Baxil [bakh-HEEL'], n. My Sites [Tomorrowlands] [The TTU Wiki] [Photos]
View My LJ [By Tag]


Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Baxil" journal:

[<< Previous 20 entries]

April 9th, 2009
06:33 pm
[User Picture]

[Link]

Anyone for rebuses?
So, killing time while I'm sick, I'm playing a very obscure free Mac OS X game called "Explore!" It's basically a click-until-you-die easter egg machine; every once in a while you'll find a completely random encounter that gives you either resources or "souvenirs". If you've got a Mac you can download a copy here.

Of course, with a name like "Explore" and that level of obscurity, there's nobody out on the Internet talking about how to optimize the game or beat its puzzles. And that means when I run across a brain-breaker, the only thing I can do is pause the game and turn to my friends list.

As my latest easter egg encounter, I seem to have randomly stumbled across the game's programmer during my desert walk. He sys he'll give me a souvenir if I can solve a Unicode rebus. I said yes, and this popped up on the screen:

! // a ! ω a ...
(It's accompanied by a caption that reads something like "Your nerd senses tingle".)

The good news is that I appear to get infinite guesses (as long as I don't leave the encounter, he just says "Nope, that's not what the Unicode rebus says" when I'm wrong). I've tried a few simple variants -- 'bang' and 'not' for the exclamation marks, for example -- but can't make anything out of it. Of course, since I downloaded the game from a site in Sweden, it's possible the rebus could be in something other than English ...

Anyone want to give it a crack? I'll leave the game where it is and keep trying anything that's posted here. Baxil points and major self-esteem to the first solver.

EDITED TO ADD: The "//" glyph is not a double solidus, it's actually "parallel to" (Unicode #2225) -- it just inexplicably displays at an angle on the Mac. See comments.

------

ALSO EDITED TO ADD: Bonus riddle! Once upon a time while in a whimsical mood, I posted this comment about the hypothetical playlist of an AD&D "Jukebox of Many Things":

> I considered that, but 3E really nerfed the Jukebox of Many Things. Have you seen its playlist these days? For example, they took out the high-morale skeletons and replaced them with an electrum piece.*
>
> * Gamer humor + pop-culture reference = ow.


The two things mentioned are oblique references to bands. I remember what the first of them ("high-morale skeletons") was supposed to mean but I no longer remember what the hell I meant with "electrum piece." Care to refresh my memory?

ETA x3: I really should give out some sort of actual prize or reward for these.

Current Location: ~/Brainstorm
Current Mood: perplexed
Current Music: Sting, "Desert Rose"
Tags: ,

(39 comments | Leave a comment)

December 30th, 2008
02:08 am
[User Picture]

[Link]

Scrabble brainteaser, and Legend of Hero: 021
On Christmas, [info]kadyg and I travelled down to my parents' house. One of our presents to them was a Scrabble board*. We ended up playing a game to break it in.

On my first turn, I had a handful of 1-point letters -- including an "S". I made a Hail Mary play for the 50-point bonus you score when you use up all your tiles -- dropping the S on the end of an existing word, and building a seven-letter word that also used the S. (The board position was such that the S could have been in any position in my seven-letter word.)

My word was TREANTS. My parents, not being Dungeons & Dragons geeks with a love for sentient plants, immediately challenged. We discovered that we didn't have a Scrabble dictionary handy. It wasn't in the regular dictionary we managed to dig up, so we reached a quick deal: If I took it back and played something else, I could redo my turn rather than lose it.

Not wanting to give up the quick 50-point boost, I furiously anagrammed, and finally tried the same tactic again, dropping down TARTENS. ("Oh, come on, that's misspelled!" Kady immediately protested. "No, I'm not going for the things Scotsmen wear," I replied. "I'm conjugating the verb that describes when something becomes more sour." I got challenged anyway.) As this was my second try, it was ruled that if this wasn't in the dictionary either, that was it for my turn. Sadly, the arbiters of official English didn't approve of my cruftipose verbizulation.

Esprit d'escalier being what it is, it wasn't until next morning that I realized I could have thrown down a legitimate seven-letter word, immune to challenge -- even with only a moderately sized standard dictionary at hand. Facepalming ensued.

