A Dave Fun Quiz: Before and After

Twenty words are clued below.  The ten "Before" words all undergo the same operation in order to become their "After" counterparts, which are in mixed order.  What is the operation--and for that matter, what would have been and/or will be a more thematically appropriate time to post this quiz?  (All words are between 4 and 7 letters long.)

BEFORE Clues

1. Act coquettishly, like Sarah Palin

2. Trade

3. Plugs of tobacco

4. Brightly colored parrotlike bird

5.  A common utility

6.  React to an alarm clock

7.  Crash

8.  Make sanctified, like ground

9.  A male witch

10. Detroit hockey player

AFTER Clues

a.  Call of "anyone there?"

b.  Horse opera

c.  Pig noise

d.  Making renovations to

e.  Like an old bucket of song

f.  Mayhem

g. Mitchum-Russell film set in a foreign city

h. Lever 2000, e.g.

i.  Vacuum cleaner company

j.  Part of a rowboat

I'll show the matchups and explain the whole thing in a later post.  In the meantime, enjoy!

Wordplay in the Wild redux

Thanks to old high school friend Kentaro (which, come to think of it, also means 'thanks to Facebook'), I now have this example of what may be the loveliest ambigram you're ever likely to see outside of puzzle books and Dan Brown novels. Nicely done!

LATER: I just noticed, though. The cover is a spoiler! Look away, children! Look away!

Is Hasbro in League with Wal*Mart?

In a game of Scrabble the other day, this came up naturally on my rack.  (Click to enlarge.  Sorry it's so fuzzy.)  I reacted with shock and awe:  "I so not, e-Scrabble!  I not at all!"

By the way, if anyone has a good play from this position, I'd love to hear it.  The best I managed, after finding no purchase anywhere, was HI/HAW for something like 14 points.  (I'm too disgusted to even count it.)  No doubt there's some vanishingly obscure 5-letter word that would have completely turned my fortunes.

Midday Quiz Question

What do the following have in common: Monopoly, Columbus, Pinocchio, and a light bulb?

I'll give the answers when I'm good and ready.

LATER: Okay, I'm ready now. Answers in comments.

Great Moments in Scrabulish History

While I have a number of other things to celebrate that I'm afraid I can't publicly go into, I thought it wouldn't be fair to let one particular moment go by without commenting. Printed above is my friend Tracy's and my latest game of Scrabulish. As you can see, this game has been unusually dense and, consequently, high-scoring. Even an 8-point word like UEPEIO--defined as, "In classical rhetoric, the term for an argument that says, 'I know you are but what am I?'"--scored 63 points here because it also formed EJEU, OUIE, PNNP, IOGE, VERI, and IDAO--which last is an adjective for "the posture of someone about to sit gingerly, as 'Dad posed idao above the wicker chair.'"

But even in this game, miracles can happen, and Tracy's latest move was breathtaking. If you look along the bottom you can see where she just played THUURKAX ("n. The clavicle.") on a triple-triple for a heart-stopping 248 points! By contrast, even GONURSEOPIVIASE (Which is a form of OPIVIA--that is, the delusion that just because you've finished writing a book, you're bulletproof--where the sufferer actually gets shot and refuses medical treatment; also called SURGEONOPVIASE) was worth a mere 116. Take a bow, Tracy! This is a great day for the world.

AFTERNOTE: I can't resist pointing out the beauty of Tracy's JUNOED ("v. and adj. Duped into thinking teen pregnancy is awesome") and my own UEPEIOI ("n. The bead on an abacus that represents the bazillions place"). Moments like these are what make the game worth playing.

The QUESTIONS for the Horror or Western Trivia Quiz...

Since the Facebook Quiz function has more limitations than I thought (I thought I could get it to direct people to my blog for explanation, but no such luck), here's what the quiz is. The answers are here, in the Comments to the previous post.

Below is a list of 11 classic film stars, many of whom went out on rather minor notes. Each of these performers' last films was either a horror film or a western. Can you guess which is which?

(I'm referring to major US theatrical releases, and in every case the performer is listed in the credits.)

1. John Wayne
2. Marilyn Monroe
3. Joan Crawford
4. Bette Davis
5. Veronica Lake
6. Robert Mitchum
7. Jean Arthur
8. Fred Astaire
9. Rita Hayworth
10. Barbara Stanwyck
11. Jimmy Stewart

A Dave Fun Quiz: Greeting Card Theme Codes

I'm looking over my greeting-card-days memoir today, and it struck me that there's a potentially fun puzzle in it.

