April 2006

I’m back in New Orleans for another court sitting, and things are off to a good start. I checked in at our usual hotel, the Windsor Court, and walked into my room to be surprised by a full-sized suite. It turns out that the court does enough business with the hotel that they routinely upgrade us when they have room. It’s a beautiful room, with a sitting room separated from the bedroom by french doors. What am I going to do with a pop-up television, though? Or a bidet, for that matter? I feel a bit like Crocodile Dundee.

A couple of us visited GW Fins for dinner, a seafood place on Bienville in the French Quarter. GW Fins is well-known for its more adventurous dishes, and has a bit wider range than some of the other more classic restaurants in New Orleans. After a too-dry martini, I treated myself to the seared yellow fin tuna wrapped in nori. The tuna was excellent, buttery and soft without tasting fishy at all. My dinner companion had sauteed halibut with crabmeat topped with corn butter and served with mashed potatoes. She reported that it was excellent, and it certainly looked it. All in all, a good start to our visit.

My latest addiction is sudoku. No doubt most of you know what sudoku is by now, but for those of you that don’t, it’s basically a logic puzzle solved by filling in a grid of numbers. Despite the Japanese name, the puzzle concept actually originated in New York, and rose to popularity in English newspapers last year. The traditional puzzle is a 9-by-9 grid, divided into nine 3-by-3 blocks. When finished, each row, column, and block will contain the numbers one through nine. I’m not the only addict, apparently. Sudoku caught on big last year, as articles in the New York Times, the Economist, and Slate attest. A recent visit to Barnes & Noble revealed a table stacked with sudoku books containing both compilations of the puzzles and its many variations, as well as discussions of various arcane strategies for solving them.

You needn’t shell out any cash to play the puzzles, though. Many newspapers now include sudoku puzzles in both their print and digital editions, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, and others. There are also a number of free sites devoted to the game. My favorite is Iron Sudoku, but you can also play at Web Sudoku and Random Sudoku, as well as a bunch of others. You can also download sudoku solvers, the best of which is probably Simple Sudoku, which also has an online tutorial in some basic solving techniques. More solving techniques are also described here. Now I just need a support group…