Sudoku is a stupid game. It’s the Dave Matthews Band of games. You sit there, mindlessly devouring the spiritless enlightenment of your generation. You think it makes you smart. Look at me, I do something Japanese, I’m worldly. And it has numbers, where’s my Fields medal?
Yet Sudoku is a phenomenon sweeping the nation. It’s spreading to newspapers across the country like a third-rate flu strain. You can go online and play for free. You can buy books about it on Amazon. There’s even a Wikipedia entry. A BBC special proclaims that Sudoku was the seventh most popular Web search of 2005.
Really want to impress that little hottie in you Law in the Political Arena class? Just tilt your newspaper a little so she can see how far you’ve gotten on you Sudoku. Pretty soon you’ll be hounded by a troop of women trying to get a piece of your steamy Sudoku mojo.
But it’s more than a cheap ploy for romantic attention. It’s the engine of our national aspirations. Sudoku moves world economies. Someone told me that the reason the Indian economy is so successful is because their workers do Sudoku while Americans read the funnies. Dammit, I like the funnies. Let us salute the great American soldiers of Sudoku who are fending off the evils of outsourcing by learning how to fill in boxes with numbers. Congratulations, you are the real heroes of America.
To honor their heroism, I think we need to have a National Sudoku Day. We will gather all to sing the ancient Sudoku spirituals (my favorite is “9 4 3 6 8 7 2 1 5”) and celebrate our Sudoku heritage. There will be Sudoku contests and Sudoku cookouts, and we’ll all wear Sudoku shirts. Instead of having stars on our flag we’ll have a Sudoku array. Instead of saying the Pledge of Allegiance, elementary school children will solve the National Sudoku found on the new American flag. No more controversy about the word “God” because it goes without saying that Sudoku is God.
At the end of National Sudoku Day, after the fireworks and awards ceremonies, we’ll all gather around a gigantic computer. Then the Grand Marshal of the day’s festivities will press a big red button. And right before our eyes, the computer will run a magical program that it took some second-semester computer engineering dropout three minutes to write: a program that can solve any Sudoku in a fraction of a second!
Congratulations to you all for your courage, your brilliance and you commitment to this game of games, so sophisticated and stimulating that a computer can solve it in moments. It’s not a challenge, it’s not creative, it’s just plugging away for a few minutes until you have the predetermined answer.
All I have left to ask is: Do you Sudoku?
