My personal favorite columnist right now isn't political or entertainment oriented. He is Patrick Smith, the "Ask the Pilot" columnist from Salon Magazine (online here)
Apologies to the Soduko players amoung us, but I am dumbfounded by the game. As is he:
The most alarming trend to strike air travel in the past half-century is not suicide hijackings, surly service or overzealous pat-downs from the Transportation Security Administration. No, the most troubling thing about flying, and perhaps humanity in general, is sudoku, this generation's dumbed-down answer to crossword puzzles. Sudoku was invented by an American, but popularized in Japan. Need you be reminded that these are the people who eat meat-flavored ice cream, carry women's panties around in their wallets, and think it's fun to go indoor fishing? I'm not saying the game isn't challenging. But so is solving quadratic equations, or sword swallowing. That doesn't mean we should all be doing it for fun. People enjoy sudoku, I suspect, because it requires a lot of thinking, but only from a small and highly specialized corner of the mind. It's very egalitarian, in a way, because it's an entirely left-brain exercise with a single and absolute solution. (I think back again, as I often do, to my favorite movie of the 1980s, Terry Gilliam's "Brazil." Mind-numbed citizens of Gilliam's sick dystopia entertained themselves with a small, toylike device that dropped a pendant onto a board, randomly indicating a result of "yes" or "no.") More to the point, you can be a failure at sudoku without guilt. Crossword puzzles make you feel bad about yourself -- for not knowing the capital of Canada or forgetting the name of a Shakespeare play. Sudoku is numbers, and for most of us there's little shame in being lousy at numbers.