Double Cross

To help pass the time in my ongoing Wednesday Grand Jury outings, I started picking up the local Upper Deleware River Valley newspaper, The Times Herald Record. It's basically a recap of all the national paper's news with a few bits of local interest thrown in. Definitely not worth a subscription, but it'll do in a pinch for a read. What I came to find myself drawn too, though, was the crossword puzzle. I'm too embarrassed to ever do the NY Times crosswords, even in private, as I have no skill in trying to figure out all those retarded, inane clues that often don't have anything to do with the answer or if they do, I'm simply to uneducated and socially inept to know it. I realize that is suppose to be part of the fun of crosswords but it isn't for me. Since I'm a visual person, almost a fontiphiliac, I like seeing neat rows of letters lined up, with words intersecting along various axis. Basically, I'd just like the answers so I could fill them into the nice neat puzzle. But what I have on Wednesday's is a blank puzzle with the same difficult, confusing questions and no answer key until Thursday so I try my best, going through all the questions first for the answers I know which usually can range anywhere between four and ten and then plugging along trying to figure out the rest. It's a particularly painful test of my patience as I don't have much of that to begin with. Case in point, I'm blogging about it instead of trying to figure out the last five words on today's puzzle. I'm so furious right now, a level of emotion I usually reserve for my unwieldy CSS coding blunders or stupid assholes in the service industry, I've taken to using Google, dictionary.com, and thesaurus.com just to try and cheat my way to completion. I have no compunction about utilizing the Internet in this way as that is what it's there for. Had I not, I would not have known 37-across "erstwhile Peruvian" was "I-N-C-A" thereby completely fucking up 22-down "describe" which I though was "L-I-S-T" but is now "L-_-S-N", a veritable impossibility. Just to worsen my already dark mood, the online crossword puzzle at the Times Herald-Record for today isn't even the same fucking puzzle.