The Simple Life

While riding on the Chinatown Bus back to New York from Washington D.C. I was reading the Washington Post, supposedly one of the better papers out there in terms of journalism, quality and all around good newspaper stuff and passing the time. (The Chinatown Bus system is a discussion that I will have to make another time, but to sum it up, it's both embarrassingly cheap and embarrassingly crappy.) So after about an hour of reading and skimming through various human interest stories, I finally got to the comics section.

Now there are a few things that I expect from the comics section and that no comic section should be without:

1). Comics
2). A Crossword Puzzle

So what was there? Comics? Check. Crossword Puzzle? Not so much. What was there instead? A Sudoku Puzzle.

Now I understand that crossword puzzles have a degree of difficulty to them and most people do not remember the last time they finished an entire puzzle. I am among one of those people. But is it really necessary to replace crossword puzzles in newspapers with sudoku puzzles? Yes, sudoku puzzles also require thinking and a certain level of logic. They have their own merit too. It is ridiculous however, to choose to insert a sudoku puzzle into the paper over a crossword puzzle because crossword puzzles are too hard, and sudoku puzzles are for everyone. If newspapers want to remove an ad for Lasik surgery and instead insert both a crossword puzzle and sudoku puzzle into their paper, that is fine. If they want to insert one, I'm asking them to insert crossword puzzles. I am really tired of seeing them remove the challenging late in the week crossword puzzles with easy and very easy sudokus that people can finish in less than five minutes. We need to think people.

Has it gotten to the point where as a society where we are so afraid of failure and so put off by not being able to complete things that we have started, that our lives must be filled with easy sudokus? I'm pretty sure there are a lot of people who do not want their coffee watered down, do not want their Simpsons episodes to only consist of slapstick, and do not want to only do easy sudokus with more than half the numbers already in the 9x9 grid among other things. You don't have to simplify everything or over complicate anything. Just please leave crossword puzzles alone.

-y