Can you tell me what word I should have played with those seven letters?**

The answer may or may not be in the new installment of Legend of Hero over at [info]ttustories. You should go read it and find out! It also may or may not resolve the incredible cliffhanger in the previous episode. You should go read it and find out! Either way, further updates will continue to follow the M/W/F schedule.

For the record: We're catching up on a character we haven't seen in a while, so you may also want to check Wastes: I and Wastes: II for context.

--
* Technically, Super Scrabble, but I'm considering that a subset of the larger "Scrabble" genre.
** No, none of them were blanks.

Current Location: ~/computer_desk
Current Mood: devious
Current Music: David Nelson Band, "Long Gone Sam"
Tags: ,

(21 comments | Leave a comment)

October 29th, 2008
07:02 pm
[User Picture]

[Link]

Okay, I'll bite.
http://img147.imageshack.us/img147/9924/donotpostbf3.jpg: A sign reading

DO NOT POST PICTURES OF THIS SIGN ON THE INTERNET
986F 64B9 3005 E03E FC42 A41E BD57 3179


Google doesn't seem to turn up anything relevant, but here's a Reddit thread speculating on its meaning (and whether it's Photoshopped; weak consensus there is yes).

Among the more interesting tidbits pointed out there:
  • The hexadecimal code is 128 bits, which (among other things) is the right size for an MD5 hash.
  • The user who posted the link to Reddit, "agent_langley" (Langley, VA being the home of the CIA), has posted only that single link so far (and two possibly unrelated comments to other threads).
  • Converting it to eight Unicode characters gets three Japanese glyphs Han unified ideographs [See comments -B] followed by several other random characters from non-Asian languages.
  • Converting to ASCII gets basically gibberish.
  • It's not the AACS HD-DVD decryption key, which began with 09F9.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's some viral campaign that hasn't quite hit the denouement stage yet, but it's still an interesting brainteaser.

Edited to add: Well, that was quick. Apparently solved (less than an hour later!) in comments.

Current Location: ~spiral
Current Mood: curious
Current Music: "Knight of Fire," Xenogears OST
Tags: ,

(16 comments | Leave a comment)

September 22nd, 2007
12:21 pm
[User Picture]

[Link]

The sandwich shop is o-pun
[info]kadyg just graduated from cooking school* and opened up our new business! Unfortunately, some clod (*coughs, looks away*) left the sandwich names off of the menu; all I have are the ingredients and some eclectic pop culture knowledge. Can you help us out?




1. Spam, turkey, and Swiss cheese on French toast, deep fried

2. A hot dog, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese, and Thousand Island dressing, served open-faced on rye bread

3. Hamburger meat and American cheese on grilled rye bread - and when it arrives, your waiter forces you to march it back to the kitchen

Extra Credit (a toughie; hints in comments):
    4. Bread, coal, lettuce, bread, tomato, blood, and bread, held together with a toothpick and served with bottles of Budweiser and Heineken on the side




NOTE: Comments will contain solutions and/or spoilers! (The checkmark next to the number indicates someone has solved it.)

--
* Not really. She finishes in March.

Current Location: ~/brainstorm
Current Mood: devious
Current Music: "Manhattan Skyline," Saturday Night Fever sndtrk
Tags: ,

(18 comments | Leave a comment)

January 22nd, 2007
11:39 pm
[User Picture]

[Link]

Nifty links of the moment
This is where I would normally put a Further Confusion wrap-up, but I ended up reading other peoples' journals before getting around to updating my own. So, without further ado, a bunch of great links ganked from others.

  • Department of Space: A Google Maps-type star map for the entire Traveller setting, complete with borders, star system data, shipping routes, jillions of names, etc. The full impact of this doesn't really start hitting you until you scale down step by step and see how big the map is. (via comments in a [info]momentrabbit post)

  • Department of Aerospace: The Russians built two counterparts to the Mir space station. Where are they now? If you answered "Nobody knows," you're only half right, and that's the less interesting half. (h/t [info]xiphias)

  • Department of Decoding: Here, have a cipher to decode. And if you happen to have solved that one already, have a harder one. (h/t [info]chipuni and [info]soreth, respectively)

    (The first one's cheatable ... if you know where to look. I'll link to the web resource I used in comments, but I'll screen it for several days.)

Edited to add:
  • Department of American Exceptionalism: This article should be required reading for anyone who still has any respect for the American health care system. (The rest of us can just cite its statistics as we agitate for a sane alternative.) Via [info]annafdd via [info]jinian.
  • And a second health care link I couldn't wedge in anywhere else.

