Welcome to Decoder Ring, the roundup of topical puzzles and puns the world serves up for our amusement, if only we take the time to notice. If you come across some, send them to decodewired@gmail.com.
Scrabble player of the week: Mikki Nicholson is your new UK Scrabble champion. Radiant in pink, Nicholson beat four-time winner Mark Nyman on Halloween. What makes this a noteworthy story outside of Scrabble circles is that Nicholson, in addition to being a champion, is also a transsexual. The Guardian covered this with their usual aplomb, even issuing one of the most bizarre corrections I’ve ever seen: “Less respect than was due was shown yesterday to Mikki Nicholson, the new British Scrabble Champion, (Scrabble newcomer wins British Championship, 1 November, page 12). Ms Nicholson won the competition on 31 October with the word ‘obeisant’, an adjective incorrectly defined as the noun ‘respect’. The correct definition is ‘respectful’. In addition Ms Nicholson, a transsexual, was referred to by the male subject pronoun in the online version of the story when we should have used the female.” Ranking those in order of priority may not have been the Guardian‘s strong suit. Regardless, they showed a lot more class than crosstown rival the Sun, who found only one thing intriguing: that Nicholson used the word NADS in her winning game. (Not that the Guardian shies away from such language. See this Guardian story for what happened when a Countdown contestant got the letters DTCEIASHF.)
Things that flipped the control in my house this week:
Happy Guy Fawkes Day! I always have to stop myself and remember, remember, that “Guy” rhymes with “me,” not with “I.”
Which U.S. state has the longest name? Maybe you think it’s “Massachusetts” or “North Carolina,” at 13 letters apiece? Well, you’d be off by a mere 34 letters. In Tuesday’s election, voters in Rhode Island overwhelmingly declined the opportunity to change their state’s name from “The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations” to simply “Rhode Island.” And so Little Rhody remains the state with the smallest population-to-letters ratio, with slightly more than one letter per 30,000 residents.
Great Caesar’s Ghost! In other election news, Superman fans in Texas had the choice of a lifetime, shown in the Statesman headline “Perry-White governor’s race tops Texas ballot.” And CNN’s prognosticators probably didn’t do themselves any favors when they posted this result on Friday:
Yesterday I saw a bus with an ad proclaiming in large letters that the Motorola Droid smartphone is “The Next Generation of Does.” I still can’t look at that without thinking they run a deer-breeding farm.
This week, ESPN began broadcasting promos for the November Nine, the final table of the World Series of Poker. One of those promos I saw ran on ESPN’s new college football show, ESPN Goal Line — which is nice, because if you remove the last letter of “goal line,” you get the poker term “go all-in.”
LeBron James loves to laugh, it seems. Then he should love the savage slam “QUITNESS” at the end of the Cleveland fans’ parody of his “Rise” ad.
This week’s internet blowup in the recipe world provided a vivid illustration of the principle that if you’re going to go all knave of hearts and steal someone’s tarts, it’s best not to have a name that can be easily transformed into “Crooks Source.”
This week’s Noodler: Reader Brian Joughin became the newest inductee to the Decoder Ring of Honor by noting that APROPOS, BALKIER, DESIST, DODGER, FORESTS, KEYNOTES, and LAMEST anagram to the beer brands Sapporo, Kaliber, St. Ides, Red Dog, Fosters, Keystone, and Amstel. That puzzle was suggested by reader Cory Calhoun, who also noted that Budweiser has an apt equation anagram: Beer+us=DWI. For this week’s Noodler, you’ll need to hit the election results. One of the U.S. House races featured a candidate whose last name is a type of place, against a candidate whose last name is an object you’d find in that place. If you’re the first to send me the names to decodewired@gmail.com, you’ll be a Ringer too.
Where the geeks are this week: In London (the one in England), solving the UK Puzzle Association’s 1st UKPA Sudoku Championship. In you’re in London this weekend, you should go — not just to compete, but to see if Eugene Varshavsky dares to show up. Around this time last year in Philadelphia, the US Sudoku Championship was rocked by a major cheating scandal, as the unknown Varshavsky, hooded like the Unabomber throughout (perhaps to conceal a camera and headset), blazed through an opening round and then nearly froze solid onstage in the finals, filling in only three squares. When retested after the prizes were frozen, Varshavsky — who in 2006 had also come under suspicion of cheating at a chess championship — could not solve a sudoku. The puzzle world’s Black Sox scandal has affected all sudoku championships since, with heavier monitoring and … well, let’s just say that if you go to the London championship, you’ll be asked to remove your hoodie. (My fellow Decode puzzler Thomas “Dr. Sudoku” Snyder’s blog entries on this scandal are must reading.)
NaNoWriMi update: As I write this, readers have submitted 68 novels for Wired‘s National Novel Writing Minute challenge. Take a minute and write one, won’t you? We’ll post our favorites at the end of the month, but I’ll post one a week that catches my fancy. Here’s this week’s, with typos included: A bag of hammersby alec hankins The first day of january was cvrisp and and the bag of hammers was calling. it was clear what one had to do: nail everything in sight.
Mike Selinker is a game and puzzle designer who heads the Seattle-area studio Lone Shark Games. He also writes a blog about non-puzzly stuff called The Most Beautiful Things.
