Eric Berlin

Why do books have typos?

By Eric Berlin | Published: January 27, 2012

It’s happened to all of us: We’re reading a book, we’re involved with the story, and then we’re jerked back to reality by an idiotic typo. How did nobody catch this?, we ask ourselves. Didn’t these people read their own book? Come on, guys! Find some professionalism! Take some pride in your work!

I still shake my head at some of the stuff that makes it into print — even from where I stand, some of these errors seem glaring — but now that I’ve been through the process a few times, I understand why it happens.

In my folder full of Word documents, I have ten different versions of the book that will soon be released as The Puzzler’s Mansion. Way back at the beginning of the timeline, in one of the earliest drafts, I wrote the following sentence: “He spied a first-aid kid and began rooting through it.”

That’s right: A first-aid kid. (Or did you miss that?) Apparently in Winston’s world, the entrails of baby goats have curative properties. You just slice one open, root around in there for a bit, and your wounds are as good as healed.

I’m not sure I can even calculate the number of times this sentence has been read over the past couple of years. I myself must have read it a hundred times in the course of writing and re-writing. The completed manuscript then had a number of test readers. My editor and I passed it back and forth a dozen times, and along the way, it also faced a copyeditor and a proofreader. The sentence survived every pass. The galleys were bound into “Advance Reading Copies,” and sent out to critics and booksellers. I also gave ARCs to two entirely new test readers. These new eyes resulted in a ton of excellent notes, including an error in a puzzle that had gotten by everybody. But the first-aid kid stayed hidden in plain sight.

The editing process continued through two more passes, including a second copyediting. After each pass, I would read the book again, in an increasingly heightened state of paranoia because I hate the idea of typos getting into my books. And STILL the first-aid kid lived on.

The whole shebang just had one last absolutely final proofreading pass, and a handful of changes were sent my way for review. Mostly these were commas that had been inserted and deleted multiple times over the last couple of years: Person A thinks a comma should be there, Person B disagrees and removes it, Person C puts it back in, and so on. On any given comma, I don’t remember what my original opinion was, nor do I have any idea how I feel about it now. We can go with majority rule!

But lo and behold, what else does the proofreader find but a first-aid kid. And not only that: She also read the sentence, “He raised a finger and pointed it Winston’s chest,” and saw the missing at that everybody else had skipped over. This book had been scoured so many times, including by me on readings where I am specifically looking for errors of this nature… and two errors are caught only at the very last second, pretty much as the book is going out the door to the printer.

Which means there’s something else in there. Somewhere. Some ridiculous mistake that I’ll probably spot thirty seconds after the hardbound books arrive on my doorstep. Well, I can always make a correction in the paperback.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Straight to the Meta II: The answer

By Eric Berlin | Published: January 19, 2012

I swear that I came up with this puzzle well before the Mystery Hunt organizers revealed this year’s theme. In each answer, the first word is the name of a song from a famous Broadway musical. If you take the nth letter of that musical, where n is the number of letters in the second word, the resulting letters spell out SONDHEIM.

Puzzle Name	Answer	Musical
A scientific calculator	ONE PERCENT	A Chorus Line
A globe	HELLO WORLD	The Book of Mormon
A Valentine’s Day card	HEART RATE	Damn Yankees
A how-to-dance manual	CONGA LINE	Wonderful Town
A newspaper	AGONY COLUMN	Into The Woods
A blueprint	SIMPLE PLAN	Nine
A textbook	CLASS ACT	Chicago
A sewing machine	SCRAP MATERIAL	The Full Monty

It was noted that “Simple” is in fact a song in two different musicals — Nine and Anyone Can Whistle. I hadn’t realized this, but I doubt that little glitch would have gotten in anybody’s way once they discovered where this puzzle was going.

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Straight To The Meta II

By Eric Berlin | Published: January 18, 2012

Weeks and months before the Hunt began, a few of us came up with “practice metas” for my teammates to solve. This one is mine.

Imagine a puzzle hunt (or perhaps a Mystery Hunt round) called “Show and Tell.” Each puzzle centers around a different object. You’ve solved every puzzle in the round. Now it’s time to tie everything together and come up with the meta-answer.

Puzzle Name	Answer
A scientific calculator	ONE PERCENT
A globe	HELLO WORLD
A Valentine’s Day card	HEART RATE
A how-to-dance manual	CONGA LINE
A newspaper	AGONY COLUMN
A blueprint	SIMPLE PLAN
A textbook	CLASS ACT
A sewing machine	SCRAP MATERIAL

No spoilers in comments for now, please. E-mail me the answer if you like.

