Tablesaw!

This puzzle was posted by jangler_npl two weeks ago. I wanted to repost it for a larger audience, since the original was under a friends lock.

What unusual feature do all of these songs have in common? If you know the answer, feel free to show it by posting additional examples (if you can think of any). There's at least one other Paul Simon song which works. (And technically, the Pretenders song probably needs an asterisk.)

"1979"—Smashing Pumpkins
"Against All Odds"—Phil Collins
"American Tune"—Paul Simon
"Big Yellow Taxi"—Joni Mitchell
"Brass In Pocket"—The Pretenders
"No Rain"—Blind Melon
"Sloop John B"—The Beach Boys

The original post inspired several additions, some of which will be listed in the first comment to this post, as additional references.

One of the most popular after-hours games at con this year was "Exquisite Fruit," a game received by tmcay in a dream, as befits any pastime of the surrealist vein. One person writes down an answer to be guessed, then seven people collaborate to form a clue for that answer in the style of Exquisite Corpse. The first person writes three words, then folds the paper so that the next person can see only the last word and the answer. The second player writes down two words and folds, and so on until the last person adds a single word and asks the question to the person next to them.

There'd been a massive game of Pyramid on Saturday night, and I hadn't thought to collect the categories for posterity. So I decided to grab the clues from a Sunday-night game of Exquisite Fruit when the opportunity arose. Players included Artistry, rubrick, toonhead_npl, jeffurrynpl, Eddy, /Jabberwock, Wraavr, hahathor, cramerica, tmcay and probably someone I'm forgetting. Some higlights:

• What Kubrick film starring Malcolm McDowell singing in the Nadsat slang like "horrorshow" movie?
• What Depression housing Green Acres pig Dahling presidential administration caused homeless in Annie Warbucks?
• What tacky tartan man skirt has many male skirt Scottish Batman was from Scotland?
• What porcine cocktail do goys drink tref and shaken not stirred not fried shaken?
• What jagged building stepped pyramid in middle of Q-Bert’s block pyrmaid but low-resolution Jews?
• What horror face-off between extraterrestrial against queen creature ultimate face-off between two creatures?
• What underwater weapon energy based illogical Captain Skywalker used in Klingon killing weapon explodes?
• What borough in Welcome Back in New York borough Welcome Back from Manhattan neighbor?
• What snackalicious treat like tollhouse recipe is sweet black sweet drops with brown morsels?
• Jerry Lewis’s partner nutty Jerry Lewis often sings "That's Amore" alcoholic not "G-schploing!" smarmy?

More clues with answers here

Always carry an exquisitefruit.

Thanks to tinhorn2, a major portion of the Denver NPL convention is available online: Diorama Flats.

For readers not involved with the NPL, "flats" will need some explanation. Usually, they take the form of poetry, and you can get a nice introduction to that style of puzzle in the NPL's minisample. In short, every flat starts with a "base" which is a group of words united by a particular bit of wordplay. So hideout and hideous form a base known as a "last-letter change," for reasons that should be obvious. Others are mote complicated, but they're all listed in the NPL Guide

But for this convention, we threw out the whole "poetry" thing and decided to work in a more three-dimensional medium. For diorama flats, the words in the base had to be represented in the form of a diorama, made with the various arts-and-crafts materials provided.

Over fifty dioramas were made on Friday night, though only thirty-three were presented as part of the competitive solving the next day. I thought I'd take this opportunity to share some of my favorites.

First, here's the one that I made with cazique (I was going to embed them, but Picasa isn't letting me, I guess:

CONSONANTCY (7, 5, 5)
(Link to Diorama)
=Z-Saw (cazique/tablesaw)

A Consonantcy is a flat type where the consonants for each word remains the same, though the vowels change (like acorn, crayon, and ocarina). The numbers following the title tell you how many letters each word has.

Other favorites:

DELETION (5, *4) (*4 = not MW)
(Link to Diorama)
=100 Down/D Ness

In a Deletion, one letter (but not the first or last letter) is removed from a word to create another word. The asterisk means that the four-letter word is capitalized. "Not MW" means that the word doesn't appear in a major Merriam-Webster dictionary.

TRANSPOSAL (*6, 6)
(Link to Diorama)
=(Logic/Artist unknown)

A Transposal is a simple rearrangement, with the same letters in each word. Again, the asterisk means that one word is capitalized, but this time, it can be found in Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary.

LETTER BANK (11, 12 5)
(Link to Diorama)
=Vebrile/¢

In a Letter Bank, the first word (the bank) has no repeated letters. The second word uses each letter in the bank at least once but possibly many times (like lens and senselessness). The "12 5" means that the second "word" is actually a two-word phrase where the first word is twelve letters and the second word is five letters.