Greeting cards are organized by "theme codes" (or were, back in the fin de siecle). They were normally four letters long, and were supposed to tell you the general overall point of any given sentiment. Sometimes they were about the punchline (GGAG stood for "gift gag"--a joke where you promise a gift on the outside, and there's some twist when you open the card), but mostly they were designed for serious cards (such as SELD, for "seldom say"--"I love you all the time, even though I only buy you cards on our anniversary." Very popular in male captions.)

Here are ten greeting card sentiment theme codes. Can you suss out what they stand for?

1. HMYM
2. WHAP
3. SLAM
4. FRND
5. TOY or THOY
6. QLIF or QLIFE
7. WSUC
8. TYDS
9. GENW
10. ENCG

Answers later. I'm a little busy right now.

(Greeting card people who participate will, of course, face a much steeper grading curve. Even if you worked at American Greetings and not Hallmark, I still assume you know Hallmark's theme codes. After all, American Greetings copied everything else...)

UPDATE: I've posted the answers here.

7,351 Words, and a Dave Fun Quiz

I had an amazingly productive day today (7, 351 words) and I'm going to celebrate by popping online briefly and posting a Dave Fun Quiz that's easy to research. I discovered it recently by looking up the word "avocado" because it sounded suspiciously like a lawyer-related word and I wasn't sure why.

Here's the Question: Which of these words doesn't belong, etymologically?

avocado
orchid
feist
cullion
musk

As usual, the answer is in Comments.

P.S. I now know how to get the maximum writing done. 1.) remove the wi-fi card (duh), and 2.) start writing first thing in the morning. You can exercise later, after the first two or three thousand words.

Let Us Now Mock Crappy Puzzles

I've got nothing against Mensa, qua Mensa. Let me just say that up front. Lately I've been working my way quite happily through Henry Cox and Emily Rathvon's Mensa Cryptic Crosswords 2, and enjoying the cleverness and high quality of the puzzles inside. So Mensa has done good things, and I'm not actually sharpening my axe here with malice aforethought.

But while I was looking around my temporary country lodgings the other day, I noticed a puzzle book on the shelf titled Mensa Publications Presents the Ultimate Puzzle Challenge--a book of 400 or so puzzles published in Britain in 1995. Not only is the book ugly--printed on something just one step above butcher paper--but the puzzles are the same ten or so types of puzzles repeated over and over again: Deduce what these symbols weigh; Find what's next in this series; Complete this magic square. They're almost all mathematical, and they're all pretty damned boring. (Admittedly, there is a color section on much nicer paper, with color versions of these same puzzles, but since I'm colorblind there's no point in torturing myself with those.)

And yet, as I was flipping through it, I noticed a few other types of puzzles that were even worse. Take, for example, the Aunt Hildegarde puzzles. As aficionados of Aunt Hildegarde puzzles know, they follow a distinct pattern: Aunt Hildegarde has just visited [Name of Relative], and now she loves X but hates Y... and you have to figured out what's guiding her preferences. If she visited Uncle Wallace, and she loves CHALLAH but hates BREAD, loves OFFENSE but hates DEFENSE, and loves MOUSSAKA but hates FUDGE, you might guess that she likes double letters--as exampled by the double L's in Uncle Wallace's name. It's a potentially fun type of puzzle, and when done well, the variations are always interesting: she visits Uncle Septimus and only likes words that contain chemical symbols; she visits Aunt Mildred and only likes words that contain the names of colors; she visits Cousin Liv and likes finding Roman numberals; and so on.

In the Mensa Ultimate Puzzle Challenge, here are the answers to the three Aunt Hildegarde puzzles: she doesn't like words with S; she likes words containing a U; and--in a puzzle that said, "She likes LILLE but hates PARIS, she likes ANTWERP but hates BERLIN"--it turns out she doesn't like capital cities. Three puzzles, no mental challenge at all worth mentioning. What a depressing waste.

But, having established that the editor (Robert Allen, director of Mensa Publications) is enigmatically tone-deaf, I was appalled further by his occasional tendency to add old-fashioned, full-page riddles. Bad Riddle #1 says in essence,

"Little Johnny wanted to go under the sea. Although his father protested [I've cut out a lot of tedious dialogue], they eventually agreed to do so, even though neither of them swim, there would be real sharks (who somehow wouldn't hurt them), and they were afraid of getting wet ('we won't get wet,' said Johnny). Johnny and his dad are not going diving, or taking a trip in a glass-bottomed boat. So how are they going under the sea without coming to any harm?"

