A puzzling weekend

April 3rd, 2005 admin Posted in Tidbits |

The puzzler went something like this “There is a famous person in history, with 5 lettered first name and 4 lettered last name. Rearrange the first name to make a term used in a certain game and rearrange the lastname to make the name of that game!”

I thought about it for a few seconds and realized that finding the names of games that are only 4 letters long might be worth it. Golf and polo came to mind. But I could not think of many 5 lettered terms used in those games. I was listening to the National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Sunday on the radio, brushing my teeth. Soon I went down to the kitchen to preparing my usual weekend morning tea. I started heating water on the range when I called Kavita. She woke up sleepy eyed and after a few initial words I threw at her this problem. Upon hearing that I was thinking about polo as an option, she just said “Marco Polo”. She said it as a joke, almost as a rebuttal that if I thought of Polo, she actually though of a famous person with that for a last name. Maybe she did not realize that the problem had the added twist of rearranging the letters. Almost immediately a light bulb went off in my head. That could be it. “Pool is also a game and is a rearrangement of Polo!” AND more importantly, Carom, is a term used in pool! I was amazed at how she got the answer almost without realizing she had! It was a good start to the day. I sent in the solution to puzzle@npr.org today.

Yesterday I was at Srini’s place and Shyamala and I were playing wordgames like taboo (Shyamala had sometime ago written up with the word being guessed and the tabooed words that should not be used while trying to describe the word), twenty questions etc. One of the games was about thinking of something or somebody and giving indirect clues about it. She asked me a question, “I am thinking about something which cries when used, makes our lives brighter and comes in many colours. What is it?” I thought for about 5 minutes…while watching the Illinois Fighting Illini and the Louisville Cardinals fight it out in the NCAA mens basketball semifinals…I had no clue. I asked for one more clue. She said “Some of these smell nice”. I continued being clueless. Then after a few more minutes of contemplation, I asked, “Can I see it from where I am sitting?”, and she, after a few moments of thought and with a hint of uncertaininty said, “You should be able to see if from where you are sitting”. I started looking for things not in direct sight, but at the edges of my vision. Shyamala had said I “should” be able to see it. And she had taken a few moments calculating the answer given my position in the room. So it had to be something not in direct sight. Still no clue. Then my phone rang and Kavita was on the other side. After a few initial pleasantaries, I asked her this question. I even told her that I should be able to see it where I was. She might have thought for a total of 5 seconds and said candles in a tone suggestive of “Aaaawbviously”. And then the big bulb went on in my head. Every thing made sense. Every clue. And it was right in front of me all the while…sitting on the mantlepiece of Srini’s woodburning fireplace in his Brook Arbor apartment!

My comeback to Shyamala was a question about somebody famous (or infamous) and went something like - “More like a shrub, less like grass or a tree, donkey among elephants but not a donkey!

And talking of puzzles, there was this one on ThinkGeek.com. If you bought anything over $10 you were supposedly getting this T-shirt which said “Fake Ghostlike Photons”. I was wondering what satirical message could this be. The website, upon closer insoection revealed a clue that this was an anagram of some sort. Unable to solve it and unable to contain my curiosity, I googled for it and found on Slashdot, the message, in accordance with it being April Fools day recently, was, “Fools shop at ThinkGeek!”.