Holy cow! Babs got me a bottle of Dom Perignon for Christmas! I thought I'd never get to try this before I died. (Though I probably will never get to try it again, but still.) This + my six-pack of Westvletern 12 I bought from Belgium over eBay which I will finally be trying today = one happy alcoholic haze of a holiday. Ooo, I also got "The Dark Crystal" soundtrack and the "Star Wars" pop-up book. And yes, I'm 34... why do you ask?

So, apparently if you don't log into LiveJournal for, oh, say two or more years, they delete your account. How dare they? ;-)

Though it's kinda a bummer, as I had a bundle of quickie book reviews I had posted over the few months I was totally interested in blogging.

Crossword-wise, I've been helping Barry Haldiman in proofreading Litzmas 2007, this year devoted to Richard Silvestri, who's one of my favorite constructors. This was much less work than last year, where I litzed and proofread every Mel Taub-edited puzzle (between Maleska's death and Shortz's first day) -- including the two weeks where there was no editor -- and from those Barry culled the ones he posted for Litzmas (on the whole I agreed with his choices, though there were of course a few I would have liked to have seen posted -- but it's his site, and it's not like I care that much). Which reminds me, I really should litz some more diagramlesses some day -- the last one Barry posted of mine was back in August 2006.

I also recently finished deciphering (as well as any human is capable) Will Weng's notebook where he recorded all of the daily constructors -- a valuable resource since the puzzles appeared in the NYT without attribution. Unfortunately, the notebook in question only goes back to December 31, 1973. In the case of the Farrar dailies, this isn't exactly the end of the world, as she printed many of the bylines in the books -- so if you have the time and inclination, you can match the puzzle in the book with the unbylined puzzle as printed in the "Times" to get the publication date. (This is exactly what constructor Holden Baker did when he litzed several months worth of 1957 puzzles.) However, Weng never published the bylines in his compilations, so unless some other record exists somewhere in the dusty bowels of the NYT, those bylines may be lost forever. (Though I suppose if some enterprising souls were to delve into fifty-year-old check registers, they may be able to glean which constructors got paid and when -- though unless the puzzle dates were written on the check stubs, that might not even help.)

Of course, Weng's handwriting was only a micron clearer than the hieroglyphics left by the feet of chicken, so there are some I am not at all sure of anyway!

[Well gosh, that was fascinating. I must remember not to post at 2:45am in the future....]