Last year’s practice meta is here.

Update: Solved by Scott Weiss, Jeffrey Harris, and Todd McClary.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Scenes From The Hunt

By Eric Berlin | Published: January 17, 2012

Will Solve For Food

The MIT Mystery Hunt is a weekend-long puzzle event that attracts the most fanatically dedicated puzzlers in the country. It is, for many of us, one of the highlights of the year. There is hardly anything more fun than staying awake to all hours with the rest of one’s team, working together to solve unique and incredibly difficult puzzles.

Technology has made it easier to participate from afar, but serious Hunters know that for the full experience, you have to be on campus, in Cambridge, MA. No aha moment is more satisfying than the one that strikes at 3:00 a.m. in a fluorescently lit classroom. You’ve been awake for 27 hours and are now fueled almost exclusively by caffeine. Everyone around you knows how hard you’ve been struggling to find the answer to this puzzle, which consists of pictures of random objects and has no instructions. You and several others have been trying to make sense of it for eight hours. When the eureka finally arrives, it isn’t the here-and-gone satisfaction that comes from finishing the daily crossword. A Mystery Hunt eureka is pure and undiluted, and is usually accompanied by a round of applause from your teammates. I solved a particular puzzle at this past weekend’s Hunt, and every time I think back on it, I glow all over again. The Mystery Hunt is a puzzle event like no other. For a certain kind of person, to miss Hunt weekend is unthinkable.

And that is why, an hour before this weekend’s event began, I saw three people holding signs in MIT’s Lobby 7, where the Hunt traditionally begins. The signs read: “NEED TEAM.” “HELP!” “WILL SOLVE FOR FOOD.”

These were Michael, Mike, and Lacey, and their team (“The Silly Hat Brigade”) had dissolved just four days earlier. What were they going to do? Not show up for the Hunt? Don’t be ridiculous. I chatted with them for a few minutes — I thought at first they might be a puzzle planted by the Hunt organizers; such a thing is not unheard of — and soon realized they were legit and sincere, so I invited them to join my team, and they did. And such is the environment of the Hunt that within an hour or so, it was like they had been on the team for years, applauding when someone arrived at a hard-fought eureka moment, and earning applause of their own.

Springtime for Puzzlers

Each year, the puzzles in the Mystery Hunt are connected by a theme, and this year that theme was The Producers. Bialystock and Bloom have changed their names and are back at their old tricks. This time they don’t want to put on just one show — they want to put on six shows, all of them great big failures. It would be up to the teams to figure out how to make the shows as bad as possible. For some reason, this meant solving a whole lot of puzzles.

Each show was also going to be reviewed by a particular critic, and in order to ensure failure, still more puzzles had to be solved, in order to determine the critic’s weak spot.

For example, one of the musicals to be performed was entitled “A Circus Line.” After solving a bunch of puzzles, we figured out that the show had to include an elephant in a tutu. We also deduced that the critic of the show was a stickler for grammar, so we had to throw grammar out the window. With both requirements worked out, we then had to actually write and perform this show (or a 3-5 minute version of it). Thankfully, we had a lot of people on the team with theater backgrounds, and other people more than willing to be silly on a stage, so I was not required to put on the elephant trunk made from duct tape, nor the tutu made from I-don’t-know-what.

Down the Rabbit Hole

How did we determine what special element a show had to contain, or what particular outrage we should add to horrify the critics? First we had to solve a whole bunch of puzzles, and then we had to use those answers to extract the necessary information — in hardcore puzzlers’ circles, this is known as the metapuzzle.

For example, in the “Circus Line” round, we arrived at the following answers:

BOOKWORM
COCOON
COSPONSORS
ENTICING
ENUMERATE
MEDLEY
OCTOPOD
PINHEAD
SUBSTITUTE
TORCHWOOD

After some time, we noticed that many of the answers had three Os. We also noticed that the answers could be paired up by word length — there were two 6-letter answers, two 7-letter answers, and so on.

Pairing up the answers gave us the following:

COCOON
MEDLEY

OCTOPOD
PINHEAD

BOOKWORM
ENTICING

TORCHWOOD
ENUMERATE

COSPONSORS
SUBSTITUTE

We realized that the three Os in each word were intended to symbolize a “three-ring circus.” If you look at the other word in the pair and take the letters in those same positions, you spell out ELE/PHA/NTI/NAT/UTU. Elephant in a Tutu!

