Day: February 28, 2002

Cruciverbalists run amok? The New Yorker has an interesting story about crosswords and the people what love ’em:

Joshua Kosman, a classical-music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, is a typical attendee. “The past fifteen years, for me, has been a process of sinking into, codifying, and coming to terms with the fact that this is what I do. That I’m a puzzle guy,” he told me. Then he cut to the chase: “Did you know that Britney Spears has signed a big endorsement deal with Pepsi? That’s right, it’s true, and we are all very happy about it. You see, ‘Pepsi-Cola’ is an anagram of ‘Episcopal’ and ‘Britney Spears’ is an anagram of ‘Presbyterians.’ ” He paused to let this sink in, but my reaction wasn’t quite what he had hoped for. “Yeah, I know,” he said. ” ‘Episcopal’ is singular, and ‘Presbyterians’ is plural. But we take what we can get.”

Found through Arts & Letters Daily.

The music on Dell’s tech support hotline seems to change every time I call, and the uninterrupted ’80s pop of Sunday night — yes, little friends, video killed the radio star — gave way last night to some strange blend of quasi-classical elevator music, interrupted every half-minute with a “thank you for your patience” and “all our representatives are busy helping other customers.” It could have been worse; they could have been playing John Ashcroft’s greatest hits. And I suppose there are worse things to find yourself doing than deleting the contents of your hard drive and then reformatting it, but if there are, I don’t want to know about it. Typing “format c:” and hitting enter is nerve-wracking enough for one evening, thank you very much. I think I managed to salvage the more important files before the big purge, although I lost a lot of digitial photographs and some of the software I need to upload them, and I’ll need to talk to my cable modem provider about what software I need to reinstall from them, since nobody there ever sent me a CD or disk.