FIRST-LETTER CHANGE (8)
(Link to Diorama)
=tmcay & Team Conorado

Should be self-explanatory. Change the first letter of the word to get a new word.

The red eggs held clues reading assassinate, murder, physician, surgeon, sport on a plank, fortunate, beneficial, and inexpensive butt. Which suggested my copy of the game Kill Doctor Lucky [link changed 6/22/11; original link to "http://www.cheapass.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=CAG&Product_Code=CAG001"]. Inside, instead of the low-overhead, high-concept game we've all come to know and love, there were several pieces of paper.

First, there was an alien communication regarding Step 2: Drawing Crop Circles. Corporal Flerg has returned his notes to Ensign Dronn, making special mention of the section of the design that crosses itself like an X and explaining the concept earth crops to the young ensign. It's clear to see why this was needed, because also included in the box was a diagram of the prospective site of the circle. Finally, there were twenty-five pieces. (The agents' tetragrams were already cut, but that's difficult to do over the Internet. If you'd like to solve on your own, you can download an image in which the pieces have been randomly arranged and rotated.)

After correctly reconstructing the original crop-circle design, the agents used the clues in the alien communication to dig in an area in my backyard that corresponded to the place on the diagram where the X ended up. After going down a short way, they found the next gold egg.

Background and Construction
This puzzle was changed in probably every possible way before it was finished. Originally, I wanted the location of the golden egg to be located around the church down the street from me. But as Easter grew closer, I became worried about two things. One: The church would attract a lot of families. A lot of families means a lot of nosy kids. A lot of nosy kids means a higher likelihood that the egg might be located and messed with before the agents reached it. Two: I wasn't sure what parts of the church and its grounds would be accessible at what times. The spot I wanted to use (adjacent to a rosary of stepping stones around a garden of roses dedicated to Mary) might or might not be locked by the time the party got started.

At about this time, I decided to try to use the movie Signs as an inspiration for the aliens. It didn't completely pan out, especially since I couldn't locate a Signs-inspired font for the messages, but it did leave me with the idea of a crop-circle puzzle. While eating dinner at the local Chinese restaurant, I mused about the piles of mostly loose dirt in my backyard not being conducive to crops. From there, I thought that the idea of digging up my yard might be pretty fun, or at least surprising.

( More on Puzzle Design )

I drew a 10x10 grid on graph paper, selected a good area for a 2x2 square to hold an X, then divided the rest of the grid into non-square tetragrams. Then I drew a loop. Then I cut out the pieces. Then I tried to figure out how to give information to make the placement of the pieces easy.

The grid I'd drawn just didn't want to be easy. I tried so many things, but nothing gave enough information without providing a shortcut to placing the square piece. I also had trouble fighting against the urge to turn the loop into a logic puzzle. There are lots of pencil-and-paper logic puzzles based on figuring out how a loop fills out a grid. I had to keep reminding myself what it would look like. In my mind, I saw Bartok quickly filling it out while Mel and Maria looked dazes/bemused/bored. I quickly shook it off.

Finally, I accepted that the answer would be to give the outlines of all of the pieces. To do this, though, I had to scrap the hours I'd already put into the grid and draw a new one so that, instead of only one square piece, there would be several. Karmically, once I had recut the tetragrams and drawn a new loop, the puzzle was satisfyingly difficult. Clarifying which pieces were "end pieces" by adding the dark borders made it easy enough for me to consider it complete.

I went into my backyard and took pictures of four patches of dirt, after digging them up a little bit and smoothing them with a rake. Then, I arranged them into a square, and lined up my prospective burying spot with the area that would hold the X piece. I overlaid the outlines of the pieces, and the puzzle was finally complete.

Agents in Action
This was the last communication found by the agents. In retrospect, I wasn't incredibly happy with the cluing, but things worked out satisfactorily in the end. My biggest regret was that "sport on a plank" was way, way too ambiguous for "board game", especially since one of my cousins is on a diving team. Regardless, they figured out that "killing" and "doctors" were important, so when my mother stumbled upon the box of Kill Doctor Lucky (conveniently laid on the top of a stack of boardgames), she immediately knew it was right.

I left the house to help the agents working on Step 3, and soon, I saw some agents wandering around my backyard with the diagram. When I found out they hadn't solved the puzzle, but were hoping to shortcut by finding loose earth, I sent them back inside.

