He additionally delivered a heartfelt eulogy for the pencil on social media.
“Being me means dropping a trusty longtime mechanical pencil, having it break (it doesn’t click on anymore), and feeling like I misplaced an previous good friend,” he wrote on Bluesky.
He then instantly changed it with one other one of many very same make and mannequin.
Amongst aggressive crossword solvers, such is the inimitable enchantment of the Pentel Twist-Erase III.
As a result of certain, beating out a whole bunch of different solvers on the ACPT—the nation’s largest and oldest annual crossword contest, based in 1978 by New York Occasions crossword editor Will Shortz—may imply memorizing the dictionary or spending numerous hours practising your cruciverbalist abilities on more and more sophisticated grids. However having the precise software to jot down with received’t harm, both.
“I’m certain I’ve used mechanical pencils which can be fairly shut, just like the different Twist-Erase fashions, however I at all times return to my standby,” Hinman mentioned in a cellphone interview. “You get your trusty pencil, work in your approach, simply do loads of puzzles—that can go a great distance.”
Right here’s why Hinman and a great deal of different crossword solvers rely solely on mechanical pencils and why the Pentel Twist-Erase III is so usually their pencil of selection.
