With thanks to Todd McClary, a delightful 2-minute animation of 35 movies, very simply symbolized. So simply, in fact, that you might not get all of them the first time through. Let’s see if we can get them all between the lot of us. Leave a comment with one of the movie titles, and when you do, give the approximate mm:ss time.

And I’ll start:

00:03: Singin’ in the Rain
00:07: Titanic
00:10: Jaws
00:16: Full Metal Jacket
00:20: Psycho
00:24: Carrie
00:27: The Devil Wears Prada?
00:28: The Gold Rush
00:31: The Wizard of Oz
00:34: Night on Earth?
00:37: One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
00:40: The Thomas Crown Affair?
00:44: Gone With The Wind? (if it’s not, it should be)
00:47: Snow White (thank goodness for the musical cue)
00:48: Manhattan
00:49: The Blues Brothers
00:50: The Terminator
00:51: Star Wars
00:55: Pulp Fiction
00:57: Life of Brian
01:00: The Exorcist
01:03: North by Northwest?
01:06: Fight Club
01:07: Toy Story
01:11: A Clockwork Orange
01:12: Modern Times
01:16: They Drive By Night? (I have never heard of this movie, but hey…)
01:21: 2001: A Space Odyssey?
01:22: Taxi Driver
01:23: The Tramp
01:27: Rear Window
01:34: The Tin Drum
01:36: Dracula
01:38: The Untouchables and/or The Battleship Potemkin
01:44: Apollo 13
01:46: Easy Rider?

Geez, I got 11? That was sad. Help me out here.

Laura asks:

If the school lunch episode ruffled your feathers, then what did you think about episode four and the double elimination challenge? I’m trying to piece together what was edited out and then vaguely alluded to just before the final credits.

Could it be that the producers are trying to keep Kenny in the competition against the wishes of the judges?

I got a little spoiled myself before this episode — a friend tweeted that he had never been angrier about a Top Chef elimination. I braced myself for the worst… and didn’t quite get it. Yes, all four chefs on the chopping block were worthy contenders, and it was a shame to see any of them go. But given the rules as I understood them, I thought the correct team got the boot. The point of this was to make a dish that the Hilton would want to add to its menu. And Arnold and Lynn presented what? “Pineapple Red Curry Mussels with Squid Ink Pasta?” Over on Project Runway, this would be called “forgetting about the needs of your client.” (Arnold pretty much said this dish was “all about who he was.” Hey, that’s great, except this challenge was not supposed to be about you. Should have saved that for the finale, my friend.) Add in the undercooked pasta, and the judges’ decision seemed pretty solid to me.

I grant you that this lack of cohesion between the dish and the Hilton didn’t actually come up at the judge’s table. I’m only saying why I think it was the right decision.

All that said, I missed the “vague allusions” you refer to, Laura, probably because these days I must simultaneously watch Top Chef and play squeaky-toy-fetch with an energetic four-month-old puppy. What are these allusions?

I’ll tell you one thing I found curious: If I was the Hilton rep, I would have wanted to select the winning menu item from among all the meals presented — breakfast and lunch included. Has there ever been a challenge where, by design, the strongest teams were eliminated from the potential win?

And finally, to actually answer your question: Yes, I think it was clear from five minutes into the first episode that the producers planned on making the Kenny/Angelo rivalry a focal point for the season. Does that mean the producers are holding sway over the judges to keep Kenny around? I have no idea, though it wouldn’t surprise me. Even if the producers don’t want him booted this early, though, I can’t see the Kenny we’ve seen so far making the finale. He needs to improve his game.

“Would you like to try a dinosaur egg?” she said.

“No, I’m fi– what did you say?”

So of course I had to try the dinosaur egg, and it was delicious. It was, in fact, a pluot, a plum-apricot hybrid. I’m not sure how much luck they’re going to have selling these as dinosaur eggs, but I wish them all of the best.

2. One highlight that didn’t make it into my report: Sitting around with a handful of NPLers late on Sunday night, solving a puzzle in which various movies and TV shows were reinterpreted as Shakespearean scenes. Fueled by a combination of adrenaline and exhaustion, it didn’t take long before our two actors had us in near hysterics. (You try saying “Goodly Duke” a dozen times. It sounds like what Wayne and Garth would say when introducing a flashback, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it??) It was a fine and silly coda to an excellent week.