Later, I found them digging. In the wrong place. They had solved the puzzle, but couldn't locate it in my backyard. I realized I'd made a foolish mistake. Although the diagram I have online is nice and colorful, clearly showing four different locations, the printed version, in black and white, isn't so clear. In my enthusiasm, in printing, I didn't realize how hard it would be to distinguish the sections. So the agents were using the main resource they had (two flower pots in one shot) and using them to orient the X. I clarified their locations, and soon they were digging in the right place. I had to do the ultimate excavation, though, since they were still a bit hesitant about digging in my yard.

So, though it had troubles, I liked this puzzle a lot, probably because I went through so much grief putting it together. But all of the wrinkles ironed rather well, and the hunt went on.

Despite a creeping throat cold, I ran a Christmas-themed trivia game at my family's Christmas Day party. I borrowed the scoring system called Trivia Football from NPL member Conundrum. Since that scoring system idn't going to work on the weblog, I'm going to offer a modified version.

Each of the questions below has at least eight correct answers. Without using any references, create a list of seven answers. Your score for the question will be the number of correct answers given before giving an incorrect answer. For example, if you were asked to identify the true love's gifts in the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas", and if your answer sheet looked like this:

1. Maids a-Milking
   
2. Lords a-Leaping
   
3. Pipettes Piping
   
4. A Partridge in a Pear Tree
   
5. Golden Rings
   
6. McDonald's Happy Meal
   
7. Turtledoves

. . . then your score would be two. Although there are five correct answers in total, only two are given before the first incorrect one. Incorrect answers have no penalty, so if you run out of answers you are sure of, you can add other guesses to pad your list out to seven.

( Tablesaw's Christmas Trivia Bonanza! )

Answers will be accepted by e-mail until the end of the year. The winner or winners will receive some stuff that's lying around my house.

All precincts are reporting in. To sum up the election, here's two people heard in passing [changed link to Internet Archive, 11/21/10]:

"California: The Wish We Were Kidding State."
"Did you vote?"
*silence*
"You forfeited your bitching rights."
"So that's what those stickers are good for."

I'm going to do another recap of the results, updating last night's analysis and giving updates on everyone from my other major post on the subject.

And here's the anagram of the day, from Minipearl and the NPL mailing list:

He's grown large 'n' crazed.

The week, that is. I just want to crawl into bed and stay there.

Things that may be able to lure me out of bed:

• The urge to finish off the SwampBeast plank puzzles (Nine out of fifteen so far)
• The opening of the Ninth Annual Interactive Fiction Competition
• Alias [dead link changed 11/21/10; original link]
• Pizza

SunNYTX: 27:30.

There's one oddity of the California Special Election that I haven't mentioned here. I wanted to, of course, but I was bound by a code of secrecy. You see, I had incorporated it into a puzzle in the Grey Labyrinth, and since I knew that there is at least one reader who solves those puzzles, it wouldn't be fair.

For over twenty-five years, California has used a complicated process to ensure fairness in voting. Apparently, there's a marked tendency among voters who enter the polling booth without have made a clear decision to just vote for whoever's name is on top. So California rotates the order of the name in every district and provides, for every election, a brand new alphabet to use when ordering the names of candidates. This time around, the alphabet is: RWQOJMVAHBSGZXNTCIEKUPDYFL.

Catchy, huh?

The alphabet is pulled in a ceremony that looks more like the California Super Lotto. A young woman pulled ping-pong balls out of a chamber, reading letters instead of numbers. Each one was pulled out until the new alphabet appeared.

Although not on the tip of everyone's tongue, this is definitely the most publicized random arrangement of the English alphabet that I can think of. The drawing was covered in most major California news sources, and it's been mentioned at least once by most national news outlets. There was a story about it on NPR, and the recall alphabet has appeared on CNN web pages in stories about the election. It was also recently used as a trivia question on "Wait, Wait — Don't Tell Me."

It's rare to see letters get the spotlight like this. I've written one puzzle based on it, and I can't imagine that there won't be more. It seems like a useful datum to save for future reference for a while.

The Hexagrams Puzzle by Eric Solomon. Solomon is also the inventor of the famous Black Box puzzles, a hexagon version of which is also available. The hexagrams are a lot of fun to play with, but it can be surprisingly hard to place all nineteen.

ThuNYTX: 12:45.

The puzzle has been formatted to the New York Times' specifications and is sealed into an envelope ready to be flown across the country. Wish it luck on its way.

What I've learned thus far:

• There's an informal limit on the number of black squares allowed into a grid.
• Many people don't know what emo is.
• This is fun.

TueNYTX: 6:30. WedNYTX: 7:30. TueLATX: 5:15. WedLATX: 5:30. Oooh . . . pangram.