Believe it or not, that was a relatively easy metapuzzle: A mere appetizer. Future metas would prove a lot harder. This is partly because the puzzles were damn hard — but also because very smart puzzlers have a tendency to spot patterns that do not, in fact, exist, and we waste hour after hour working with those patterns, chasing them down rabbit holes.

One of the shows we had to perform was called “Okla-Holmes-a!” For a while, we had only a handful of answers in this round. One of my teammates noticed that each answer could be read from left to right (though not consecutively) in the title of a Sherlock Holmes short story… but only if you first dropped a single letter. For example, one of our answers was BYLINE, and one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories is “The Case of the Beryl Coronet.” If you drop the I from BYLINE, the rest of the letters are in the title, clear as day:

BERYL CORONET

Naturally, we assumed that dropped I was the letter we needed for our final answer. Once we had enough answers and matched them to the short stories, the dropped letters would spell out our instructions. Another meta solved!

One small problem: All of the above is completely, thoroughly wrong. The answer instead had to do with the periodic table of elements, springing from Holmes’s famous catchphrase. But we spent hours convinced we were right, because the answers worked so very nicely with our theory… until we received another answer, VESTIGE, that could not be matched to any short story. Thus did we discover our folly, and thus did we have to go back to square one and try again.

Novice puzzlemakers sometimes throw a lot of “noise” into their puzzles — clues that solvers have to figure out to ignore if they want to find the solution. Experienced puzzlemakers know the truth: You don’t need to include noise or red herrings in your puzzles. Solvers can be counted on to provide plenty of red herrings, all on their own.

Dedication

It happens every year: A puzzle so hard or a task so challenging, that the only way to conquer it is to dedicate hour after hour to its dismantlement. Very often it is my teammate Sofiya who performs these miracles. In the past, she has taken computer programs written in arcane languages and compiled them in her head to arrive at the answer, and a couple of years ago I believe she took a knitting pattern and brought it to life without the benefit of knitting needles or yarn — she simply (well, maybe not simply) plotted it out on graph paper and then drew the result for us.

This year we had James and the world’s nastiest chess puzzle. He spent hours on this thing before realizing it wasn’t even straightforward chess, but a variant called “Alice Chess,” invented by Lewis Carroll. Alice Chess requires two chessboards, with pieces hopping back and forth between them. The particular puzzle he was solving took Alice Chess and married it to a Scrabble game where all the words had to come from the poem “Jabberwocky.” Poor James must have spent fifteen hours at this, and never did find his way to the answer. And yet his enthusiasm never flagged for a moment (at least not outwardly) and I know he will absolutely be back next year to solve some more. He probably wishes it was next year already.

We also had Eric — not me; my team has five Erics on it. This particular Eric was new to the team. He knew maybe one other person in the room. And yet he was willing to spend an astonishing amount of time with a circuit board and a tangle of wires, building us a contraption we needed to solve a particular puzzle. As the hours passed, I would check on him every so often, worried that he might be reaching the end of his rope. But, no. He sat there with an entire makeshift electronics lab, with his laptop in front of him and his wife on a video chat. She was an engineer, too, apparently, and the two of them were working out the necessary circuitry bit by bit, wire by wire. He delivered the final product like it was no big deal, and it worked perfectly.

And Now, a Complaint

This year we had a strong, well-put-together Hunt, with lots of fun and creative puzzles. As always, the Hunt was presented by a team of volunteers, who dedicate a full year to organizing things: Writing puzzles, testsolving them vigorously, designing the Web site, working with MIT to make sure there is sufficient space for the 1,500 people who will be arriving for the weekend. (They earned this responsibility by winning the previous year’s Hunt.) Someone with a couple of nitpicks might well pause a moment before marching forward with his complaint.

But there is a particular part of Hunt that has evolved over the last few years, and is now going in a direction I and others find at least slightly dismaying. I am referring to the “event puzzles.”

Generally, there is very little interaction between teams. Each team keeps to its own headquarters — everybody is far too busy with puzzles to socialize. And so there are “events” to add a little social lubrication to the weekend. Once upon a time, these were flat-out parties, possibly with a puzzle floating around the fringes. Now the events are puzzles, and it’s the social part that has moved to the fringes. That’s not my complaint: We are here, after all, to solve puzzles.

