And the Answer Is...

Yes, yes, I know I promised the answers to yesterday’s puzzles!


Sacramento can be broken into ‘scent’ and ‘aroma’. Cool, huh? And the number puzzle is 2345X6/7=2010. I just love stuff like this.

See you here Monday, August 9th, which will be the first anniversary of Funny Is the New Young. No gifts, please, but there will be a celebratory cake, hats, and festive balloons! Wa-hoo!

The Puzzle Master, My Hero!

I like puzzles and games; crosswords, Sudoku, kakuro, oh my! I especially like to play along with Will Shortz on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday mornings.

Shortz is the editor of the New York Times crossword puzzles, and has a bazillion other titles and honors to his credit. The Sunday morning gig, however, enables listeners (like me!) to play along as he plays word games, or does brain teasers. When the game ends he issues a challenge for the coming week, and it’s normally in the form of a puzzle. If you solve the puzzle, you e-mail in your answer, and one random entry is chosen to select a participant to play the next week’s puzzle on the air. Believe me, it’s entertaining.

Here’s an example of a past puzzle Shortz challenged the listeners to solve: Sacramento, the capital of California, can be broken into two words, five letters each, and they are synonyms of each other. What are they? (Yes, I’ll post the answer tomorrow.)

Sometimes the puzzles are more about numbers than words, but hey, I say, bring it on. (Doesn’t mean I always solve them, though!) Here’s one of those: Write down the digits from 2 to 7, in order. Add two mathematical symbols to get an expression equaling 2010. What symbols are these? (Right, tomorrow, remember? That gives you time to work on it—if you want more than a day, just don’t peek. It’s like not looking at the answers in the daily paper—your choice.)

So last week’s challenge—meaning we won’t get the outcome till this coming Sunday, the 8th—was to come up with a riddle that starts off with "What's the difference between" and involves a spoonerism. Okay, here I’m going to quote from the website to make good use of my time, and not make a complete fool of myself trying to explain this…

“A spoonerism is when consonant sounds are interchanged. For example, "What's the difference between an ornithologist and a loser in a spelling bee?" The answer: "One is a bird watcher, and the other is a word botcher." Another example: "What's the difference between an iceberg and a groom at a stable?" The answer: "One crushes boats, while the other brushes coats." Entries will be judged on cleverness, originality and naturalness of syntax. “

So here you have it, a challenge to rouse your brain from the summer doldrums. What? That’s just ME? Oh. Nevermind. But just in case you like word games, come up with one, and post it here as a comment. Want to know what I submitted? Here you go: “What’s the difference between a lunatic and a gastroenterologist? One goes nuts and the other knows guts.”

He’s going to hit me with a skillet, isn’t he?

The Perils of Facebook

No, not the usual warnings about privacy and potential employers finding photos of you table-dancing at your sister’s bachelorette party. Bigger stuff than that.

I logged on the other day, and read this cryptic post from my dear former neighbor Judy: Qejpmbv. And, as Edgar Allan Poe would say, only this and nothing more.

Hmmm, I wondered, what is she trying to say?

Maybe it was a new exotic spice she liked in a recipe she got from Martha Stewart. Or a new fruit just being marketed here, fresh from the Brazilian rain forest. Google searches got me nowhere.

I tried to determine whether it might be a mnemonic device for something like “Queen Elizabeth just pilfered my bronze vase.”

Hey, stranger tools have been made up—what about the one we all used to learn the order of the planets? Remember—“My very excellent mother just served us nine pizzas.” (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.) Yes, I went to school when Pluto was still considered a bona fide planet. I guess now (if they teach this stuff at all) they have to say, “My very excellent mother just served us nachos.” Anyhoo, maybe Judy was trying to tell us all something important, but in a very secret code.

So that took me to trying to solve it as a cipher, you know, where each letter stands for another letter. I am pretty good at solving the daily “Cryptoquip” in our newspaper, and to make it more of a challenge, I do it without using the clue, and I do it in my head. But this had no interesting pattern, no repeated letters, and I was pretty much adrift. Judy’s message was not something I could solve. I was defeated.

I checked back for updates, and only found that at 7:52 p.m. her husband had posted, “What does this mean?”

At 10:29 p.m. I posted a white flag, a confession of gross inadequacy, and a plea for help.

At 10:50 p.m. Judy posted the following message: “This means my cell phone must have been in my pocket and the strange message was sent without my knowledge. It means nothing.”

Sigh. I’d like to believe her, but I’d still say we should look for that bronze vase.

On the Road Again--Pittsburgh!

So I’ll be posting from the road for a day or two because I’m going to be visiting my son and his fiancé in Pittsburgh. I love Pittsburgh, but I adore my son and his fiancé more. I love being able to call her his fiancé now—after five years of thinking ‘girlfriend’ sounded too much like a high school relationship. I had come to think of her as my ‘de facto daughter-in-law’, and since I tend to make everything into an acronym (the blog is FITNY to me) I viewed her as my daffodil. (I was, however, savvy enough to keep this to myself.)

This was cool (and nerdy, I know—DUH! How many times must I tell you?) for several reasons.

1. I love daffodils. They are harbingers of spring. They are beautiful and graceful and bright. They represent happiness and hope.

2. I love this young woman. Yes, she is lovely and smart and sweet and caring. She is hard-working, accomplished, respected and highly principled. She has a social conscience and acts on it. And beyond all that, she adores my son, who adores her just as much, and she makes him happy. Which is really all a momma could want for her son. At least this momma.

3. I like playing dopey little word games. They amuse me. I love the Will Shortz puzzle segment on NPR Weekend Edition Sunday. Check it out.

Back to the subject: Wedding coming up in May 2010! Be there or be square—or in my case, be both. I’ll be the happiest mother of the groom (MOG) you ever saw!