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We’re the Answer to this Week’s Sunday Magazine Puzzle
By Jennifer 8. Lee | November 23, 2008
Fortune Cookie Chronicles as the Sunday New York Magazine Acrostic
So this week, I’m part of the solution to the Sunday Magazine puzzle (not the crossword, but the second one). It’s called an acrostic (otherwise known as an anacrostic) by famed puzzlers Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon. Which is very flattering.
As it explains. It’s some related somewhat to crossword puzzles, except it uses an acrostic form. It typically consists of two parts. The first part is a set of lettered clues, each of which has numbered blanks representing the letters of the answer. [This usually in the NYT is the last name of the author + the title of hte book.]
The second part is a long series of numbered blanks and spaces, representing a quotation or other text, into which the answers for the clues fit. [This is from my book!]
The Wordplay blog discusses how it came about.
This week’s quote from Jennifer 8. Lee was sent to us by a solver and correspondent named Marc McGarry, an avid reader and lover of puzzles (and also a Red Sox fan with whom we’ve exchanged sympathetic e-mail during the baseball playoffs). With no particular prompting, Marc sent us a number of excerpts from The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, saying only that the book seemed rife with acrostic-worthy quotes.
As it happened, we’d already been browsing happily in that book, and we’d earmarked a few passages — including the one Marc sent regarding chop suey’s etymology. Yielding to coincidence, we chose that passage for the puzzle.
Yay. Of course, solving this is beyond me, so my professor is sending me a filled in copy to keep. And here is someone who completed the puzzle.
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