Current Location: ~calorg
Current Mood: rushed
Current Music: Orbital, "The Saint theme"
Tags: , , ,

(4 comments | Leave a comment)

August 28th, 2006
06:20 am
[User Picture]

[Link]

AMAQ: Responses 1 (photo edition)
Thank you all for your responses to my freshly revived Ask Me A Question poll. I've gotten 13 questions so far, and will keep answering them until I run out. If you haven't had a chance yet, feel free to pitch me a question at the original post!

I'm going to do a little cherry-picking for my first replies, because that will allow me to group them thematically. Today's answers:

The 3,000 Words* (And 16 Colors) Edition!
* Technically 3,271.


To start us off, [info]ounceofreason says, "What's the deal with the 'stache? It totally screams 'gay biker.'"

Picture! )




[info]chipuni says, "One of your interests is 'tilting at windmills.' At what windmills have you been tilting, recently?"

Picture! )




[info]soreth says, "So, why haven't you ... beaten the Great and Illegible Literature puzzle yet? ;)"

Colors! )




A responder says, "How many attacks of the Mold Monster from the Fridge have you suffered since you made your documentary?"

Picture! )

Current Location: ~/computer_desk
Current Mood: creative
Current Music: "Euthema," Fledgling
Tags: , ,

(3 comments | Leave a comment)

July 16th, 2006
05:28 pm
[User Picture]

[Link]

Riddle: Double-entendre nations
[info]kistaro just shared his write-up of participating in Microsoft's Intern PuzzleDay. It's a fun read that gives some flavor of the brain-bendingness of the event. But what caught my eye was the following paragraph:
Another puzzle, "Kingdoms", gave confusing names for countries, approximately; we had to figure out what they meant (few of the puzzles had instructions) and that they were all countries, but it went fairly quickly from there. ("Curve, simple" was "Belize": bell, easy. Yes, they were all that much of a stretch.) Well, each puzzle had a number by it, and using that number as an index into the country name spelled out one more puzzle: "HOTEL SECRETING ORGAN". This is, of course, England. (Or, if you prefer, Inn Gland. However, I am very likely to refer to England as Hotel Secreting Organ for much of the forseeable future.) I have no idea why it struck us all so funny, but it was a huge laugh in the debriefing at the end when it was revealed that a few teams had come to the very wrong answer of "HOTEL SECRET IN GORGON" as the very wrong answer. The woman who invented the puzzle wasn't sure what country that would be, and she didn't really want to know.

What? Even the puzzle creator couldn't be bothered to come up with a solution for HOTEL SECRET IN GORGON? Okay, now that I just can't leave well enough alone.

Using a lazily-googled list of country names (n.b.: I used only their English names, although I suppose you're free to use native equivalents) and a wee bit of Internet research, I quickly managed to come up with a plausible (though terribly unfair to potential solvers) solution.

I challenge you to do the same -- what country does HOTEL SECRET IN GORGON represent? There's no "right" answer, but props are due in direct proportion to the elegance of your solution. As such, I won't screen answers this time, and I'll put my own offering in comments -- it might get your brain thinking in a creatively useful direction.

Current Location: Still at home
Current Mood: devious
Current Music: "Fingal's Cave," Wolfstone
Tags:

(4 comments | Leave a comment)

February 23rd, 2006
02:23 am
[User Picture]

[Link]

The Line Before
There's a story behind this post. If I have time later this week, I might even tell it.

But at any rate: I realized, after some rather extensive research led me to a surprising discovery, that while virtually everyone can cite famous quotes ... it's very rare to know the context surrounding them. So much so that if you were to step back even a single sentence from the famous line everyone knows, the origin of that line could be much harder to piece together.

To illustrate this, I'm going to offer you two Line Befores. Here are the rules. To answer a LB, post the person who wrote or said that line. Also, please track down the LB from a favorite famous quip of yours (you will probably have to go back to your source poem/prose, or Google the transcript of the speech that spawned it), and post that in the same reply. That'll help keep a stream of LBs up and give other people a chance to play along.

If someone's already posted the author of a LB you know, you can add the famous quote that follows it. But no Googling in order to post the famous quote! (Googling for the author might be in bad form, too, but I suspect it's sometimes necessary.)