The answer, it should pain you to hear, is, "Johnny wants to go through the glass tunnel at an aquarium." Which ought to, but does not, include the subclause, "...which, in the interest of keeping the puzzle consistent, was actually placed under a real sea, not a series of tanks made to simulate it for tourists." But even after that addition, I feel like adding further, "Or they hopped in a submarine; that would work too."

Bad Riddle #2: "A man came home to find himself locked out of his house and his backyard full of water. An upstairs window was open [which would allow him to get in and unlock the door], but he had no ladder to help him reach it...Then he had an idea. What was it? It did not involve ladders, steps, or climbing up the walls of the house."

I'll give you one sentence of spoiler space, so stop here if you want to think about it before proceeding.

Answer: "The water in his garden was snow. He rolled several giant snowballs, built a pyramid, and climbed up."

I came up with a better answer. "The snow was actually frozen ethane, and he was able to use it for fuel to propel himself skyward. Did I mention he was wearing a jetpack?" This is a guy who will go to any lengths to avoid simply smashing a downstairs window.

Bad Riddle #3: "I have five hands, but you would pass me in the street without comment. Why?"

Official Answer: "Because three of them are on my wrist watch."

My answer: Because they're hidden in my backpack, where I keep all my victims' trophies.

But once you get to the end of the book, in the Brain-Buster section, you get two of the crappiest puzzles of all. Here's the final, brain-busting, be-all-and-end-all riddle:

Bad Riddle #4: "Joshua Shrimp had been at sea for forty years and in that time he had been around the globe many times. However, he had always spent his nights in bed and on dry land. How?"

The answer is so depressingly bad that I've relegated it to the Comments section so you can click it for yourself.

That would be bad enough. But here's one of the final word puzzles. It consisted of a picture of three crates, each one covered with letters. Three crates, mind you. Now here's the text.

Bad Word Puzzle:

"ARROT RCUP RPDRC
LEHAEC TMHEED UPSE
US LE ME

These letters, when joined together correctly, make up a novel and its author. Can you spot it?"

It's really that bad. "Lets just take a title and its author, scramble all the letters, and ask people to reconstruct whatever the hell we were thinking about." But to compound the insult, the visuals of the crates are completely irrelevant to the puzzle! It's not a clue, it's not a "take one letter at a time out of each crate in order" type of thing; he just literally threw down a bunch of random letters and said, "You know, I've got some clip art of a crate that would work here; three of them would give me enough space for all these letters. Good luck, solvers!" This is, hands down, the laziest goddamned excuse for an alleged "puzzle" I've ever seen, lazily tossed off by someone who doesn't seem aware that puzzles are supposed to be fun.

The answer to that one is also in Comments. In the meantime, I have a puzzle for Robert Allen:

The following letters below--divided into three groups for no reason at all--can be rearranged to spell out a three word message. Can you figure out what it's saying?

KFUN UCYS OMEA

A Dave Fun Quiz: Guess the Book From the Meme

I can't get that page-123 meme out of my head, and I'm in a house filled with books, so I hereby offer the following challenge: can anyone identify this classic nonfiction book from the sixth, seventh, and eighth sentences on page 123?

"This usually causes the cervix to pop into view.
8. To remove the speculum, keep it open and slowly pull it straight out.
*
When I first saw another woman's cervix, I thought that it was pretty gruesome, and why were all these women in the clinic getting so excited about it?"


[Note: that last sentence should be in italics, but--again--Safari and Blogger are butting heads. I'll fix it when I can.]

UPDATE: Answer in comments! Congratulations to Trip "Qaqaq" Payne, whose polymath credentials are still secure.

Heads and Other Things To Play With

If you've got a little time to kill--say, you're waiting on hold, or you can't watch the movie because your kids are still washing up after dinner--I hereby recommend the following games to divert you. They're free, they're incredibly low budget, and they have all the freedom and joy that comes from not giving a hoot. This is why I love low-budget movies, too: at their best, they think, "If you can't be slick anyway, why not surprise people with something weird?" These games are all strange and lovely.

Feed the Head. Loopy, fun, and I can't tell you anything more except that it actually has an ending. And when in doubt, grab whatever you can and obey the title.

