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Generic Confusion

When you leave, my blog just fades to grey
Nu ma nu ma iei, nu ma nu ma nu ma iei


News? Check. Politics? Check. Music? Check. Random thoughts about life? Check. Readership? Ummm.... let me get back to you on that. Updated when I feel like I have something to say, and remember to post it.

Sunday, June 12, 2005

Blogger Puzzle Challenge

Many people have started blogs recently, and some contribute to multiple blogs. But do you know of anyone with 80 blogs?

There is one person who has 80 blogs, a puzzle maker who is utilizing Blogger's free service to host a puzzle challenge. Each week, he sends the participants a clue. The answer to the clue is the name of the site of the next puzzle, at the site http://(answer).blogspot.com. The tenth puzzle each week, when solved, leads to a page that indicates you've solved the week's challenge.

If you want to play at home, here are the clues so far:

Week 1
My first is a test that a lawyer must pass.
My second, a verb, means "retain" or "amass".
My whole is a person who'll serve you a drink,
And may take some time to hear out what you think.

Week 2
In these clues, a single word is disguised:
All official saints must be canonized.
A finalist fiasco is a troubling gaffe,
And a mob boss has a siciliano staff.

Week 3
It's not a poem this time - it's a multiple choice quiz. Your solution will just be the ten letters that correspond to your answers.

1. What color was the robot lion that formed Voltron's left arm?
a) red
b) blue
c) black
d) green
e) yellow

2. What was the name of the light blue ghost in the original American Pac-Man video game?
a) Mucky
b) Bashful
c) Blinky
d) Inky
e) Clyde

3. Who are the only two women to be named honorary Harlem Globetrotters?
a) Jackie Joyner-Kersee & Whoopi Goldberg
b) Tracy Williams & Lynette Woodard
c) Abigail Saperstein & Sherry Manny
d) Tamika Catchings & Tina Thompson
e) Bette Midler & Goldie Hawn

4. In the rules of Fight Club, which rule is mentioned twice?
a) Fights go on as long as they have to
b) No low blows
c) There are no rules
d) You don't talk about Fight Club
e) If this is your first night, you have to fight

5. What work of fiction has a 100-letter "word" in its third paragraph?
a) Ulysses
b) 1984
c) Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas
d) Lord Of The Flies
e) Finnegan's Wake

6. What's the mathematical term for a number that's abundant but not semiperfect?
a) deficient number
b) weird number
c) pseudoperfect number
d) harmonic divisor number
e) Giuga number

7. Which movie features Monty Python cast members as well as Cheech & Chong?
a) The Meaning Of Life
b) After Hours
c) Yellowbeard
d) A Fish Called Wanda
e) Time Bandits

8. In the Twilight Zone episode "A Most Unusual Camera," what's so unusual about the camera?
a) It takes pictures of what people are thinking
b) Looking into the viewfinder lets you see through walls
c) It takes pictures of the future
d) It takes pictures of ghosts
e) If you take a picture of a person with it, it steals their soul

9. In Dante's Inferno, what was the name of the river that the ferryman took Dante across?
a) Malebolge
b) Dis
c) Acheron
d) Cocytus
e) Styx

10. Which of the following is not a real professional wrestling move?
a) Stretch Plum
b) Chimera Suplex
c) Miracle Ecstacy Lock
d) Backslide From Heaven
e) Japanese Ocean Cyclone Suplex

Week 4
1. Take the year in which the Great Fire of London occurred.
2. Write that number in Roman numerals.
3. Treat the Roman numerals as letters, and shift each of those letters forward x positions in the alphabet, where x is some integer between 1 and 25 inclusive. (Z shifted 1 position forward becomes A.)
4. Unscramble those letters to form a single English word. That word is the solution.

Week 5
(This week's first puzzle isn't conducive to posting, so here's the after-the-fact summary from the puzzle host.)

