The Dark Side of Sudoku
by Bill Shein

In recent months, have you been unable to sleep? Are you finding less satisfaction in normally pleasurable activities? Have you divorced your spouse, quit your job, or stopped bathing? Do you mindlessly arrange tabletop objects, loose change, and nearby children into 3-by-3 grids?

These are signs that you, my friend, are addicted to "Sudoku," the numerical puzzle game that seems to have appeared out of nowhere.

At this very moment, Sudoku addiction is distracting people from important tasks, lowering productivity, and driving millions of people insane. Yet those addicted to Sudoku insist that it's fun, harmless, and that it will keep their minds agile well into their 130s. (Though it may lead to compulsive fingernail chewing and grinding one's teeth down to useless nubs.)

Despite its sudden popularity, Sudoku is not new. Its dark and troubling past goes back nearly 100 years. Of course, the "official" history of Sudoku — shamelessly promoted by publishers of Sudoku books — suggests that it was invented in the United States in the 1970s. It then appeared in Japan, where it was called "Su-ji wa dokushin ni kagiru," which means, "the numbers must occur only once."

The name was later shortened to Sudoku, which literally means "single, celibate, unmarried" — the precise description of people who become hopelessly addicted.

The real history of Sudoku is not so benign. In fact, it's filled with tragedy. For example, a barnacle-covered Sudoku book was recently discovered on the deck of the sunken Titanic, suggesting that on that fateful night in 1912, the ship's lookout was busy filling little boxes with numbers when he should have been watching for icebergs.

Howard Hughes, the eccentric aviator and industrialist, lost his marbles only after discovering Sudoku on a trip to the Far East in the 1930s. In fact, moments after Hughes said, famously, "I'm not a paranoid deranged millionaire. Goddamit, I'm a billionaire," he stripped naked and rolled around in the completed Sudoku puzzles littering the floor of his mansion.

In the 1960s and 70s, NASA used Sudoku puzzles to keep the minds of the Apollo astronauts sharp during long missions. After all, there's only so much "monitoring of life-support systems" and "sampling the various cheeses found in the moon's outer crust" that a space traveler can do before the mind turns to mush.

So several times per day, each astronaut mixed up a frosty pitcher of Tang, sharpened some pencils, and got busy with Sudoku.

For years, NASA didn't see the danger. But that changed in 1970, when the near-calamitous Apollo 13 disaster was caused by a frustrated astronaut who slammed his Sudoku book between the retro-rocket facilitator diode receptor toggle button and the intergalactic gyroscope used in the moon-cheese storage drawer — though this was left out of the Tom Hanks movie.

Recently, how did Sudoku spread around the world at a speed that puts the Asian bird-flu virus to shame? The conspiracy-minded won't be surprised to learn that since 2003, a consortium of pharmaceutical companies has secretly promoted Sudoku, even giving the addictive puzzles away for free.

Why? To boost sales of "Sudokuzine," a new drug that counters dangerous, repetitive thoughts like, "Must ... finish ... Sudoku ... before ... feeding ... baby" and "Seriously, I can do Sudoku puzzles while driving 75 mph on the highway."

Even President Bush was a victim, becoming fiercely addicted to Sudoku in the weeks prior to the invasion of Iraq after a drug-company lobbyist accidentally left a Sudoku book in the Oval Office.

"Mr. President," his advisors warned, "now would be a good time to lay out a plan to prevent post-Saddam Iraq from descending into civil war."

But Mr. Bush was otherwise engaged. "Let me just finish one more of these Sudoku puzzles," he said, eyes darting wildly. "Or maybe two. Actually, I think it makes sense to do nine more puzzles. Yes, nine is the magic number."

Tragically, the rest is history.

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Bill Shein's madness is not Sudoku-related.

(This column originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle newspaper on April 5, 2006. Join a discussion about this column in Bill's blog. And read Bill's previous column, "Some Recently Opened Businesses").