July 31, 2008
Missed wordplay opportunity
If you're going to put a (probably infringing) Disney character on the label of my pluot...
...it should really be Pluto.
Sometimes I'm productive
Like when I write a puzzle for the Onion. Here's the one I contributed this week. (Get the Across Lite crossword reader here or here.)
July 19, 2008
The Tie Project, days 222-230
I am a bad person. I should be writing the next chapter of my book, but instead I played "Professor Layton and the Curious Village" on my Nintendo DS and am reading "High Fidelity". As penance, I will update the Tie Project.
Day 222. Not one of my best. More of an attempt to get this tie out into the fresh air than anything else.
Day 223. This combo I like. I always enjoy the vividness of this shirt.
Day 224. I bought this shirt twice, in two colorways, on the same shopping trip. (See day 19 for the other one.) But this one I don't wear as often because it's a little too big for me. It matched nicely with the tie I bought in Ann Arbor, though, so I broke it out.
Day 225. This shirt's been seen quite a few times in the project, since it's relatively sedate and thus easier to match. It's livened up a bit by the tie, which was worn about two weeks previously in actual tie-wearing time, and several months ago in blog time, on day 211.
Day 226. This is the shirt I wore with yesterday's tie on day 211. The tie was a recent acquisition, I think, probably from the flea market on 7th Avenue.
Day 227. This shirt is kind of weird-looking. (The pockets in particular are kind of strange.) Not sure the tie managed to redeem it here.
Day 228. Not my most exciting combination, but I like the way the pink and blue stripes on the shirt are echoed in the background of the tie.
Day 229. Bright! Very bright. The matching parts of the shirt and tie are not so prominent in the picture (the thin brown stripes, the yellow stripe way off to the side, the handful of magenta circles on the tie). Mostly I feel like the shirt and tie match because, you know -- bright!
Day 230. This is the outfit I wore on the very first day of the Tie Project, but now I think that photo looks kind of sloppy, so I took a new picture.
And so, having come full circle to my first outfit, this would be a perfect time to bring the Tie Project to an end.
Except I'm not going to.
Next time: A complete reimagining of the whole Tie Project! (Not really.)
July 07, 2008
National Puzzle Radio
My Mystery Hunt teammate Dan Katz and I were recently interviewed for NPR's Weekend America, talking about why exactly it is that we spend one weekend a year in a classroom at MIT getting not enough sleep, eating poorly, and, oh yes, solving impossible puzzle after impossible puzzle. The audio is now up here (the player will automatically start at the correct point in the stream). It's a pretty good story, although devoted Hunters may have some quibbles or clarifications -- for instance, the elevator anecdote has been compressed, leaving out the part where the two teams negotiated a deal to take turns in the elevator. Also, am I really one of the "most devoted" hunters? I do attend every year...but so do a crapload of other people, and many for longer than I've been attending. Obviously I am one of the handsomest and most charming, but that's another thing entirely.
July 04, 2008
I'm a patriot and didn't even know it
I know it's a holiday weekend and so the Internet is closed, but if you'd like to amuse yourself nonetheless, you might like to visit Miss Conduct's column over at boston.com and enter her clerihew contest. What's a clerihew, you ask? Well, it's a short poem about a famous person written in no meter to speak of, with the rhyme scheme AABB, named after its inventor, Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The first line of the poem is the famous person's name or mostly the famous person's name. Here's my entry in the contest, which may serve as a helpful example:
William S. Burroughs
Had a brow filled with wrinkles and furrows
(Which were probably exacerbated, of course,
By his addiction to horse).
And here's an autobiographical one:
Francis Heaney
Doesn't like olives, not even in a martini,
So you will not find it jaw-droppin', odd,
Or otherwise strange that he also hates tapenade.
(Thanks to Miss Conduct for helping provide content to my parched blog.)