About Us

I produced a short version of the backstory of this puzzle on the front page, but I’ll expand upon that brief introduction here.

I met John Weil when I was an aspiring actor and comedy writer – still a teenager. John had founded the Quicklime Comedy Revue in Cleveland, and I submitted a packet of material for his consideration. That material, I promise you, was wall-to-wall dreck, but John saw something in it to invite me in to become a Contributing Writer and Assistant Director of his revues. This was back in 1980.

This began our artistic collaboration that lasted for a few years, with some fairly considerable triumphs that might be recounted on another day. But it started something much more enduring – our friendship, which lasted for all of these last 42 years.

Okay – fast forward to 2010. John struck on an idea for a short-form acrostic puzzle, in a format never really seen before. We had both been fans of Acrostic puzzles, which are a staple of the world of word games, but still distantly lag in popularity to their far better-known cousin, the Crossword. For instance, The New York Times publishes daily crosswords on their website, but only one acrostic every two weeks.

This is unfortunate, because the Acrostic carries an ingenuity and elegance few other puzzles possess. 

The traditional Acrostic yields a solution grid of a published paragraph of about 200 characters, supported by about 20-25 clues whose initials would spell out the author of the quote and the title of the source work. It’s always a substantial puzzle, requiring about the same amount of time to complete as a Sunday Crossword. 

John’s idea was to produce a shorter puzzle that could be produced daily, and be solved in a few minutes, to accompany the solver’s breakfast with two payoffs – the satisfaction of a solved puzzle, and a good laugh to start the day. Just as in our comedy revue days, John’s fondest desire was to get people laughing.

I don’t have a comprehensive knowledge of the history of puzzles, but I have never seen Acrostics published in this manner, not once. Acrostic puzzles have ALWAYS been around 200 characters, and around 25 clues – ALWAYS. He thought we could present a unique product to the ever-growing world of puzzles.

Now I was more of a puzzle buff than John, so I was John’s first consultant on all his finished puzzles, his principal editor. Together we established a set of quality criteria, things that are considered necessary for all publishable Acrostics. We worked out how to resolve the specific problems this particular format brought out. I was backing John up every step of the way when he was publishing the puzzle, and I can claim to be more familiar with them than anyone else.

He never made much money at the puzzles with the Plain Dealer. They paid him a ridiculously low fee, which he accepted to retain the rights to his puzzles – he wanted the opportunity to sell them to other outlets – the dream prize being a deal with a distribution syndicate. But he could never get the gatekeepers interested in his puzzle, and when the PD pulled the plug in 2012, he could never find another publisher.

John’s problem was his failure to grasp the possibilities of the Internet. For years, writers, artists, performers have been using the Internet to bypass the gatekeepers and release their work on their own. There were opportunities for this in 2012, and they have grown exponentially since. And on this date in 2022 – in fact, one year to the date of John’s death – we find ourselves with unprecedented interest in online puzzling, as witnessed by the unlikely explosion of Wordle and its many offshoots and derivatives into our daily lives. The time is ripe to re-introduce the world to John’s puzzles.

Please enjoy!

Chris D’Amico
Lakewood, Ohio