Happy National Spaghetti Day!
According to this web site, one of the things you are encouraged to do on National Spaghetti Day is “Think Outside The Box.” They mean you should make your own pasta instead of buying a long, rectangular carton, but for a split second I thought the game of Spaghetti was beginning to attract a wider audience. Because when it comes to thinking outside the box, spaghetti (the pasta) has nothing on Spaghetti (the improbable word game we are about to play).
In a moment, I will give you five words. I selected them from an abridged dictionary with the help of a random number generator. Being entirely random, there is no way these five words could possibly constitute the elements of a puzzle. And yet, we are going to pretend otherwise.
That’s the game of Spaghetti in a nutshell:
- Here is something that — let us be absolutely clear about this — is NOT A PUZZLE.
- Solve it anyway.
Hence the thinking outside the box. Successful Spaghetti players will find patterns and parallels among these words that would never occur to a more straightforward thinker. The best players will cause you to doubt that the words were randomly chosen in the first place (they were). The VERY best players will cause you to doubt their sanity.
Whether or not you can solve this year’s Spaghetti, I invite you to stick around. Keep yourself updated on the comments, and give a Like to any entry you enjoy. (Multiple votes are not only allowed, they are encouraged.) At the end of the day, whoever gets the most Likes will be the winner.
Oh, yes, one more thing: If you need a sixth word to help you realize your Spaghetti vision, feel free to add it.
All right. Brace yourself. Here are the words for this year’s game:
AUGUR
LAW
PARLIAMENT
MASCULINE
IRRECOVERABLE
Good luck! (Note that if you’ve never commented on this blog before, you might get stuck in the moderation queue. I’ll get those approved as fast as I can.)
10 Replies to “Happy National Spaghetti Day!”
It’s the Nondancing Men cipher! PARLIAMENT contains MEN, while the rest merely have synonyms containing MAN or MEN; these latter four in length order, taking MAN as dot and MEN as dash in Morse code, give us:
LAW = COM(MAN)D(MEN)T = .- = A
AUGUR = O(MEN) = – = T
MASCULINE = A (MAN)’S (MAN) = .. = I
IRRECOVERABLE = UN(MEN)DABLE = – = T
We thus get PARLIAMENT AT IT, which clues the final MEN-filled answer: ARGUMENT.
What a conniving metapuzzle!
The first aha is noticing that all of the words contain one or more instances of the letter “A” followed by another letter. Arranged alphabetically, therefore, you get:
AUgur
irrecoverABle
lAW
mASculine
pARliAMent
(It also helps to have the last answer in this round, significANt. You may be able to solve this without it, though it’s significantly harder.)
UBWSRMN
The next aha is noticing that the first three letters are used in Magic the Gathering to indicate three of the five colours. (The allusions to colours and Magic the Gathering in the feeder puzzles could have been stronger to clue this solve path.)
A search query, such as this one (https://scryfall.com/search?q=name%3A%2Fs%5Cw%2Br%5Cw%2Bm%5Cw%2Bn%2F+c%3Dubw&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name) will return the card “Saruman, of Many Colours” as the only result for cards containing those letters in that order within a word in its name and in (exactly) those colours – notice that the additional letters are perfectly interleaved.
The final aha is noticing that the card name also has the letter A followed by another letter multiple times. Extracting these letters (RNW) and then interleaving again produces the only (common English) word, RENEW, the answer to this puzzle.
You only need to take a quick look at this to determine the answer. Use the first letter of each answer followed by the next letter in the word that forms a chemical element symbol. Arrange these in decreasing order by the last digit of the atomic number, breaking ties by reverse alphabetical order:
AUgur – gold (79)
LAw – lanthanum (57)
IRrevocable – iridium (77)
MasCuline – moscovium (115)
PArliament – protactinium (91)
These first letters spell GLIMP and the only common word that begins with those letters is GLIMPSE, meaning that we need SELENIUM as our final answer to give us SE.
And who was the person who decided magnesium should be Mg, not Ma? Grrr.
Oops, I used IRREVOCABLE instead of IRRECOVERABLE. Apparently using chemical elements in your puzzle makes you mistranscribe words. My meta still works with the actual word.
Scott Weiss is correct that element symbols are involved, but it’s a bit more subtle. Each answer, including GURU, begins or ends with a 2-letter element symbol. Moreover, the answers have unique lengths, allowing them to be sorted:
LAw
guRU
AUgur
masculiNE
PArliament
IRreducible
This being the Altered Carbon round of the Cyberpunk hunt hints that we need to change these elements somehow. If we start at each indicated element, and then move left or right for each additional letter in the answer depending on whether the symbol was at the beginning or end of the answer, we arrive at the following new elements:
LAw: La + 1 = Ce
guRU: Ru – 2 = Mo
AUgur: AU + 3 = Pb
masculiNE: Ne – 7 = Li
PArliament: Pa + 8 = Es
IRreducible: Ir + 9 = Rn
Taking the first or last letter of the newly altered elements according to whether the symbol appeared at the beginning or end of the answer, we get the answer COPIER, which is hinted at by both the phrase “carbon copy” and the clones in the TV show
Oops, in doing this on my phone I discovered that I typoed IRRECOVERABLE as IRREDUCIBLE. Fortunately, this gives Ir + 11 = Ra, so COPIER is still the answer. Whew!
First, arrange the feeders by length:
LAW
AUGUR
MASCULINE
PARLIAMENT
IRRECOVERABLE
The first letters spell LAMP I, which clues the next step:
There are two I’s in the remaining letters. Write the feeders in a monospace font. Then, for each I, note the letters that would be illuminated by a lamp in that position (i.e. all other letters in the same row/column). For the I of MASCULINE these are MASCULNEMV, and for the I of parliament these are RUPARLAMENTC. Now note all letters in both of these sets: ACELMNU. Considering the meta question (“What did you need to get the lightbulb moment of this puzzle?”), there’s only one anagram of these letters that makes a punny answer: A CLUMEN, referencing the light-related unit lumen.
This, unlike in the past, fell quite quickly.
The word list,
AUGUR
LAW
PARLIAMENT
MASCULINE
IRRECOVERABLE
use what felt like fewer letters of the alphabet than typical.
The unused letterbank is
DFHJKQXYZ
While this doesn’t look like much, instead of using the final word and it’s 13 letters as a clue to use ROT 13, we take the first word’s 5 letters to point to the less common ROT 5. Revealing the expected
IKMOPVCDE
When we anagram this, we discover
MOCKED VIP
The pinnacle of the MOCKED VIP is the
NEW YORK FRIARS CLUB ROAST
Which is obviously our final answer.
Ah yes, the winnie the pooh puzzle. Each of the other characters’ puzzles gives us instructions for how to translate them. From left to right in the picutre that should have been provided:
* Eeyore: His puzzle involves finding the negative of neutral words. AUGUR becomes OMEN.
* Roo: His puzzle involves finding kangaroo words. In this case, MASCULINE becomes MALE.
* Kanga: Her puzzle involves abbreviations, and uses the same word as Roo. MASCULINE becomes MASC.
* Rabbit: His puzzle involves antonyms of words from the Rabbit novels. In this case, IRRECOVERABLE is an antonym of REST.
* Piglet: His puzzle involved letter banks. Since Piglet is holding a sign that says “City”, we can convert LAW to WALLA WALLA.
* Owl: Owl’s puzzle was a take-off of Crow Facts puzzles. PARLIAMENT becomes MURDER.
Finally, in the picture we only see Winnie the Pooh’s butt sticking out of the tree. We take the last letters to get NECTAR.