Sudoku: smart new date

So I don't do the New York Times crossword puzzle. Not Monday, not even Tuesday, and definitely not Sunday. Perhaps it is in an effort to feel less dumb that I actually would if I tried to pick up a Times puzzle on Sunday morning. Perhaps it is due to a spectacularly lame sort of apathy on my part, half in hopes of resisting -- on a minor, minor level trying to differentiate myself from -- all those folks like Bill Clinton and Jon Stewart and, yes, the Indigo Girls -- who spend their free time puzzling.

So I sudoku. I don't need to pull out the OED, or the GRE hit-parade word list, or the thesaurus to find the synonyms for this or the antonym of that. I just need to know 9 numbers, and I pretty certain I know that b/c I can count my fingers and toes. It's rather easy to understand: fill in the blank spots so that all the rows, columns, and squares are filled with the numbers 1-9. A ha. I can follow the logic inherent in each puzzle (Will Shortz, you are a genius puzzler, but sudoku can't be attributed to you.) and eventually find my way to the very last square in the puzzle.

Though the "light and easy" can still stump me, I've managed to finish a puzzle in 5 minutes (ok, ok, only once did I do that), and a scond puzzle was done in 7 minutes. The rest, well, unfortunately still, they range from 15 to 30 minutes per puzzle. According to puzzlemaster Will, an ideal puzzle would be solved in 30 minutes. Any less, it's not a challene. Any more, too much of a challenge. It demands to much of us, of our time and energy. Will thinks that a puzzle which takes longer than 30 minutes to solve will be too much of a demand and stretch of our resources.

30 minutes. What a speed-demon world. Imagine if all our dates were half-hour. If we slept for only 30 minutes. If lunch breaks were 30 minutes. If everything were 30 minutes, why waste our time with a puzzle, then? Sadly, I'm guilty of sudoku-ing almost every free moment of the day. I do more than the usual 1 per day. I do them back to back. They are soooo fun!