Mr. Mothball. A hop-around-on-platforms game that's mostly quite easy, very forgiving (you never really die; you just restart each single-screen-sized level), and what I love most of all is the fact that it looks really cartoony in the best way.

Levers. Utterly simple and Zenlike. I'm totally stuck at the moment (the birdhouse just dropped) and I don't even care. All I know is, you can pluck things out of the water by fishing around, and you're trying to get the balance more or less even for a certain length of time.

The Tall Stump. My favorite of the lot, even though it's way longer than the others and a lot more intricate. But it's also nicely episodic and unfailingly cute. I even like the music. Just remember to shoot everything once you get the bazooka, and use your coins to save your place. Because this is one where you really can die.

Just doing my part to destroy everyone's productivity.

Dave Fun Quiz: Food and Drink Wordplay

I've been going to a lot of health food stores recently, and I noticed the following fact: if you take the names of two grains commonly found in health food stores, combine them, and rearrange the letters, you can spell the name of a liqueur common to many mixed drinks. What are the words?

UPDATE: As you might expect, the answers are in the comments. So consider this a spoiler alert.

This Could Be the Funnest Game Ever

Introducing Scrabulish!

I recently discovered that if you're on Facebook, and you're playing Scrabulous (their online version of Scrabble which is so far still legal), one of your options is to play a "Challenge" game, which means the computer won't stop you from playing non-dictionary words. So for the past few days I've been playing with my friend Tracy a variation where the game is to NEVER play an actual real word, and to make up plausible-seeming definitions for whatever you play. I call it "Scrabulish." The picture shows the board as it currently stands.

Here's the gameplay so far. I've played the odd moves; Tracy has the even ones:

1. OILET (n. A small oil.)

2. GURNIX (n. A female hospital orderly who physically or psychologically domintates her patients.)

3. Q-ING (n. The inability to draw a clean circle.)

4. BRAIP (v. To burp inwardly.)

5. MIFE (n. Rodents with missing teeth.)

6. TRIADERN (n. one who holds down three jobs.)

7. RANDLESS (adj. Broke, in South Africa.)

8. WOOST (v. To sleep with one eye open.)

9. GRATT/WA/OT/OT (GRATT. v. To drag a rake over a sidewalk; WA. n. A unit of metaphysics, equal to the volume of an average human soul; OT. n. Bird poop, while still in midair.)

10. ROTHKAT (n. a scarf made of thistles, worn diagonally across the breastbone. German.)

11. GREEPIAN (adj. Pertaining to, or in the style of, Edmund Whitcomb Greep (1876-1934), Am. architect and couturier, noted for his mixing of navy and black.)

12. GOGAD (n. a small, perpetually moving article whose common name is unknown or forgotten. See: DOODAD.)

13. COILET/CABIER (COILET. n. A makeshift outhouse constructed from rope; CABIER. n. The guy at the front of a taxi stand who ushers folks in one at a time. French.)

14. VELVO (n. One who dresses entirely in plush fabric.)

15. UNNUI (n. An intense hatred of palindromes.)

Currently I'm leading, 289 to 231. But it's quite literally anyone's game.

A Conflux of Geekeries

My friend Joe ("Toonhead!" to Puzzlers League folks) just directed his blog readers to this startling discovery: a 1924 cartoon based entirely on the then-burgeoning crossword craze. Behold Crossword Charlie!

(Edited to add an exclamation mark to Toonhead!'s name. Apologies to Toonhead!.)

What I Learned This Weekend By Editing Crossword Puzzles

*There is no country or region called NATAL anymore. Technically, the area is now called KwaZulu-Natal.

*CARESS is not technically clued as "Dove competitor." Today, Caress and Dove are both owned by the Unilever Corporation.

*The EXPOS are now the Nationals, and they're in Washington, not Montreal.

*The capital of Guam is no longer AGANA, though the name "Agana" is still used for the river, the bay, and the nearby area Agana Heights.

*ARCO is no longer a "L.A.-based gas giant," but is a subsidiary of British Petroleum.

*"Time Magazine's Person of the Year 2005" is not BONO per se, but Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates ("The Altruists").

*Most strangely, Steffi GRAF does not, as of this posting, have a page on Wikipedia. (Or rather, she has one that you can see right here, but it contains no main body text, no links, no search window, and is basically fucked up.)

...And now you know as much as I do.

