Puzzles are the anti-TikTok, the antidote to mind-numbing social media

     If you asked me to list the three greatest cartoonists from a century ago, the first two would be easy: No. 1, George Herriman, whose “Krazy Kat” created a surreal world around the love triangle of the titular, gender-fluid feline, her — or, sometimes, his — unrequited love for the brick-throwing Ignatz Mouse, both kept in line by Krazy’s secret admirer, Offissa Pupp, all capering across a stark Arizona scrubland conjured up by Herriman’s madly creative pen.
     Then Windsor McKay, whose “Little Nemo in Slumberland” plunged readers into Art Nouveau dreamscape where a little boy peers over pillows while his bed, its legs impossible long, strides down Fifth Avenue.
     As for the third, I’d be hard-pressed. But Rube Goldberg would certainly qualify. His wildly complicated machines entered the vocabulary, a “Rube Goldberg device” being any overly-engineered contraption which, though perhaps not involving a goat gnawing through a rope releasing a boot to kick a ball through a hoop, uses more steps than necessary.
     That said, I would not have noticed, never mind purchased, “The Rube Goldberg Puzzle Book,” if it weren’t created by my former NU classmate — and ace New Yorker cartoonist — Robert Leighton. Friends buy friends’ books — the sales pitch getting harder and harder, year by year. Everyone is so busy.
     Yeah, busy flipping through Instagram.
     Which I do too, for 30 minutes at a throw, watching snippets of “Peaky Blinders” and “The West Wing” and whatever other mind-decaying fluff some string of code decides is going to mesmerize me today.
     But having purchased a puzzle book ($16, not bad for a hardback) there was a complication I hadn’t foreseen. I then had to do puzzles, based on Goldberg’s drawings. Initially, they were quite simple — a four-panel comic strip is scrambled. “Can you figure out the proper order to tell each story?” Robert asks. Well, you can, but you have to read the panels first, then find the fractured narrative by thinking. And thinking is the one thing you don’t do flipping through TikTok.
     But I felt compelled to push on. Not only was the book written by a pal, but the introduction is by Jennifer George, Rube Goldberg’s granddaughter and chief creative officer of the Rube Goldberg Institute, “a not-for-profit organization that uses my grandfather’s work to inspire joy, curiosity, and creativity through inefficient machines.” That also scratched my particular itch — I’ve been gazing into my newly arrived second grandchild’s face a lot lately, musing on two things: first, what could his world possibly be like, say, in 2076? And second, what passing thought, if any, might he someday have for a certain old guy who huzzahed him into the world?

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