My problem is this: Lately, the organizers do not reveal their full intent for an event puzzle until after the team representatives have already arrived. We are simply told to send two people to such-and-such a room at such-and-such a time. It is rarely clear what those people will face. This is the equivalent of assigning a puzzle to a team member based solely on its title — and if that puzzle turns out to be a crossword, but the teammate doesn’t like word puzzles, well, that’s just tough.

The first event this past weekend was called “Bringing Stars Together.” It was described thus: “You and one guest (two people from each team) are welcome to join us for a night of glitz, glamour, and hobnobbing — all in the name of charity, of course!” If the description had mentioned that guests would also have to solve a very tricky logic puzzle, we would have sent guests who like logic puzzles. But this information was hidden from us, much to the dismay of the two people we sent to this event.

Similarly, the final event promised “Show Tunes Trivia.” Since the entire weekend was Broadway themed, we sent people who liked musicals to this event. Surprise! They were faced instead with trivia about TV theme songs, and one of our representatives was mostly useless and entirely unhappy.

I understand the instinct to keep some measure of surprise in the weekend’s festivities. But perhaps this should not trump letting teams match the right people to the events.

We Didn’t Win, but Victory is Mine!

Only one team gets to win the Mystery Hunt, by putting together all the answers and finding a coin hidden somewhere on campus. This year, Manic Sages got there first, and as such are probably already planning next year’s Hunt.

A relatively new development is one that’s quite excellent: Even after the first team wins, the Hunt organizers keep things running so that more teams can find their way to the finish line.

My team, Palindrome, did not make it to the finish line. But that’s okay, because the Hunt also allows for personal victories.

I’ve been attending the Mystery Hunt for about fifteen years, and in all that time, I have never contributed the breakthrough moment on a metapuzzle. I make smaller contributions here and there to the team’s progress, but solving a metapuzzle is a Big Deal, a giant step forward for the team, and I have never been the person to take that step.

One of the shows we had to produce this weekend was “Phantom of the Operator.” After solving most of the puzzles in the round, we had the following answers.

1. FIRESTONE
2. CLINTON
3. UNION
4. MERCURY
5. PERSHING
6.
7. VALLEY
8.
9. TERMINAL

Someone noted that all of these were old-time telephone exchanges, from back in the day when you’d say your phone number was PEnnsyvania 6-5000 instead of 736-5000. And so we assumed we had to translate each exchange to its pair of numbers:

1. FIRESTONE (34)
2. CLINTON (25)
3. UNION (86)
4. MERCURY (63)
5. PERSHING (73)
6. ??
7. VALLEY (82)
8. ??
9. TERMINAL (83)

But now what to do with these numbers? We tried a number of ideas, but none of them worked, and soon we moved on to other puzzles.

After a while, I looked again at this list and had an idea. It was by no means a eureka moment — the clouds did not part, nor was I illuminated by a beam of sunshine. It was just a small idea that probably wouldn’t amount to anything.

I took the numbers and translated them back into letters using the telephone keypad. So the first pair, 34, could be DEF and GHI. Assuming I was trying to spell out a message, it looked like it should begin with DI or maybe FI.

The next pair, 25, gave me AL. The first two pairs, taken together, could give me DIAL. Huh.

The next two pairs after that, 86 and 63, could be used to spell TONE.

I had just spelled DIAL TONE, in a puzzle whose very theme was telephones. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that at this point my hands began to shake.

Those damn missing answers got in my way for the second half of the puzzle, and I simply couldn’t see any words using what few numbers we had. Luckily, my friend Kevin can extract entire answers from very little information, and he suggested the final word could be RECITATIVE, an opera term. (I wouldn’t have gotten this even with all the numbers.) We called it in and it was right. I had finally done it — I had seen what others had missed, and had made the leap that would let us move forward. I am not sure how long I will be able to summon up the exact sensation I felt upon learning this, but I expect the feeling is going to last a good six months or so.

Much later, after the Hunt was over and our headquarters was cleaned up, I walked around campus visiting other teams. One group was still trying to figure out one of the metapuzzles, just because it was frustrating to them that they hadn’t gotten it. This was, in fact, the very puzzle I had managed to solve. Smiling, I asked them if they might like a hint.

Posted in Uncategorized | 17 Comments

44

By Eric Berlin | Published: January 6, 2012

The last time I wrote a birthday post — not last year but two years ago — the overall theme, if I may summarize, was oh god, what the hell, what’s with this GETTING OLDER crap?!