3. On the plane ride in, I sat next to a man traveling with his wife and two tween-age kids. I noted early on that he had given his kids a puzzle to solve — the classic SEND + MORE = MONEY cryptarithm — and occasionally he would dip into a puzzle book he had brought with him. So I told him why I was going to Seattle, and that drop-ins were welcome. He nodded and hmmmed and asked no questions. I figured, well, doesn’t hurt to try, and went back to my book.

So I was pretty much floored when he showed up Thursday night, and joined in with the introductory mixers. Then he showed up again Saturday, smack in the middle of the puzzle extravaganza, which is a bad time to arrive, because that’s not the sort of thing you can jump into late. I felt bad for the guy, but needn’t have. A while later he joined in the after-hour games just like anybody else, and when I went to bed at 2:30 a.m., he was just getting ready to play something else. Apparently he didn’t head home until nearly 4:30 a.m. I don’t know if he’s going to join the NPL, but clearly my recruitment efforts were not wasted.

I spent this past week in Seattle, at the annual convention of the National Puzzlers’ League — my one time each year where I get to feel like Calvin, glutting myself not with burping contests but with five glorious days of non-stop trivia and wordplay and cryptic puzzles and hanging out with friends I see far too infrequently. As always, the end of the convention only makes me hungry for the next one to begin. Alas, I’ll have to wait a year for that.

What did I do out there? I stayed up until all hours playing various homemade games. My friend Jeffrey presented his annual Jeopardy! game, which I won for the second year in a row — he is definitely on my trivia wavelength, although perhaps not with his category on Bulgarian Folk Music.

Jeffrey and I were also partners in another NPLer’s wild “Doubles Jeopardy” variant, a game that Alex Trebek would hardly recognize. At one point I had to keep my eyes closed while Jeffrey read a question off an index card; he then had to select a candy bar whose name was the same as the answer. I had to identify this candy bar by feel and by taste, thus finally answering the question. We would have done well in this category if we were the only ones playing. In a game with five others teams, I don’t think I managed to ring in even once. In another category whose answers were all numbers, we had to team up to provide two factors of the answer. In others words: MATH! Jeffrey is a college professor who teaches electrical engineering, and he once appeared on a math-intensive British game show. My ability to add a column of numbers declines precipitously after midnight, which is when we were playing this game. So Jeffrey would ring in quickly for each question, and say a number, which was then followed by me looking blank and panicked. I did get one right, though. It was through sheer, blind guesswork, BUT IT WAS RIGHT. Points on the board!

The “pub trivia” format has also taken root, and I played a couple of fun games of that, too. (Winning both of them, now that I think about it, although this was largely because I was smart enough to get on teams with some very smart people.) NPLers are not content to let trivia be trivia, though, so both games had magnificent, curveball-like, puzzling finales that were a lot of fun. My big moment: Coming up with a live-action Disney movie whose title contains the consecutive letters NOM.

It wasn’t all trivia. A group of us hit the Frank Gehry-designed Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum, two museums for the price of one. The latter was pretty much a hodgepodge of science fiction artifacts — replicas of phasers and spacesuits and androids. Enjoyable, but not very exciting unless you are a True Believer. The music side was much better, with interactive Make Some Music displays and a showstopping history of the electric guitar. I was less bowled over by a special display of the costumes of The Supremes, but all of my friends seemed pretty wowed by this, so let’s count that as a plus, too. And throughout both museums, we solved our way through a little puzzle hunt laid out for us. Because nothing improves a museum like solving puzzles along the way.

There were handouts galore in the form of puzzles from various members. One of my nicer memories of the con was co-solving a tough little anagramming puzzle with several others in a crumpet shop near the Pike Street Market. I presented a crossword variant myself; at the last minute, this was promoted to an official con event, where it seemed to go over pretty well. You’ll be seeing that puzzle in the New York Times a few Sundays from now.

Ken Jennings, famed Jeopardy champion, lives in Seattle, and he came and gave an amiable and funny after-dinner talk. I don’t normally walk up to celebrities and introduce myself, but I figured this time I had an in: Ken blurbed my first book. But, no, my name did nothing more than ring a distant bell, if that, so after sixty seconds of awkwardness I slunk away. Whoops.

Ken stuck around to participate in the con’s main event: An hours-long team-solving “extravaganza” of interlinked puzzles, put together by some of the best and most creative constructors in the organization. Happily, I landed on an excellent team: We worked extremely well together, filling in gaps in each others’ knowledge, assisting each other through the more complicated parts of the event. Usually the Saturday-night extravaganza puts an emphasis on speed, but this time the constructors implemented a points system that forced teams to consider things strategically (and hope for a little dash of luck). I liked this idea, though I suppose I would: My team, while placing 13th overall on speed, wound up as one of the five winning teams because we played the game correctly, if not quickly. I wonder if future extravaganzas could be set up to reward speed on the one hand and strategy on the other, thus pleasing everybody. Not quite sure how that would be done, but I’m pretty sure one genius or another in the NPL could figure it out.

