| PUZZLED IN VANCOUVER by Susannah Sears Originally published in The Ottawa Citizen, 9/15/2002 |
| It's the kind of Friday afternoon that a Vancouverite treasures. The sky is an unbroken blue and the warm weather has tempted thousands to leave work early and claim a spot at the beach or a restaurant patio. The uncommon climate has failed to move a dozen or so hotel guests, however, most of whom don't even glance at the postcard view from their 30th floor hospitality suite. |
| Their focus is firmly on sheets of photocopied paper, which they occasionally scribble with notes, or pass to a neighbour for help. They will spend most of their five days in Vancouver this way. Though they are officially on vacation, they're also hard at work unravelling clues in the many puzzles they've travelled thousands of kilometres to solve. These are the members of the National Puzzlers' League, or the NPL for short. "It's not that I don't love the mountains and the ocean," explains longtime member Henri Picciotto. "It's just that I'm here really for the puzzles" -- puzzles that require him to know that "sulci" is a Latin word meaning "depressions" and that "Croatian" is an anagram of "raincoat." Organizers of the annual convention have spent all year making sure puzzlers' brains will be teased to the extreme. The schedule is crammed with crosswords, cryptograms, trivia quizzes and even a puzzle sing-along. For members seeking maximum mind-bending, unofficial games go all night in the hospitality suite, whose kitchen is fully stocked with brain food -- M&Ms, Oreos, nacho chips and onion dip. A box of white wine is still sealed, however. "You need to stay sharp to be competitive," explains one sleepless puzzler. "Wine dulls the mind." "It's such an intense break," Picciotto says. "Normally when you go on vacation, it's still continuous with your life. You're with your spouse, your kids, and so on. Here, it's so full-time. It's another world. It's the ultimate escape, in a way." Picciotto, who's escaped from his math teaching job in San Francisco, is better known to NPLers as "Hot." He's not the only one using an assumed name on this trip. Most members choose alternate identities called Noms, a tradition that dates back to the League's formation in 1883. Though the 52-year-old is clearly among the hottest of solvers, he says that has nothing to do with his Nom. "I joined the H of Henri with the last two letters of Picciotto in reverse order, to get Hot, which is more in keeping with my Mediterranean temperament." His Nom is one of the more straightforward. Many involve byzantine wordplay with several layers of meaning. A few NPLers decline to reveal the origins of their Noms, refusals that don't offend anyone in this group. Trying to figure them out provides yet another puzzle, and that's the League's raison d'être. According to its Web site, the NPL is for anyone who delights in the fact that the word "schooled" has the words "shoe" and "cold" perfectly interlaced. "As one of our wittier members once put it, it's like meeting people from your home planet," says Darren Rigby, whose Nom is Dart. |
| Rigby is one of four Vancouver area residents hosting this year's convention, or Concouver, as it's been dubbed (There are few words these people will not alter). It is only the third time in NPL history the event has been held in a Canadian city. Though the 28-year-old math adviser has become one of the league's stellar word game creators, words did not come easily to him at his first convention three years ago. Most of the famous names in crossword creation are NPL members. One part-time puzzle author, who likes to go by the Nom Mr. Tex, is also the Emmy award-winning co-creator of TV's The Critic and former executive producer of The Simpsons. "I was really intimidated about meeting all these people who had been doing their puzzles, and hearing about past conventions and other things that they'd been doing," Rigby says. "And they just welcomed me with open arms, and made me feel at ease in a way that no other group of people ever really had." That sense of belonging is echoed by most of the 400-plus members, many of whom say they've gotten used to being labelled "geeks" by the less word wise. "Some of my friends here resent it," says Picciotto. "It's not that important to me. I know who I am. I know what I like. I don't have to please the public." Others, like Dean Sturtevant, a 46-year-old Massachusetts software designer, take the put-downs with pride. "We are comfortable with our 'geekiness' if you will, with our love for puzzles and doing things that most people might not understand," says Sturtevant, whose Nom is D. Ness (a homophone of Dean S.). "I think sometimes it's that they choose not to understand, and that's their issue, not really ours." Sturtevant admits, however, he resisted recruitment 20 years ago, while living with two eager NPLers. "They showed me this magazine full of verse puzzles, and I was not the least bit interested." Aptly named The Enigma, the monthly NPL publication contains games so challenging that an 80-page solving guide is sent to new subscribers. The Enigma is largely filled by puzzles called flats, which, at first glance, appear to be poems with a couple of words gone awry. The trick to solving them is to replace the questionable words with new ones, arrived at through various forms of wordplay |
| "Typically when I explain a flat to a normal person, they kind of give me a blank look," says Picciotto. "Then there is the occasional person who gets a charge out of this. I have become pretty expert at identifying those people." For Sturtevant, who thinks up math and word problems when having trouble sleeping, it took another 15 years before he identified himself as NPL material. Eventually the idea of meeting like-minded people proved irresistible. |
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| SUSANNAH SEARS WITH NPL MEMBER D. NESS |