I’ll take a pass on the histrionics this time around. Life is pretty good around these parts. Complicated, but good. Alex went through an alarming rough patch a couple of months ago — he was hitting his teachers and throwing things whenever he got even slightly upset. Those thunderstorms seem to have passed, for the most part, and now our happy kid is back. Educationwise, I wish things were progressing further. Alex can recognize a whole lot of words, but I can’t say he’s “reading.” Writing is a huge frustration for him and the fastest route back to temper-tantrum land. He can do basic math with a calculator, but we’ve been spinning our wheels on coin counting for the past few years.

We’ve turned our attention instead to teaching Alex the ins and outs of functioning in the larger world. His small special-ed class takes field trips to the store and to restaurants, and when I take him to the supermarket we work together to find the items we need. We’re trying to teach him how to cook foods other than instant mac and cheese.

We’re furiously worried about his future, of course, and one of the things I hope to accomplish this year is figuring out the maddening, complicated world of state services and financial instruments designed for special-needs adults. There may be some blogging about that here in the next few months.

Homeschooling for Lea continues apace. Some days I wonder if we’re doing the right thing, but my wife harbors no such doubts, and certainly Lea is ahead of the standard 4th-grade curriculum in many subjects. I remain her teacher on math (we just started basic algebra) and computer programming (she’s been making “dress-up” programs in Scratch). We’re a little lost on science these days, but Lea eats up history (lately, King Arthur and the middle ages) and geography. And she is finally reading and enjoying books on her own. She won’t pick up a book on her own accord — that’s crazy talk — but after dinner there is a period of no TV, no computer, no pixels whatsoever, and Lea will sit with me and read uncomplainingly. The other day at the library we discovered the Goddess Girls series by Joan Holub and Suzanne Williams. If any subject has inflamed Lea, it’s Greek mythology, so it was a eureka moment, finding a whole series of books where the gods of myth are re-imagined as a schoolkids. There are ten such books, so I think this is going to keep her busy for a while.

We’ve had our foster child now for three months, and so of course we are all quite in love with her. My guess is she’ll be with us for another six months or so, and maybe even longer. I would not argue if she got to spend her one-year birthday with us in July. I wish I could post pictures of her, but in a way it is good that I cannot, because they might KILL YOU WITH THE CUTENESS.

What else happened in the past year? Well, I didn’t write a new book as I had hoped, but there was a lot of hard work on The Puzzler’s Mansion, which comes out in just a few months. I had a lot of fun working on the puzzle event Intercoastal Altercations 5, which was largely well received. I’ll be working on two more puzzle hunts in 2012 — a smallish one for presentation at this year’s American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (with help from Jeffrey Harris), and this fall’s iteration of the Boston Area Puzzle Hunt, which I’ll be constructing with Dan Katz, Scott Purdy, and Chris Morse. Oh right, plus another mini-hunt, to go along with the release of Winston 3.

I’ll get to travel a little in 2012. This year’s National Puzzlers’ League convention is in Portland, Oregon. And in April I’ll spend a week in Missouri, doing school visits before heading to the Children’s Literature Festival at Truman State University. (I’m still looking to fill up a couple of days that week, so if you know of a school in Kansas City or St. Louis that might want a fun, puzzly author visit, let me know.) Hopefully some other school visit opportunities will pop up as the year progresses. Last year my visits to Chicago and Massachusetts provided some of the year’s happiest memories.

All in all, very little reason to complain, wouldn’t you say? It’s clear at a glance that my life is full of blessings large and small, so even if there is some consternation at the whole getting older thing, it would be damned churlish to focus on that for more than a few seconds. Indeed, I’d have to say my main goal for 2012 is more of the same. More going to the mall with Alex when he’s been a good boy at school, to let him ride the escalators and visit the luggage department at Sears (they know us well there by now). More reading in the evening with Lea, and then tossing the no-pixels-in-the-evening rule overboard so that we can work together on a new computer game. And now that the third Winston book is totally and completely out the door, more writing, on something new.

But of course, the first major event of the year (other than my birthday) is the MIT Mystery Hunt, coming up next week. Non-stop puzzling with many of my friends plus dinner at a good restaurant with my brother — secretly, I’ve long considered this my birthday party. I look forward to seeing many of you there.