Shortly before the con began, a member of the NPL sent an e-mail to the mailing list, detailing his experience at AnthroCon, a convention for people who like to anthropomorphize animals. I would have guessed this to be a pretty niche group, but it turns out that over 5,000 people attended this event, dressing up in animal costumes and attending discussions on books where the animal is the star of the show. And I thought: 5,000 people for that and only 200 at a puzzle convention? Something is very wrong here.

But right after the con ended, people who didn’t have to run to the airport were all hanging around, and a very silly game was initiated. In “Exquisite Fruit,” players are given an answer that they must clue… but each person can only write down two words of that clue. The paper is then folded, and passed on to the next person, who adds a couple of words without seeing how the clue began, and who then folds the paper again before passing it on to the next person, and so on. And this is how you get clues like “Machine that writes on keyboard that is QWERTY and old machine of keyboard that is writing machine.” And from this, someone has to get the word “typewriter.”

I didn’t play, but sat across the room and watched. Hardly anyone sleeps at the con, so everyone was quite drunk on a combination of adrenaline and exhaustion: It didn’t take much to get these folks laughing hysterically. There were thirty or so people playing at a couple of different tables, and I thought, I know the names (well, the noms, since every NPLer uses a nom de plume) of every one of those people. What’s more, I like every one of those people, and the vast majority of the other people who were here this weekend. Maybe everybody eventually gravitates to the group they were meant to be a part of — birds of a feather and all that — but at that moment I felt extraordinarily lucky that I had found the National Puzzlers’ League, and had become one of the mere 200 people who attend these conventions. I would love it if the kind of puzzles we do attracted a larger audience… but it’s hard to imagine that these conventions would be as special as they are if they attracted 5,000 people. They are just right, right now, and I am already looking forward to taking my family to Providence, RI, in 2011.

But while Top Chef is really just a next-generation game show, there is a key difference: The producers of Top Chef either don’t know or don’t care that they’re running a game show, and so they feel free to dump their own rules overboard when it pleases them to do so. If Jeopardy! decided to keep its second-place finisher for the next show because she was more likeable than the true winner, people would point and laugh. Top Chef does this sort of thing all the time, and never more gratuitously than in the most recent episode.

The new season of Top Chef is barely underway: Wednesday’s episode was the second of the season. As such, I’m not yet sure of anybody’s name, with a few exceptions. Angelo is clearly the man to beat, winning three of the four challenges so far. Kenny gives every indication that he, too, will be a major player.

In the last episode, the sixteen remaining contestants were divided into four teams of four. Angelo and one other contestant were blessed with immunity; they could not be eliminated. Joining the two of them on their team were Kenny and a contestant named Ed. Angelo chose these two specifically to join him. It was almost certainly a strategic ploy. But strategy only works when a game has consistent rules, as we shall see.

The way team challenges work on Top Chef — the way they usually work — is that one team is deemed the best and another team is deemed the worst. From the best team, an individual winner is chosen. (That was indeed the case in this episode.) From the worst team, a loser is determined, and that person is sent home.

Incredibly, in this episode where they upend their own sense of rules and fair play, the show includes a scene where they confirm how team challenges work. We see head judge Tom Colicchio inform Kenny that since half his team has immunity, if his team winds up on the bottom, there is a “50 percent chance that you’ll be going home.” Kenny soberly tells Colicchio, and the home audience, that he is aware of this.

And indeed, Angelo and Kenny’s team fail the challenge. (There is some discussion as to whether Angelo threw the challenge in order that this team should be on the bottom; I don’t see much evidence that this is the case.) The judges are clear: Angelo and Kenny’s team is the worst of the four teams competing. I believe the term “by far” is used.

At this point, the judges should have had to make a very difficult decision: Send home Kenny, or send home Ed, Kenny’s only non-immune teammate. The edit makes it clear that of the two of them, Kenny’s errors make him more worthy of elimination.

Instead, the judges decide to do away with the entire team model. They call back four poor performers across the two least-successful teams, and eliminate a woman named Jacqueline, who made a miserable banana pudding from underripe bananas.

