saturday's teen stampede, which tore through her neighborhood like a tornado. At least the damage inflicted by a tornado isn't personal. Not so with the assault that Guendelsberger endured at the hands of 30 to 40 animals. They surrounded her near Broad and Green streets, punched and kicked her, then moved south on Broad, looking for more victims to terrorize.

Thirteen letters for "record-breaking crossword-puzzle builder"? That would be Bernice Gordon . At 96, the Center City resident is the oldest person to create a crossword puzzle for the New York Times, according to editor Will Shortz . (She was oldest last year, too, when she submitted one.) "I had a very fine education and a good vocabulary," the Penn grad, whose first NYT entry appeared in 1952, told me. "I was babysitting two little children and decided to make some money on the side.

PHILADELPHIA - Joel Fagliano was sitting in sophomore chemistry class at Masterman High School one morning when his attention wandered from the blackboard to the blank piece of paper in front of him. He wrote down five letters: B-O-R-E-D Under that he wrote down another five: O-L-I-V-E To be truthful, he doesn't remember exactly what word came next, but sitting at his Mount Airy kitchen table the other day, he demonstrated his...

An old friend has come back to please your puzzling mind and intrigue your intellect. Beginning this week, Wayne Robert Williams, highly regarded for constructing and editing shelves-ful of puzzle books and magazines, is again the man behind the crossword puzzles that appear Monday through Saturday in The Inquirer. His name might be familiar to Inquirer puzzle pencil-pushers: The paper published his crosswords for years until 2009, when Tribune Media Services stopped distributing Williams' work.

AMC's Rubicon : Lots of puzzles wrapped in who-knows-what-enigmas, with sparing doses of mayhem, suspense, and character. The once-blessed AMC cable channel adds to its stable of two stunning series ( Mad Men and Breaking Bad ) with a giant conspiracy show that will dilute the brand. But that was pretty much inevitable. MM and BB may be grand-slam home runs, but even Ty Cobb struck out occasionally. Rubicon , premiering Sunday with two episodes from 8 to 10 p.m., is no strikeout.

It all began because, about 60 years ago, Bernice Gordon found television a bore, except for Milton Berle. So instead of watching a box with black-and-white pictures, she started creating her own black-and-white boxes: crossword puzzles. More than a thousand published puzzles later, Gordon, age 95, is still at it, and the honors keep rolling in. Last week, the woman who put the & in answers like SC&INAVIA, and once did an X-rated set for the Happy Hooker, was recognized as one of a handful of people contributing puzzles to the New York Times for at least 50 years.

Among the many mysteries of All About Steve (mystery #1: Why?) is the rationale behind its insufferably kooky protagonist's choice of footwear: the same pair of cherry red go-go boots, every day, every night. A crossword puzzle constructor for a Sacramento newspaper, Mary Horowitz - played with alarming pep by Sandra Bullock - trots around town beaming proprietarily as she spies this person and that, on the bus or in a park, laboring over her crosswords. And everywhere she goes, she's in those boots.

Herbert S. Levine, 78, of Ardmore, a University of Pennsylvania professor and expert on the economy of Russia and the former Soviet Union, died Sunday at Bryn Mawr Hospital of complications from surgery. Professor Levine joined the Penn faculty in 1960. Though he battled prostate cancer for 15 years, he taught economics until spring 2006 and continued to advise independent studies students. He received several teaching awards including the Lindback Award and the Irving B. Kravis Prize.

It is the feeling that anyone addicted to crossword puzzles knows well. The last letter, or number, or word gets figured out and penciled in. Ahhhhh, completion. And then, next one. When Marilynn Huret of Lower Makefield isn't scribbling in a puzzle and seeking that feeling herself, she is creating the brainteasers that are the welcome adversaries of the puzzle crowd. Huret specializes in crosswords. She creates them, edits them, and uploads them to the Garfield Games Web site for which she is the puzzle editor.