Memeify if desired; you can repost the rules and a Line Before in your own journal if you want.

So here are my seed LBs -- an easier one from a poem, and the other one that started me going:

"Thousands at his bidding speed, and post o'er land and ocean without rest."

"Okay, I'm going to step off the lem now."

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: d-compleX, "Ecstasy"
Tags: ,

(38 comments | Leave a comment)

January 16th, 2006
02:20 am
[User Picture]

[Link]

17 hours until Christmas:
BEHIND THE LID SCINTILLATING RA 7:00 DEC 24

Current Mood: devious
Tags:

(13 comments | Leave a comment)

January 11th, 2006
01:21 am
[User Picture]

[Link]

The paradox uncoiled
Oops! I was going back through old posts to get them properly tagged tonight, and realized that I never bothered to unscreen peoples' answers to the Paradox Dragon riddle. If you were wondering about the answer at the time, feel free to go back and give it a read.

Current Mood: embarrassed
Current Music: Tori Amos, "Putting the Damage On"
Tags:

(2 comments | Leave a comment)

November 19th, 2005
04:17 pm
[User Picture]

[Link]

Request for geek enlightenment
Does anyone out there know the meaning of "##!!//" (without the quotes) -- and why it's innuendo?

I only ask because it breaks Google.

Current Mood: curious
Current Music: Dave Brubeck, "When I Was Young"
Tags: ,

(17 comments | Leave a comment)

November 4th, 2005
12:58 pm
[User Picture]

[Link]

Silent English
You've all heard the joke about the man who signed in at a hotel "Mr. Ghoti" and pronounced his name "fish," right? "Gh" as in "enough," "o" as in "women," and "ti" as in "motion."

I've been wondering for a long, long time if it's possible to assemble a "Silent Alphabet" -- use the same selective pronunciation to find dark corners in the language where the absence of virtually any letter goes unnoticed.

A few quick examples:
   n as in damn ["dam" is pronounced the same]
   w as in sword ["sord" isn't a word, but if it were, you'd pronounce it the same way, per "sore" and "sort"]

Shrinking of double letters (such as in "fillet," the verb, and "filet," the noun) seems too cheap to me to count. Unambiguous silence would be preferable for vowels (is the "o" silent in "unambiguous"? I'd rather find a word where the word with its absence is also proper English). Beyond that ... have fun, and help me out.

Letters still needed: f, (i), j, q, v, y

Current solutions below the cut (and in comments) )

Current Mood: working
Current Music: Cyzum, "Brainstorm"
Tags: ,

(52 comments | Leave a comment)

September 15th, 2005
09:17 pm
[User Picture]

[Link]

OK, wtf?
From an obituary I'm editing right now:

"Born April 24, 1928, 77 years ago in Fresno, CA; died in Roseville at Sutter Memorial on Sept. 13, 2005 of a heart attack.
He had a lengthy career in the trucking business. Former employers included: Abenshan, Miline, Cresent, Delta, De Anza, and ONC Trucking. Alec retired in 1993 from Willig Trucking after 35 years as manager.
Alec was a veteran of the Korean War; he held the post of Commander for 4 years in the VFW Post 904. He belonged to the Rocklin (Calif.) American Legion and the Coodies."


This sounds from context like it might be a military and/or local fraternal organization. Google: Nothing. You'd think if it was the slang term for a group like that, Google would at least point me in the right direction.

I suspect it might be whoever typed up the obit for submittal to us misheard the group name, but I also can't think of anything similar offhand.

Anyone have any idea what this is supposed to refer to? If I can get an answer in the next two hours, I should even be able to correct it for tomorrow's paper.

--

Edit, 12:30 p.m. 9/16: I found it.

Current Mood: mystified
Current Music: Hurricane Sam, "Didn't It Rain"
Tags: ,

(20 comments | Leave a comment)

August 17th, 2005
04:12 am
[User Picture]

[Link]

Riddle: The Paradox Dragon
Wow, I've been on an unusual mathematical kick lately. Must be the aftereffects of all the good news I'll mention in my next post, or something.

First [info]amthrax came up with the river-crossing riddle I posted here two days ago; I not only solved it, but came up with a proof for why the given solution is optimal.

Now, by chance I've stumbled upon the PartiallyClips strip (LJ: [info]partiallyclips) named "Paradox Dragon". And the logic circuits of my brain kicked in.

