The final issue of News of the World, which you could have seen online today if you were fast enough (Rick was), was civil and laudatory, or relatively so. “THANK YOU AND GOODBYE” reads the cover headline, with a gentle but firm reminder below of the paper’s proud statistics: a hundred and sixty-eight years; seven and a half million readers. Not mentioned: some two hundred employees now looking for work. But they have made their presence known in the crossword puzzle, where a number of clues and answers appear to be directed at Rebekah Brooks, the departing editor. As the Telegraph reports,
The journalists had smuggled the stabs in the puzzle to get around the “two very senior Sun journalists” that Brooks had “go though every line on every page with a fine tooth comb to ensure there were no libels or any hidden mocking messages of the chief executive,” an unnamed source told the Daily Telegraph. (They also might have tried using the C.I.A.’s First World War-era formula for invisible ink, but it can be tough to find nitrate of silver in bulk.)
The crossword puzzle has been suspected of treason before. When “UTAH,” “OMAHA,” “OVERLORD,” and “MULBERRY” turned up as answers to the Telegraph’s puzzles in May of 1944, MI5 got suspicious. All were code names associated with D-Day. (It was not a coincidence, but the explanation for how the words got into the puzzle only came out years later, and is too convoluted to go into here—it involves a headmaster, some loose-lipped soldiers, and a fourteen-year-old playing hooky. But the answer “DIEPPE” appearing the day before the raid on Dieppe in 1942 was, according to an extensive MI5 investigation, a fluke.) Today, MI5 may do better to scour Google Suggest.
I’m no MI5 official, and wouldn’t recognize any military code names should they surface, but I decided to see what today’s New York Times crossword puzzle, by Will Shortz, might or might not be communicating subliminally. Spoiler alert: I’m including some answers. (Modesty alert: I cheated to get them.)
William and Kate’s American journey plays a prominent role in the puzzle, in my estimation. The answer to 53 Across, “DOH,” surely refers to Homer Simpson, who, surprisingly, has his own stationery, inviting the couple to visit a table read for an episode of “The Simpsons” while in California. (They declined.) The answer to 1 Down, “LASSO,” may be a comment on Kate’s interpretation of American apparel. The Duchess of Cambridge could just as easily be the secret subject of 5 Down: “BEANPOLE.”
Some of the hidden messages are tougher to decode. At whom are 21 Across (“DORK”) and 28 Down (“SNOOTY”) aimed? Does 19 Across—“CHAOS”—refer to the budget negotiations in Washington, the situation in Syria, or the rodeo the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge attended?
Lest we forget that a coded crossword puzzle is, in terms of farewell pranks by disgruntled workers, all in good fun, check out 56, down and across: “USPS” meets “UZI.”
