The Saturday X-word is the toughest of the week. I'd never finished one, and I don't usually get too far if I do try it. But yesterday, I got the whole thing. I went through most of the clues, and had hardly typed any letters in. I finally saw an easy one: a baseball player named Brogna. Then I quickly figured out that an "association with guards" was the NBA. From there, I somehow went back through and got the whole thing, in about an hour and a half. (I'm down to about eight minutes on the Mondays--the true puzzle nerds do it in under two.)

As I started writing this post, The Simpsons came on, and in it, Lisa was doing crosswords, even name-dropping Will Shortz. And now the episode is over*, and Will ended up being in it, in cartoon form. Maybe this will spark some interest in his amazing puzzles among the part of the population who do non-NYT puzzles. (Kim, this means you!)

Great line from Homer in the episode:

"Like any prudent gambler, I know when to walk away...never!"

Oh, but the original point of this was to say that while Rico Brogna is well-known to baseball fans, the casual- or non-fan doesn't know him at all. So maybe the guy can be happy that he's a very advanced crossword clue. And maybe I can be happy that I know something from the Saturday puzzle that somebody who knows, say, all the Chinese dynasties in order, doesn't?

*It didn't take me a half-hour to write this post--I was writing during commercials