Wordplay

Wow it's been a solid 3 months since I posted last! I'm sure many parents have this same feeling, but so much has happened in those 3 months, yet it also feels like nothing has really happened. In those 3 months since January, I've spent probably 95% of it in my home with MJ, Baby Girl Yan, and myself, so not going anywhere physically, but mentally I've traveled so far and to the ends of the earth in my study for one of the best competitions ever. Oh and there was a road trip in there as well we took where Baby Girl Yan spent 2 nights in a new location sleeping in a hotel room, and like her father she took it pretty well, adjusted like a champ....except we got greedy at the end of the trip enjoying the outdoors and she got sick, lost her voice on the way back. Like her father, though, she recovered quickly and is the picture of health. One ofthe greatest luxuries in life is to be able to sleep well, stay health, and eat heartily, and then right after that is for your child, in this case infant child, to do all of the above, and she does. Now if we can just survive the upcoming teething process and get her to sleep all the way through the night instead of waking up once or twice.... that would just be the icing on the cake. Honestly, as a new parent who doesn't have any other experience with newborn babies, I feel extremely lucky to have wound up with Baby Girl Yan, she's made our lives so much easier than it could have been, I still get plenty of sleep at night, we haven't lost our minds, and we haven't lost a fortune on medical/health expenses or anything like that, only on diapers and baby wipes (she is a poop machine!) In my trivia preparation, I've come to understand what my strengths and weaknesses are, they become pretty obvious after you go 0/5 on certain categories on Jeopardy or run certain categories with ease....one of my many weaknesses is wordplay, anything with anagrams, add a letter, spell a letter backwards, palindromes, etc. This wouldn't be that big of a problem except the Jeopardy writers seem to be adding more and more of these every year, hoping to weed out the memorization-based players like me who can memorize a lot of facts and study flashcards but can't think on their feet well especially when words get scrambled. A big part of this weakness for me is never having gotten into crosswords and similar puzzles. I've always heard of the NY Times crossword puzzle as the gold standard of crosswords that all cruciverbalists swear by, but I just never got really into it outside of picking up an airplane magazine while killing time sitting on a flight, never actually finishing one because I'd inevitably get stuck and have to start looking in the back for solutions. I assume the thrill of finishing a crossword without any hints is like that adrenaline rush you get when filling in the final piece of a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, or finally achieving checkmate in a drawn-out battle of chess, or finishing a week-long research paper... that feeling of completion that you finally accomplished it and can say confidentally that you did it. I crave that completion feeling, which is why sometimes I rush and get antsy when something is not finished (like the income taxes that I keep putting off). Recently, though, in the past year I've seen Paolo Pasco start on Jeopardy, win 8 games with seemingly effortless ease, then get to the Tournamnet of Champions and dominate in 3 games. Then today I saw the movie "Wordplay" (Free on Youtube!) that's much-heralded as one of the best documentaries ever, not just of the documentaries made for nerds. It's very similar to the documentary "Spellbound" about the National Spelling Bee, Wordplay follows several competitors on the roard to the 2005 National Crosswords championship, where these super-smart people solve really clever puzzles put together by Will Shortz and other crossword gurus. It's very adjacent to Jeopardy where you have to have knowledge.......but also an ability to put words in the right spot and figure out what the clue is asking for in a short amount of time. I watched Paolo Pasco win the 2025 crossword championship....and I no longer quesitoned how this 25-year-old (I think?) got so good at Jeopardy....he's just super-fast and super-talented at breaking down clues and understanding what the writer meant, it's like he's done these crosswords in his sleep, and since birth. That's the thing about youth, I wish I had done these nerdy pursuits earler in life, when my brain was ready to be molded into a machine for solving puzzles like Jeopardy and crosswords...instead it was busy just doing busy homework and reading books, not a bad use of time but it was never honed for competition. Gotta start young! Baby Girl Yan, we will help you do whatever you wish to do but also steer you in the right direction. - Tiger Dad