From a culinary standpoint, this could well have been the right decision: I think it’s clear that Kenny is a more talented chef than Jacqueline. (It’s too early to know this for an absolute fact, but that’s my sense.) But this is not just a cooking competition — it is a game. If the players cannot ignore the rules when it suits them, neither should the judges and producers. Kenny was outplayed and his cooking could not save him; the judges threw him a life preserver. If the judges can do that, why have rules in the first place?

Let’s get right to the puzzles! As usual, the answer to each puzzle was a number, which corresponded to a clue in the Clue Guide, included in that morning’s newspaper:

Sculptures: We arrived at the park to see a row of abstract scupltures in assorted geometric shapes. Or, anyway, I gather we were supposed to think they were abstract sculptures. To be honest, every single member of my team looked at those sculptures and recognized immediately they were the top half of various letters, and those letters spelled out the words FIVE HUNDRED. We all saw this so quickly that the puzzlemakers may as well have simply have erected a sculpture of the actual number — 500 — and given us the answer outright.

But here’s the problem: If you walked into a park and saw a giant papier-mâché 500 sitting there, would you think that was the answer to the puzzle? No, you’d think that was the puzzle itself, and you then had to figure out the answer. Thus it was with the half-letters. Whatever the answer was, surely it wasn’t 500. Someone suggested that the answer had to be 250. And I still think this is a MUCH BETTER answer than the actual answer… 250 wasn’t in the clue guide, and 500 was. So we shrugged in puzzlement and agreed that we had the answer after all. Next.

Feet: More sculptures, this time in the form of many sets of plaster feet. Hundreds and hundreds of plaster feet were laid out on some steps in a small tree-lined plaza. I counted them and got 555 1/2. My friend Kevin recognized immediately that this was the height of the Washington Monument. (“Actually,” he corrected, “it’s 555.5.”) I wondered if even the average DC resident knew this, but another teammate found that fact reiterated in a cartoon in the clue guide. The cartoon showed the monument and the various ways people choose to beat the summer sun. One of the people in the cartoon was a man in a Dodger’s baseball uniform, holding a large purple umbrella. “Aha!” said a cartoon balloon. “It appears this man has the answer.” So we schlepped to the Washington Monument, found that very same man with the purple umbrella, and another puzzle was solved.

Speech: This was apparently the hardest puzzle of the day, but we solved it in pretty short order. A staff member droned a long, rambling speech on various topics into a microphone, while next to him a second staff member provided “interpretation for the clueless.” This interpreter was not using American Sign Language; rather, she was improvising a bunch of random oddball dance moves. There was only one move she did repeatedly: When the speaker said, “The solution is clear,” as he did several times, she threw both arms over her head twice in a gesture that clearly meant, “Touchdown!” That her shirt was black-and-white striped, like a referee, only helped bring her message across.

And so the answer had to be… uh, 12? Two touchdowns = 6×2 = 12? Sure, except 12 wasn’t in the clue guide. 14 was, but that didn’t make sense. Touchdowns are worth seven only after the team kicks the extra point. Finally we figured out not to add the two numbers but to simply place them side by side: The answer was 66.

Comic Strip: A large banner (though not large enough, considering the crowds) was printed with an out-of-order comic strip. Each panel was numbered, and I guess the puzzlemakers expected us to mentally organize them in numerical order. This did not even occur to us. We reassembled the comic so that it simply made sense, and then wrote down the numbers in that same order. Seven of them. Aha: A phone number. We called it, and were told to count the number of cats in a particular frame. Our toughest step on this puzzle was debating whether there 13 or 14 cats; sneakily, even nastily, both numbers were in the clue guide. We finally settled on the correct answer, 13.

Admit One: We were handed a pass that said “Admit One To The Hunt Bar.” On the pass was a bar code that was clearly not really a bar code: It was one of those puzzles where the letters are written really thin, and you have to hold it at a severe angle to see what it says. The message said “Nineteen Plus.” Great. 19 plus what? We didn’t know. We solved all the other puzzles, had lunch, and only after all that did we spot, on the map, an area marked “BAR.” Well, duh. We ran there and received a card that said that only those wearing shoes could receive service. Were we wearing shoes? How many shoes were we wearing? So, 19+2=21, and we were done.

And now, the final puzzle: But first, a word about me being stupid. Early in the day, I got it into my head that a particular direction on the map was “thataway” when in fact it was “thisaway,” and no matter how many times I tried to make the necessary mental adjustment, I just couldn’t do it. I’m usually pretty good at reading maps, but today I had a form of temporary, specialized dyslexia. Whatever direction I started walking, I had to be called back by my teammates so that we could go the right way, which was the opposite of where I’d been headed.

