A saving error resulted in The Jan. 21 column being resent. This is the correct column for Jan. 28.
I had no intention of writing about diversions from harsh news three weeks in a row, but after discussing comics and police blotters over the past two weeks, a quirk of timing has me talking about puzzles this week.
This is good news. We just added many more interactive puzzles to cleveland.com, including the Los Angeles Times and prized Thomas Joseph crosswords. You play them on your screen with easy-to-navigate tools.
Puzzle playing jumped online during the pandemic, with Wordle the icon of the era. (I’m still playing Wordle daily at the New York Times site, along with a few imitators.) People wanted to look away from all of the scary news, and online puzzles were an easy way to escape for a few minutes.
We’ve long had interactive puzzles at cleveland.com, which you can play at cleveland.com/puzzles, but we now have more. We’ve added the puzzles of the Tribune Content Service.
Jennifer Conklin coordinates our syndicated services and constantly works to expand what we offer. She performed some magic to line us up with the new puzzles and games.
The offerings include multiple variations of Sudoku, multiple variations of word jumbles and a variety of crosswords. You’ll also find more solitaire games as well as mahjong, matching and logic games.
To play them, you click on the tile of the Tribune puzzle page on our website. Usually, you’ll have to watch a few seconds of a video before you can jump into the puzzles and the games.
Speaking of diversions, we’re preparing to launch a second e-mailed entertainment newsletter, based partly on the striking success of our In the CLE newsletter. The latter is a going-out-guide, loaded with the best of the available activities for a coming weekend. The vision for In the CLE came from Mike Norman, our entertainment, life and culture editor, and I find it refreshing every week.
The new product will be about dining and drinking in Cleveland, focused on the region’s foodie culture. Mike has been working on prototypes, and they look as inviting as In the CLE.
You can’t sign up for the new product yet, but if you’re not receiving In the CLE, you can subscribe for free at cleveland.com/newsletters. You’ll receive it every Friday.
Finally, a lot of people are getting their diversions this year from following the Cleveland Cavaliers, and they get their information from a Cavs beat writer Chris Fedor. People have been writing me to tell me how much they enjoy his insights and analysis.
You can do more than read Chris’ content. He has a podcast with Hayden Grove, called Wine and Gold podcast. They do a few episodes each month. You can find them at https://tinyurl.com/Fedorpodcast.
Chris sends texts to paying subscribers about what he’s thinking as he reports on the team. He offers tremendous insights. The cost is $3.99 a month, but you can receive his texts for two weeks for free as a tryout. Give it a try and find out why Cavs fans are enjoying this special season through Chris’ perspectives. Sign up at https://joinsubtext.com/cavsinsider
Thanks for reading.