Right off the bat, the third panel contains a fairly obvious paradox. (Warm-up puzzle: What?) I'm going to assume that it was put in there intentionally, to give the strip its title; or maybe it simply drifted in as part of the punchline. However, if you discard the third panel entirely ... the first two panels are a self-consistent logic puzzle. I've reprinted the dialogue below, modified to clarify it for problem-solving purposes:

NARRATOR: On the hundredth day of my quest, I faced the Paradox Dragon. I knew that one of its three heads always lied, one always told the truth, and the other head would alternate [back and forth between telling the truth and lying].
FIRST HEAD: You may ask us one question, then you must guess which head is which.
SECOND HEAD: He's lying. You get three questions.
THIRD HEAD: Oh no, it's definitely one question.

NARRATOR: Not willing to risk counting on three questions, I asked [the dragon] ... what the second head would say if I were to ask it if the third head had been lying when it agreed with the first head that I could only ask one question.
FIRST HEAD: (*non-answer*) Oh ... okay, hold on a minute. ...
SECOND HEAD: He'd say, "Yes, the third head was lying."
THIRD HEAD: ... [The second head is] lying [in the statement he just gave].


To my delight, I discovered that the information given was sufficient to triumph over the Paradox Dragon! Anyone else out there care to reproduce my work and solve Rob Balder's riddle?

(n.b.: Comments for river crossing riddles now unscreened. Comments here, as with my other riddle posts, are screened to give everyone time to play along at home.)

--

Edit, 1-11-2005: Going back through old entries to tag everything up, realized that I never unscreened anyone's solution. Oops! Fixing that now -- keep in mind all answers below were the product of independent work.

Current Mood: insomniac
Current Music: Elastica, "Connection"
Tags:

(15 comments | Leave a comment)

August 15th, 2005
01:44 am
[User Picture]

[Link]

Riddles: More river crossings
Alright, I admit it: The last riddle was less of a brainteaser than it was a chance to snark.

I spent most of Friday juggling no less than three separate cars -- and two other people's errands -- in order to find a way up to my former house to pick up a clothes washer-dryer and haul it home. I was supposed to get a refrigerator, too, but simply ran out of time, and I'll have to deal with that this upcoming week (hopefully via U-Haul or a quick direct sale rather than by solving riddles just to find a vehicle capable of hauling it).

Anyway. Both of my previous riddles have been completely original, and so now I'm feeling pangs of guilt for posting such a time-worn one. It was wearing at me while I walked to work the next day, so I took some time to think up a new twist on the river-crossing theme:
#1. Alex, Ben, Charlie, Dan, and Eric are in a horror-movie plot out in the remote wilderness, being stalked by a serial killer that always murders his victim the moment that the two of them are together and nobody else is close enough to come to the victim's aid. The five survivors (the other 21 have been murdered) have figured out that the serial killer is secretly one of them, but they don't know who, so they've agreed to go back to civilization to contact police -- and all stick together so the killer won't strike again on the way.

Unfortunately, they come across a wide river filled with alligators. There is a single three-man boat on the bank. It would be easy enough to take two trips and ferry everyone across -- but if the serial killer is left alone on either bank with a victim, or is in the boat alone with a victim, they can murder one final person and escape.

"We'll just have to take our chances," Charlie says. "Without knowing who the killer is, all we can do is cross the river as efficiently as possible and hope nobody gets slaughtered. I call dibs on rowing the boat back from the first group to the second -- that way I'm never alone with the killer."

"Are you crazy?" Ben asks. "You can't call dibs on that. You're the one who suggested the trip to Dead Camper Lake in the first place. I call dibs because I suggested we go back to civilization together."

"Guys," Dave Dan interjects. "We know neither Alex or Ben are the killer, because back near the beginning of the trip we sent them off together to scout that deserted cabin. Let's leave the two of them here and the three of us take the boat across and go home."

"No," Eric said. "The deal was we all go back. I'd feel safer in a group of five anyway. And if I stick with Alex or Ben while you guys cross and someone comes back for us, I know I won't get murdered."

Alex thought for a moment. "Hang on. If you guys stop your squabbling, we can all get across without putting anyone at risk," he said.

How?


