Su Doku are the Devil!

Curse you, Count Su Doku! Your insidious tendrils are even now encircling my heart!

It's all my wife's fault. Puzzle-lover that I am, I still had enough self-control to walk past the massive table of su doku puzzle books at the bookstore. But Wendi is weak. Weak, I tell you! Like Eve innocently suggesting a fruit salad for dinner, Wendi brought this su doku book into our house, and now I am a man consumed.

Su doku, for the uninitiated, are yet another Japanese import. (A running theme in this blog - and my life!) Su doku ("numbers singly," or more loosely, "all the numbers must remain unmarried") are logic puzzles in which grids of numbers must be filled in so that each line and each cell contain the numbers one through nine, with no duplications. They fit together with nefarious intricacy in only one configuration, which is solved by testing numbers in different places until one fits, and then another, and then another. The end moves much more quickly than the beginning, but the puzzles can take quite some time, especially since I'm not a pro at this yet.

Worse, when you discover that you've misplaced a number some time ago, you realize to your horror that all your placements since then are most likely wrong, and you've been multiplying your error exponentially with each new number. This happened to me yesterday toward the middle-end of a puzzle I was sure I could finish before the clock struck three . . . in the morning.

Have I mentioned that su doku are the devil?

I have to go. Like those terrible puzzle cubes in Hellraiser, The Big Book of Su Doku #1 sings to me with its irresistible siren call . . .