I wrote this cryptic crossword a few weeks back and then discovered that it was unusable in The Enigma because someone else already had the same idea. Just so the effort isn't wasted, here's my version:

wizardofozcryptic.pdf

And, as a help, here's the solution:

wizardofozsolution.pdf

UPDATE: There seems to be a problem. Sorry about that. When it's fixed, I'll let you know.

Help Dave PDF a Cryptic Crossword!

I have a new cryptic crossword in PDF format (Word can make PDFs!) that I'd like to make available on my site, say, tomorrow. But again, as usual, I don't know how to upload a PDF onto a Blogger site. (The menu bar only handles pictures and video.) If anyone knows anything, contact me.

Great Missed Game Opportunities

My friend Francis has just posted a very entertaining piece about two truly wretched movie tie-in boardgames: Pirates of the Caribbean Scrabble, and Shrek Othello. You can enjoy the snark here.

What struck me upon reflection, however, is that there are a host of potentially wonderful tie-ins that never appeared in the first place. For example, there is no Charlie and the Chocolate Factory version of Candy Land! If ever a simple game demanded interesting new market-tested twists, that baby's it! And yet the world will have to wait another thirty years or so for the next director's sally. Sigh. Here are some other misses I thought of. If any Hollywood marketers are out there, I'd like to point out the following lapses as a caution to the inattentive:

Atlantic City Monopoly

Frankenstein's The Game of Life

Pulp Fiction Connect Four (also works with any multi-strand movie it seems to have inspired, from Go to Two Days in the Valley to Magnolia to Babel)

An Incident at Owl Creek Bridge Hangman

Twister Twister

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly Operation (be very, very careful!)

Atonement Sorry!

and of course,

The Seventh Seal Chess Set

I'm sure there are others, of course. Fire away.

P.S.: When I did some quick web research to make sure there was, in fact, no Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Candy Land, I got this surprising page on the search term "chocolate factory." Which of these things doesn't belong, and yet is cooler than all the others?

P.P.S. I was tempted to add "The 300 Bunch of Plastic Swords for Homophobic Dumbfucks to Jump Around and Hit Each Other With for Two Mindless Hours." But I guess you could just as easily call it "300 Aggravation."

A Scrabble Variant For People to Point Out the Weaknesses of

At last, I'm no longer wamble-cropped. So I'm heading into the city to (hopefully) meet with some friends at the AWP Conference (that's the Associated Writing Programs; it's where writers go to get university teaching jobs that probably aren't in New York City or anywhere else cool either).

However, before I go, I noticed a game idea I was going to post some time ago and I thought I'd send it up the flagpole.

It has long occurred to me that the main frustration with Scrabble is that the element of randomness accounts for about 40% of the gameplay. If your opponent gets both blanks and all the premium tiles while you draw vowel after vowel, even the best player will be hard pressed to battle to a win. But what if Scrabble were more like chess, with every option on the table, and almost no randomness at all?

So here's my game:

OPEN SCRABBLE

Each player gets fifty tiles, in the following distribution:

A-4
B-1
C-1
D-2
E-6
F-1
G-1
H-1
I-4
L-2
M-1
N-3
O-4
P-1
R-3
S-2
T-3
U-2
V-1
W-1
Y-1
blank-1

There are also a few special tiles, which in my ideal version would be a different color and double-sided:

Q/Z-1
J/X-1
G/K-1
A/I-1

Each of these can initially be played as either letter--but the moment a letter is chosen and played (using the Z on the Q/Z tile, e.g.), the opponent's unplayed tile MUST be the other letter. (So if you play the Z, your opponent is now holding the Q).

Players can play up to seven of their tiles in any turn. But for all practical purposes, they start with a rack of fifty tiles and can choose freely from any tile they still have. In every other respect, scoring and rules would be exactly the same. (At least for now.)

I'm curious to figure out how this would work, particuarly with high-level players. For any given Scrabble rack, there is almost always a single best play. But with all the tiles visible and available, I'm not sure whether there would still always be a best first play (ZANJERO!), or if it would start to become more like chess--"Oh, you're using the Zanjero Gambit? Let me just respond with the Zugzwang Defense." Obviously, the games would be quite a bit shorter, and the scores much higher, since there'd basically be bingoes every round. But this raises all kinds of questions. Would the first player always win? Should there be some inherent limitation (no bingoes on the first play) to limit this? Would there actually be different strategies, or would one obvious stereotyped game come to dominate (like the Fool's Mate) and make the entire game not worth playing on a high level?

I welcome comments, especially from any friends of mine who are among the top-ranked players in the United States...