There’s not much in life that’s more entertaining than reading the Mail’s sometimes ridiculous claims. Look, for example, here:

The Daily Mail was the first national newspaper to bring Sudoku to this country

Well, no it wasn’t. It’s not true. It’s plainly false. The Times first published Su Doku. Then the Mail picked it up, decided it’s readers couldn’t cope with a ‘foreign’ name, and called it Numbercrunch. The Times was first.

while the Mail on Sunday went one further with the introduction of Super Sudoku

The first Super Su Doku was published in the Indy. Not the Mail.

You might think that this is a minor correction… but the Mail splashed over half its front page that it was first. And it wasn’t. Besides which, as entertaining as Su Doku is as a puzzle, there really isn’t all that much to say about it, and its becoming quite frustrating to not be able to open a paper without some special feature or other about a number puzzle.

And just as I was about to hit ‘Publish’, it appears that Janine Gibson from The Grauniad has written along similar lines. Choice quotes:

Kudos, by the way, to Sun Doku which launched on Tuesday and distinguished itself immediately by being a puzzle that someone else has already half completed. The Guardian launched its own version on Monday, sprinting for the high ground with “the original Japanese puzzles hand-crafted by its inventors” and gently putting the boot in to the computer versions run by other papers. The others responded with suitable outrage. “We were first,” said the Times. “We’ve got four!” shouted the Independent. Sighs from baffled readers everywhere.

[T]he first Sudoku puzzle hit the UK press in the Times six months ago. The Daily Mail launched one shortly thereafter, though it was called Codebreaker and everyone else ignored it. In fact the Mail was in danger of being written out of the collective history of the Sudoku Phenomenon as it emerged day by day last week, until it devoted half of its front page to a bold “we was first” claim. It’s possible the Mail may now be regretting eschewing the Japanese name, which we can only assume it did in case its readers got upset by the idea of it being foreign.

And, I think, a perfect one to finish on:

I propose a truce. We’ve all got one now, let’s just leave it alone. Do the puzzle, don’t do the puzzle, just don’t talk about it.