Also, as it turns out, [info]amthrax proposed a different river-crossing tale with a similar solution in comments to the previous post ... so I'm going to present it here. Feel free to answer either or both.
#2. There are four people on one side of a river who need to cross the bridge to the other side. Of the four people, one of them is a runner who can cross the bridge in one minute, another is a brisk walker who can cross the bridge in two minutes, the third is a normal walker who can cross the bridge in five minutes, and the fourth person takes ten minutes to limp across. It's night-time and they have only one lantern.

The bridge is rickety and small, so only two people can cross at a time, and one of them must be holding the lamp so they can both see. When a pair of people is crossing, the faster person cannot leave the slower person behind in the dark, so the faster person must walk at the slower person's pace. How can you get all four people across in as little time as possible?


Hint: (The best solution + 4) is not a prime number.

As usual, comments will be screened for a few days to allow everyone to figure these out on their own. And as a reminder, if you never saw the solution to the dartboard problem, answers are visible now.

--

Edit, 8-17-05: Comments now unscreened.

Current Mood: productive
Current Music: Thanks To Gravity, "Catching Stars on Paper Plates"
Tags:

(35 comments | Leave a comment)

August 13th, 2005
03:51 am
[User Picture]

[Link]

Practical riddle applications
You are on one side of a moderately wide river with a fox, a duck, a bag of grain, and a boat that is only big enough for you and one other item to cross the river at a time.

You want to cross the river with all three items. However, you know that if you leave the fox and the duck together unattended, the fox will eat the duck; and if you leave the duck and the grain together unattended, the duck will eat the grain.

How can you cross the river with all of your items intact?

For extra credit: Adapt and extend this riddle to describe my day today.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Am I done driving around yet?
Tags:

(34 comments | Leave a comment)

July 11th, 2005
04:43 pm
[User Picture]

[Link]

Riddle: Dartboard difficulties
[info]roaminrob, [info]kadyg and I were playing darts last night on Rob's dart board. We played two games of 301, and he beat us both times by narrow margins; but my real fun was to begin after the play had finished.

The topic turned somehow to scoring. A brief summary of darts scoring, for those unfamiliar with the game )

"So, Bax," Rob asked me. "Is it possible to score any number from 0 to 180 in a single round of darts?"

I thought for a moment. "No. A trivial counterexample is 179. To get 180, you need three 3x20s. But the next highest single-dart score is a triple-19. The second-highest round you can score is therefore two 3x20s and a 3x19, which is 177. You can't score 178 or 179."

Rob looked thoughtful. "So, what's the lowest score that's impossible to get in a single round?"

The two of us looked at each other. Mental wheels started spinning.

Five minutes later, we were knee-deep in numbers, he'd grabbed a sheet of paper, and I was assuring Kady that, no, really, we were close, we'd have the answer in a few minutes, we could start heading home soon. (Like a true mathematician, I had told him, "Let's just find the answer first. That'll help us come up with the elegant method for deriving it." Indeed, that took the better part of an evening.)

Anyway, Kady only got home about five minutes late, and we've got our answer. Can you find it?

Extra bonus points for a proof showing why it's the smallest (and [info]roaminrob, you're eligible here too -- I'd like to see you develop your idea from the phone message more, because it's different from the one I settled on).

n.b.: I'm also going to go ahead and unscreen the answers to the previous riddle now, for those of you who haven't gotten it yet. Answers here will be screened for, um, probably a few days, or until I post the next riddle, whichever comes first.)

--

Edit:, 8-1-2005: Answers unscreened.

Current Mood: mathematical
Tags:

(48 comments | Leave a comment)

June 29th, 2005
12:04 am
[User Picture]

[Link]

Winampmancy, and a riddle
Alright ... so, yeah, I'm a mage, I should be used to (*makes little quote marks with fingers*) "coincidences." Still, these things happen. They catch you off guard.

I was doing some thinking this morning about the TTU story I'm writing*; a few things about where Kiasu picked up his ability to work magic fell into place, and along the way - I'm not quite sure where - the glimmerings of a riddle to insert into the story sprang up. I got to work, tapped out a few notes into Notepad as I sat down at the computer, and promptly forgot about it until after deadline.

A few minutes ago, I opened the window back up, went "Ah!" and whacked my head against it some more. I had a few of the elements, but it was an uphill struggle to fit it all into a nice little poem. The first two lines came together without much grief, but coming up with a rhyme that would let me work in the other hints slowed me down, and suddenly right around the time I was kicking line three into place Winamp starts playing a song that answers the riddle.

