ACROSTIC — Today’s excerpt is from a book by a Times writer and editor, Alan Burdick, called “Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation.” I’m no expert, but I believe that the notion of time, or “temporal consciousness,” is integral to consciousness in general, a concept that’s been addressed in previous passages selected by Team Cox/Rathvon (I am thinking of a recent Michael Pollan excerpt but there have been others).

Solving this puzzle could have been ironic, but it wasn’t too terribly hard and didn’t take too terribly long to figure out. I just dove in with STUFFED UP, YEATS and IGNORE, two of which sounded reasonable and were right. The next step was a total guess but logical, LEFT JAB, and then enough little words were deducible to get hints for NIGHTWOOD, BLUE MOON, and DAY-TRIPPER.

At first, I didn’t see as many quirky passage-related entries as usual, but the three just mentioned all have time elements, as does MINUTEMAN and my favorite sneaky joke today, RUSH HOUR.