Updates!

George Zebrowski gets his moment in the sun.

Enjoying a sort of “late Christmas” this weekend with Mom, Dad, my brother Graham, sister-in-law Katie, and their one-year-old Lucy. So not much of a post today, just doing a little housecleaning.

I’ve adjusted the “Highest One Move Scrabble Score” piece to include this year’s new record. This will probably find its way into the next issue of The Journal of Wordplay.

I also adjusted the end of the 1916: Year in Crosswords piece. At first, I thought there weren’t any references to the crossword puzzle from this period outside Arthur Wynne’s work, but it turns out that one did appear in Fur News magazine, soon to become Fur News and Outdoor World:

In “Thrills of the Trail,” in Fur News 2, February 1916, George Zebrowski described a “very exciting encounter” with an “ordinary husky house tabby,” possibly injured by a trap.

The cat, Zebrowski reported, “clawed my face until it resembled the original design for a crossword puzzle, and how my eyes managed to escape in the general melee is to me, as yet, an unexplained mystery.” A longer excerpt is below.

While I’m sorry for the trauma that Zebrowski and the unnamed cat went through, at least they have the compensation of being mentioned over a century later as a signpost in the growing cultural awareness of crosswords! So…that makes it all worth it, right, Zebrowski?

I’ll take your silent glowering as a “yes.”