No, really: The title of the song is the complete, succinct answer to the riddle. And it's mentioned quite repeatedly throughout the chorus.

That all having been said -- hey, if Winamp can guess it, I should give you a chance too. I'll print the riddle below; comments will be screened, and correct answers will be acknowledged without de-screening in order to give everyone a chance to join in. :)

They fear to gaze upon his face
and fear yet more to touch
Yet weak or bold, they take his gold
With praise both bright and lush.


--
* Well, alright, I haven't set a single word to paper yet. But I've got a page of written notes and I'm on about the third draft inside my head, fleshing out the outline to where it just needs to burst out onto the screen.

Edit, 7-11-05: Comments now descreened. Congratulations to our winners!

Current Mood: impressed
Current Music: Tom Bailey singing the answer
Tags: ,

(35 comments | Leave a comment)

September 12th, 2004
03:12 am
[User Picture]

[Link]

Lend me your brainpower.
Imagine for a moment that you're chasing someone. You catch up to their last known location, burst through the door, and the place is empty save for a short note crisply printed on generic paper:

I turn into a star
My hands are the heavens
And my voice is the sea.

That's it, your only clue. You have a reasonable certainty your target is trying to goad you into further pursuit, so this probably isn't some red herring with no relevance.

Now you have to try to track them down again. Where do you start your search?

Poll #348863
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 18

So, where do you go? (Please explain in comments.)

(n.b.: This is, just to set your mind at ease, hypothetical. There is no "right" answer; guess wildly as long as you can come up with some interesting reasoning.)

Current Mood: random
Current Music: Thanks To Gravity, "Bobsled"
Tags:

(20 comments | Leave a comment)

March 8th, 2004
11:05 pm
[User Picture]

[Link]

A fun quiz! Test your knowledge!
All answers are taken from the Red Cross Blood Donation Eligibility Guidelines at http://www.redcross.org/services/biomed/0,1082,0_557_,00.html. No peeking! That's cheating!

Scoring key is provided in the comments. No peeking! That's cheating! (At least until you're done.)

Poll #260081 Blood donation eligibility quiz!
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 47

Which of the following will prevent you from donating blood FOR LIFE?

View Answers

Shooting up heroin.
28 (60.9%)

Having an implanted pacemaker.
16 (34.8%)

Being a sexually active, monogamous homosexual male.
33 (71.7%)

Being a homosexual female with more than ten partners in the last 12 months.
13 (28.3%)

Being a straight man and having experimented sexually with a male high school friend once back in 1980.
29 (63.0%)

Suffering from the disease fibromyalgia ("chronic fatigue syndrome").
18 (39.1%)

Being born in Nigeria.
31 (67.4%)

Having spent a year as a transfer student at a Greek university.
11 (23.9%)

Having taken a one-week vacation to London every year since 1991.
21 (45.7%)

Having chronic acne conditions requiring antibiotics.
18 (39.1%)

Which one(s) of the following will cause the blood bank to ask you to come back in a few days or weeks?

View Answers

Just got stitches to close an accidental knife cut.
32 (68.1%)

Recently smoked a joint.
31 (66.0%)

Recently smoked a clove cigarette.
14 (29.8%)

Are depressed over a recent breakup.
9 (19.1%)

Are menstruating.
26 (55.3%)

Recently gave birth.
37 (78.7%)

Recently had an abortion.
32 (68.1%)

Recently handled an unfamiliar parakeet.
13 (27.7%)

Which of the following risky behaviors will NOT disqualify you for 12 months from giving blood?

View Answers

Spending a night in prison for misdemeanor assault.
26 (55.3%)

Snorting cocaine with a group of gay friends.
9 (19.1%)

Contracting the sexually transmitted disease herpes at a sorority party.
8 (17.0%)

Getting a tattoo from a non-state-certified tattoo parlor.
4 (8.5%)



20 points possible. Post high scores in comments. :)

Edit, 2 AM, 3-9-04: Congratulations to our high scorers so far, [info]pullthestars (15) and [info]heron61 (14). Anyone out there top them?

Current Mood: Drama'ed out
Current Music: "Ghosts (Vincent de Moore mix)," Dance Dance Revolution
Tags:

(30 comments | Leave a comment)

[<< Previous 20 entries]

Tomorrowlands Powered by LiveJournal.com