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments

Day 25: The end

By Eric Berlin | Published: December 24, 2011

First of all, congrats to frequent commenter Gary Sherman for placing first in the C Coastal rundle, and for validating the awesome power of my semi-random predictions. And congrats to all the other champs around the league as well. I wound up in 19th place, which is nothing to get excited about, but seeing as I was briefly in 48th place, I have nothing to complain about.

Here’s one last look at the questions:

1. What word has been removed from this English pangram? The brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

I thought: Could this be it? The question that actually gets a 100% correct-response rate? Quite nearly — 99% of the A-leaguers got it right. I assume the last few people were forfeits. This is one easy question, is what I am trying to say, though I suppose it is possible to have lived your life and not have come across the phrase The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

2. Glenn Miller, Johnny Mercer, and Eddie Lang were all at one time, between the years 1928 to 1934, members of a big band led by what brothers — who split and went on to successfully lead their own individual orchestras into the 1950s?

I thought I should know this — I’m a big fan of that era’s music, and even had a swing band at my wedding — but when I looked in the mental box where this answer should have been, I found nothing at all. Eventually gave up. Correct answer: The Dorseys, Jimmy and Tommy.

3. A classic Dr. Seuss allegory on prejudice and racial equality involves a set of yellow creatures who alternately discriminate on the basis of whether fellow creatures have, and then don’t have, stars on their bellies. What are these creatures called?

I didn’t think this would have 100% correct-response rate, but I thought it would be higher than it was — just 76% in the A levels and 48% across the board. I guess a lot of Learned Leaguers don’t have kids. I myself have read this short story at least a quarter-million times: The Sneetches.

4. As defined by breed standards, what is the tallest domesticated dog breed (an example is pictured here)?

Years ago I saw a guy walking an animal that, at first, I was not sure if it was a dog or a horse or a terrible new creature he had created in a laboratory. It was steel-blue and came up past his owner’s waist. I thought the guy had said his dog was a bullmastiff, but looking at pictures of that breed, I see I am misremembering. Or maybe he just said it was a bullmastiff because he didn’t want to say, “It’s just something I spliced together. It’s a number of different things, really.”

Anyway, that is what I was expecting to see when I clicked on the picture, but instead I was faced with this fuzzy giant. I probably could have come up with a name for this breed given enough time, but I’m on vacation, most of my family has been sick over the last 48 hours, and so right at the moment determining dog breeds is not my highest priority. I had no guess. Correct answer: Irish Wolfhound.

5. This former New England Patriot and New York Jet ranks fourth on the NFL’s career yards rushing leaders list, behind Emmitt Smith, Walter Payton, and Barry Sanders.

If I couldn’t come up with a decent guess for a well-known breed of dog, then I sure as hell wasn’t going to come up with “Curtis Martin.”

6. The Vaganova Academy is a 270-year old school in St. Petersburg, Russia, which focuses on the training and study of what?

I could think of no other guesses beside ballet, so I’m glad that was the answer. (I’m glad I didn’t think of chess at the time. Anybody say that?)

And so, that’s the season. Thanks for reading along and providing such interesting comments of your own. Have a very wonderful holiday, a great 2012, and I will see you again when season 52 starts in February.

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments

Day 24: Field goal

By Eric Berlin | Published: December 23, 2011

On this second-to-last day, I was up against James Mudrak, who has the most correct answers in my rundle, and whose stats are intimidating enough to befog all attempts at defense: He has answered a whopping thirteen three-point questions. He spends a lot of time near the top of the rankings.

And somehow I beat him, 3(2)-1(2). In a surprising reversal, I defended perfectly, and answered my own three-point question to boot.

1. Name the designer and architect responsible for this.

As soon as I saw the picture, a voice in my head said, “The Eero Saarinen-designed TWA terminal.” Just like that, like the narrator of a documentary on architecture. Maybe I had read the sentence somewhere — I don’t know. All I know is, I trusted that voice, and so racked up 3 points right out the gate.

2. Identify the TV character at the left in this image.

Wow. Pop culture is supposed to be my thing, but there was no getting around it: I had no idea. I remembered that this sad little elf wanted to become a dentist, but I couldn’t even summon a guess as to his name, which it turns out is “Hermey.” That doesn’t even ring a bell. I would claim Jewiness, but the fact is I saw this special a thousand times. I guess it just didn’t stick.

3. The 54-member British Commonwealth (formally, ‘Commonwealth of Nations’) includes one member on mainland South America, the only current South American country ever to be a part of the British Empire. What country is it?