And so, for the final clue, we were presented with pictures of an EAR, a NUT, and a STAR, and then a juggler attempted to juggle these pictures, but it was windy and the pictures were heavy, so he never exactly did it, but we more than got the point. Anagramming EAR, NUT, and STAR gets you the word RESTAURANT, and there was a spot labeled as such on the map, and we were OFF AND RUNNING, with me in the lead, which given the previous paragraph could only lead to disaster.

Yes, I turned right instead of left, and yes it took a couple of blocks for me to see my mistake through the haze of adrenaline. Other teammates, thankfully, got to the restaurant, and received a silly menu with a bunch of disgusting dishes. “We recommend the seafood,” we were told.

It took a while for us all to find each other in the mob scene, but when we did, we settled in to solve the puzzle and immediately got nowhere. Without getting too much into our erroneous thinking, we found ourselves trying to find eels on the map, but there weren’t any. It was clear we had made a mistake, but we could not imagine how or when, so we went back to the mainstage to hear how this damn thing worked.

There were seven seafood dishes, and each had a price: Another phone number! D’oh! We should have noticed that. When you called it, you got a message: “No, we meant the C Food!” There were a number of dishes on the menu starting with C. It was these dishes you had to use in coordination with the clues from the earlier puzzles. One of these was “B 4 u can win, u must go to the second.” The second C-dish was a “Casserole of dog.” Looking for a dog on the map was no good; it wasn’t there, any more than the eels were. Here’s the mental leap I would never have made: You needed to go to map coordinates K9 (“canine”). There you found a Hunt representative, and using the last couple of clues (handing her the menu and saying “heehaw!” — don’t ask, it’s not important) made you the winner.

All in all, not a bad Hunt. At no point did I say, “Oh, that was EXCELLENT!” and start tap dancing with joy, but the puzzles were a nice bunch, with not a clunker in the group. And of course it’s always a pleasure hanging out with my puzzle friends. My team was well-balanced, with everybody solving at least a part of something. And then there was hanging out afterwards with still more fun folks, trading puzzles and telling stories.

Then I walked back to my hotel and slept for ten hours.

Anyway, what I am here to announce is:

I’ll have the crossword in this Sunday’s New York Times. I hope you like it.

Or so we thought.

Our criteria for a dog is: No rat-sized “yip dogs,” as we call them. Oversized dogs are tolerable but not preferred. Shorthaired dogs like labs won’t do because something about the short, spiky fur causes my wife to stop breathing. Nor did I want a dog with a mane that would require a live-in groomer. That eliminates a whole lot of dogs, but it also leaves many choices on the table…

…none of which were available at North Shore that day. I couldn’t believe it. Cage after cage after cage of adorable, un-adoptable, black lab puppies. If we weren’t looking at a black lab, we were looking at a shorthaired hound. There was not a single dog there that met our not exactly stringent demands. We left after walking through the place three times — surely we were overlooking something?? — and Lea cried the entire way home.

We’d been trying to work, as well, with a number of local rescue agencies and shelters, but all of these places are underfunded and understaffed. Even getting a response to a simple e-mail inquiry was like Waiting For Godot. No wonder people turn to pet stores and expensive breeders.

So yesterday my wife read that North Shore was sending one of its mobile adoption centers up to Connecticut, about an hour away from us. We decided to go, even though we knew we would likely see the exact same black labs we passed on a few days earlier.

And yes, a few of those labs were there. And so was a 2-year-old lab mix separated from her family after being rescued from the flooding in Nashville. And a 10-month-old mix of various large breeds; if we had adopted this dog, we could have called it “Enormo.”

And also, there was Maggie:

She wasn’t Maggie at the time, but she is now. They think she’s a mix of border collie and Newfoundland, which is almost a guarantee that she is not. (Fourteen years ago, NASL told us that Toby, who was practically a purebred border collie, was a pointer.) Maggie has a Newfoundland’s face, but “Newfis” get pretty big, and Maggie’s paws are not particularly outsized, so your guess is as good as mine. All we know is we’re glad to have her. Lea is over the moon. Alex is cautious but intrigued. And Janinne and I have now closed the door (most of the way) on Toby’s passing, and are turning our attention to a whole new source of dog poop.

Number of minutes that Maggie was in our house before the first incident: Less than five.