My old pal Wade, whom I met in Arkansas, but who hails from Houston, has been guest-blogging for the last couple of days on the enormously popular blog Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle. Here’s Wade, on today’s puzzle:

Almost every single clue had its way with me. I verbed; it nouned. I past-tensed; it adjectified. I pluraled; it said, HA! Looking at the wrong word, fool!

There’s this guy there named Noam Elkies, who appears to be one of the smartest guys on the planet. Just for an example of how smart he is, he was made a full tenured professor at Harvard when he was 26, which, according to Wiki, “made him the youngest full professor in the history of Harvard.” Even cooler than that is the fact that his Erdos number is 2.