Now, I have a perhaps slightly over-intense affection for the Chicago Reader; I suppose it is for me as the Sunday New York Times is for a lot of people, but my week isn’t complete unless I have a chance to go through the whole thing, cover-to-cover.

Well, it’s not so bad — i mean, if I’m out of town, I probably won’t really miss it. Except that three weeks ago they ran a Restaurants special and I was really disappointed not to have had a look at it.

Well, another quirky thing about the Reader is that their online presence is very hodgepodge — heavily biased towards their listings and classifieds — the databasey kinds of things. They have been offering PDF files (of all things) for the content for a while, but when I went looking for that issue, it appeared that the PDFs were no longer available online. The index page was there, but all the links were dead ends.

So I sent a polite letter to some address at the Reader asking why they bothered taking them down. I never got a response, but today when I went looking for another link to share with a friend, I went looking on a whim for the restaurant special edition and found to my pleasure that the PDFs were there!

So, I’ll just take credit for that. Why not?

PS, a finer point of my slightly over-intense affection is that I’ve really developed a fondness for the crossword puzzle they’ve started running in the last year or so. I like crosswords OK, but have never been really hardcore about them, but this is one I do every week. The clues tend to be a bit out of the ordinary, and the themes are usually pretty clever. You can download ‘em as PDFs as well; here’s this week’s. It turns out that their puzzle editor, Ben Tausig, also writes for Dusted, and has occasionally put up interactive puzzles over there.

• Dusted Magazine Crossword #1 (comment about this one on a Matador Records forum: “any crossword with clues about john cage, merge, fennesz and krautrock has my respect.”
• Dusted Magazine Crossword #3 (Seems as though they skipped #2)