In this puzzle, I gave players items from a list. They had to determine exactly what the list was, then figure out what was missing from it. For example, if one of the lists was Friday, Wednesday, Tuesday, Sunday, Monday, Saturday, then the answer would be Thursday.

There are two lists. The solution is the missing item from the first list followed by the missing item from the second. Each list had eight items, but players were only given seven - and when I say "players" there, I mean as in ALL the players. Each individual player only got one item from each list.For this puzzle only, players were allowed to exchange information with anyone they wanted, but they could not give anyone else the actual solution.

I can't exactly do that here, so I'm just going to give seven of the eight items for each list.
List 1: white sox, red sox, heat, magic, wild, lightning, avalanche
List 2: virginia, connecticut, baltic, boardwalk, new york, illinois, pennsylvania

Week 6
Each of the fifty U.S. states has a commonly used two-letter abbreviation. Many of the states contain the uninterrupted two-letter abbreviation for *another* state (i.e. a state other than themselves) within their name. For instance, "Wisconsin" contains "CO", the abbreviation for Colorado. Write out the two-letter abbreviations of all states whose names do *not* contain the abbreviation for any other state. Arrange those letters to form three words of equal length, one of which is the name of an animal and another which is the name of an organ. Take those three words and put them in alphabetical order.

Week 7
1. Write all 26 uppercase letters of the alphabet in alphabetical order.
2. Switch the position of each vowel (including Y; Y is always considered as a vowel here) with the letter immediately following it.
3. Delete all letters that are not within two positions of a vowel.
4. Exchange the 7th through 12th letters with the 13th through 18th.
5. Take the letters that are in positions equal to 3 * an odd prime number, and add copies of each of them to the end.
6. Delete all letters for which the absolute value of the difference between their position in the alphabet and their position in this string of letters is equal to three.
7. Take all letters in a square-numbered position and move them two positions to the left, if possible.
8. Reverse the position of the fifth through eighth letters.
9. If there are any consecutive strings of three letters in alphabetical order that also appear consecutively in the alphabet, delete the middle letter.
10. Switch all letters in a square-numbered position, other than the ninth letter, with the letter immediately to right.
11. If any letter has a vowel immediately to its left and a consonant immediately to its right, shift it back one letter in the alphabet.
12. Delete all instances of the Xth letter of the alphabet, where X = the position in this string of letters occupied by R.
13. Put the first four letters into alphabetical order.
14. Take the fourth vowel from the left and move it to the end.
15. If a letter has same letter on either side of it, shift it back one letter in the alphabet.
16. Take the two highest-scoring Scrabble letters in the string of letters and switch their positions.
17. If a letter has a copy of itself immediately next to it, shift it forward one letter in the alphabet.
18. Find a four-letter word in this string of letters; delete the last two letters of that word and all others like them.
19. If you can shift the Xth letter in this string of letters back X positions in the alphabet and end up with the Xth letter of the alphabet, do so.
20. Count the number of Ds, Es, Fs and Gs, and add that many Ks to the end.
21. If multiple letters in a row contain lines forming an enclosed area (like P or Q), delete the last one in the row.
22. Switch the positions of two adjacent letters so that a four-letter word is formed.
23. Reverse the position of the letters forming that four-letter word.
24. Move the letter that's X letters from the right to X letters from left, where X = the number of letters forming an enclosed area.
25. Delete all letters that appear more than once and are not adjacent to another letter that appears more than once.
26. Move the last letter X spots to the left, where X = the number of Ws in this string of letters.
27. There should be two letters that are next to each other in the alphabet but not next to an adjacent alphabetical letter here; delete them both.
28. Shift first consonant from the left forward X letters in the alphabet, where X = the number of Ks in this string of letters.
29. Move the second last vowel to the immediate right of the last vowel.
30. Shift all letters forward X positions in the alphabet, where X is the number of vowels in this string of letters.

Week 8
Protactinium and radium can both be fatal.
For data on nobelium, there's not much on the table.
Iodine's in seawater, actinium it glows,
And last, not least, is sulfur, which will make one hold their nose.

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