No idea. I said Argentina, because of the Falkland Islands. It was a stupid guess, but at least it was a stupid guess backed up by some semblance of knowledge. Actual answer: Guyana.

4. Who was the first man elected U.S. President to have been born in the 20th century?

Should have been a gimme, but I had to make a little list of presidents, working backwards to Kennedy and Eisenhower. It had to be one of those, and Kennedy was the obviously better guess.

5. In particle physics, there are four known basic forces referred to as ‘fundamental interactions’, defined as those that govern how elementary particles interact: electromagnetism, strong interaction, weak interaction, and what else?

Thwarted by The Economist! I had read just the previous day the magazine’s long article about the Higgs boson, and I could have sworn that it touched on fundamental interactions, and I could have further sworn that one of these was nuclear. Nuclear isn’t in the above list; three-dot-triangle, it is the correct answer! But, no. The answer is the much simpler “gravity.” Oh.

6. In cooking and culinary arts, the seeds of the herb ‘coriandrum sativum’ are themselves known as coriander. What are the leaves commonly called?

Once again, no idea. Cilantro. That’s news to me.

Best of luck to everybody on their final day of competition!

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Kick it!

By Eric Berlin | Published: December 22, 2011

Remember Kickstarter? The Web site that lets artists test the market for their projects before they invest time or money into them? I used the site back in 2009 (what?! whoa, time flies) to get funding to create and sell a suite of crosswords. Patrick Blindauer followed suit a bit later. Now Trip Payne has jumped in. If he raises a mere $2,500, the result will be, I am sure, a splendid and imaginative suite of puzzles. You can buy in for a mere $10, but throw in $20 (as I did) and you’ll get three bonus puzzles, including one of Trip’s wild “Something Different” crosswords.

If you love puzzles, you won’t want to miss this. Support Trip’s project here.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Day 23: Réfléchir à deux fois

By Eric Berlin | Published: December 22, 2011

(That’s supposed to mean “think twice.” Here’s hoping Google Translate is accurate.)

My opponent got a six-pack and I missed a very easy geography question, but at least I was able to steer myself from a wrong answer to the right answer with good and careful thinking, so the day wasn’t a total loss.

1. Give the word that describes what is being denoted in this mathematical sign.

I suck at math. Therefore, I did not know this sign indicated the word therefore.

2. Correctly spell the French translation of the English word ‘five’.

It’s nice when your instincts inform you that you have the wrong answer, but it would be a definite improvement if they also pointed the way to the right answer. I initially wrote cinque, related to Spanish’s cinco. I knew that was the right ballpark. But was the answer spelled that way? Every atom of my body shook with NO.

For half a moment, I almost left it anyway: I don’t know French, so what am I supposed to do? Surely my only option is to chalk it up as a question I’ll never get right, and move on.

Then I said: Look. You know this is close to right. What can you do to this word to keep the general sense of it, but spell it slightly differently? I stared. I wanted to keep the c and the q, and naturally that n wasn’t going anywhere. So the vowels, then. Something to do with the vowels. After some contemplation (okay: more than “some”), I deleted the last two letters. Cinq.

I thought my logic was pretty solid, but I was still amazed to find I was right. There is something to be said for not giving up.

3. Popular and enduring characters from the Middle Eastern folk tale collection known as One Thousand and One Nights include magic lamp owner Aladdin, intrepid sea voyager Sinbad, and what noble burglar of cave-stored treasure (and murder avoider)?

This set’s gimme: Ali Baba.

4. In Major League Baseball history, the team with the most World Series titles is the New York Yankees, with 27. What National League team is second, with 11?

And then there are questions where giving up is the wiser path. I didn’t know this, and there was no way to deduce the answer. I said the Dodgers; the correct answer was the Cardinals.

5. What is the last name of these three individuals?

I dithered between Fairbanks and Barrymore, and went with the latter because I believe that acting family to have more members. This proved correct.

6. The Pacific Highway in Australia begins in the south in Sydney, and runs north for 600 miles (960 km) along the coastline ending in what city, the capital of Queensland?

It’s a rare geography question that I feel I should have answered correctly, but this is definitely one. C’mon — this isn’t obscure rivers near Upper Volta, for heaven’s sake. It’s world capitals. Nonetheless, I said “Adelaide” when I should have said “Brisbane.” All I can do is shake my head with pity and think back to those bygone moments when I magically taught myself French.

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments