The New York Times Magazine; Puzzles; Trump Bump; Jet Planes; Rodney Dangerfield

I love the New York Times Sunday Magazine.  Forgive me if I've said that before, but I am saying it again.  I rush to pull it out of the mess of NY Times newsprint each Sunday so that I can do the following:

The Spelling Bee  by Frank Longo:  as I've mentioned before, I love to match wits with the New York Times staff at finding "appropriate" words of 5 letters or more, from 7 special letters. You should try it too.

For instance, in the January 28, 2018 puzzle, the letters t,c,n,k,l,i,e were given and 5 letter or longer words were to be made from those letters.  However, each word had to contain the letter K.

The magazine gave ratings:

7 words = good
12 words = excellent
17 words = genius
19 words = the max from the magazine

I really work hard on this puzzle each week and try to beat the maximum.  Lately, I have been able to.  So, for this week, I found 21 words.  (this, of course, strokes my ego)

After the Spelling Bee puzzle, I do miscellaneous puzzles by Patrick Berry.  I get nervous while doing his puzzles; they are all different.  But I manage to finish them.

After Berry's puzzles,  I do anacrostics or cryptic crosswords.  Anacrostics are always created by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon, and I can't begin to remember how long I have been doing them.  At least 40 years... I think so.

Anacrostics and cryptics take me a while to do, but  I really enjoy the challenge.  This week, the cryptic was created (set) by Cox and Rathvon, a rare situation.

Now, all of the NYT puzzles are overseen by puzzlemaster Will Shortz. Shortz,  Longo, Berry, Cox and Rathvon are all longtime members of  puzzle world to which I also belong.  It's a lot of fun, and I highly recommend joining in.

After all of these puzzles have been completed, I tackle the Sunday Crossword.  I usually have to google 5 or 6 clues, especially those having to do with sports or contemporary music.  In those cases, I learn something new.

A guy named Rex Parker is OFL (our fearless leader) for the Sunday Crossword.  He doesn't set the puzzles, but he does critique it.  Rex is one of those puzzle experts who races the clock at competitions (usually held in Connecticut, and is very critical of each puzzle.   I do the puzzle for fun and therefore think that each puzzle is a challenge for me and nobody else.  And, as I said, I usually learn something from each puzzle.  ...  So... if you want to keep  your brain young..  do some tough puzzles each day.  Your brain will thank you and you will get better at them by practice.
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This Sunday, after the puzzles,  I enjoyed a few few articles in the magazine, for instance:

An article about ace jet plane salesman, Steve Varsano.  Steve was brought up in New Jersey, near the Teetleboro Airport.  After a long series of jobs, Steve formed a business devoted to selling the largest most luxurious Jet planes to the .0001% of the rich folks in the world who can afford to pay an average of $90 million dollars for a little transportation.

Steve says that Donald Trump paid $100 for "Trump 1."

I quote from the article:  Varsano: "In the U.S., the market is on fire, and you could say it was the Trump bump, or you could say that it was the way this tax plan has energized people to make the jump."

The author of this article, Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes:

"A provision of the (new tax) law actually allowed jet buyers to write off the entire purchase - effective immediately, for those who might want to claim it on a 2017 return."

Suckers!!
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Alex Halberstadt wrote a nice article in the magazine about famous comedian, Rodney Dangerfield.  You know, (the No Respect Guy).  Here are a few of Rodney's famous quips:

"As a child, I was so ugly, my mother fed me with a slingshot."

"I told my dentist my teeth were going yellow.  He told me to wear a brown necktie."

"My last birthday cake looked like a prairie fire."

"At my age, I want two girls at once.  If I fall asleep, they got each other to talk to."

My Uncle Allen loved Rodney and imitated all of his routines.  I'm anxious to check his routines on YouTube.   (I am old enough to remember some of them.)

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Beginning of 2018.. Trump; Words; Viagra; Creativity

Today, we are into the third week of 2018.  For two and a half weeks of that time, Elaine and I have had violent sinus infections... or colds.. not flu thought, because we haven't had fevers.  We are still coughing a lot, but not as violently.

Of course, now we are into celebrating Trump's first (and hopefully last) year as the President (to some people,)  At the beginning of the year, I thought that he might change his ways and become presidential.  Boy, was I wrong!  This year has been a disaster.  Lots of time spent trying unsuccessfully to get rid of Obamacare.  Lots of time, pushing the Republicans in Congress to forget that there was a Democratic minority which should be consulted in order to get rational bills passed.  ETC.

Now we have the Trump Shutdown of the Government.   The Republicans, under McConnell and Trump, have shown that they have no idea on how to run the country.  God help us.

Meanwhile...  let's jump to other things.   How about "words?"

Susan Silverman (from the book: Casting Lots) quotes an adopted boy who wants to know: "Who's my tummy mommy?"  In my case, I'm still trying to know "Who's my baddy daddy?"  He could be any one of five brothers.  DNA has proven who my grandfather was... but which one of his sons "did the deed?"  My family has narrowed it down to one guy, whose name just maybe appropriately  is Philander.  I hope that I can solve this mystery before I sail off to that whaleboat in the sky.

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A recent issue (November 2017) of Readers Digest had some food terms in its Word Power section, where my acrostic friends, Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon reign.  Some terms were new to me:

mesclun .. a mix of greens

chiffonade ..  shredded herbs or veggies

sous vide .. cooked in a pouch  (sounds good.. I'll have to look this up..  supposedly this method of cooking retains moisture and allows meat to cook evenly.

tempeh .. a soy cake

fricassee ..  cut and stew in gravy (I had heard the word but did not know what it meant.)

fondant ..  cake icing

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"Are you glad to see me?"

Oh, those rascals who live in the Irish village of Ringsaskiddy!  They claim that the fumes from their neighborhood Viagra factory are causing an overabundance of sexual activity in their village.  This needs to be investigated further in order to get to the hard facts.

 

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Rewarding Creativity in England

Chuck Shepherd reports that in 2015, the Selby, North Yorkshire, England, management company WLCT sponsored a contest to name a new "leisure center."  The prize was a  year's free membership. Local guy, Steve Wadsworth was the winner.  His winning entry:  "Selby Leisure Centre!"

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Enough!

Remembering Professor I.J. Good (Cryptography Expert)

REPOST OF A JANUARY 2018 BLOG ENTRY 

I wrote the original entry before I broke my face and wasn't sure it had been published, so I amended it a bit and here is the revised version.

During World War II,  I. J. Good joined Professor Turing at Betchley, England.  There, they worked their fantastic brains to successfully break German codes. 

We must not forget; however, that American  Elizebeth Smith Friedman did help them a little... even though nobody in the British group gave her any credit...while in the United States, J. Edgar Hoover took credit for her work as well. 

Her only attempt to get well deserved credit in any form was to put the initials CG on the bottom of all of her code submissions.  CG stood for the US Coast Guard, where Mrs. Friedman had set up her code-breaking office.

As a crypto analyst in Germany, I encountered Mrs. Friedman when I read her account in destroying the fallacy that the Shakespeare plays were written by Sir Francis Bacon. 

Her book has a long title, but don't let that stop you from reading about a marvelous code-breaking effort. I think it is "out of print," but I'll bet copies can be found somewhere on the Internet.

Here's the title:  The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined: An Analysis of Cryptographic Systems Used as Evidence that Some Author Other Than William Shakespeare Wrote the Plays Commonly Attributed to Him.

Whew!

Anyway, back to Doctor Good. I came across work by Professor Good through my membership in Mensa. 

Good came to the US after the war and became a professor at a Virginia college.  As a sideline, he published a mail-in project in the Mensa Bulletin from 1968 to 1980.  The project was called PBI (Partly-Baked-Ideas), and over the years he published 800 "ideas" from contributors and from his own fertile brain.   Here are a few that I retained:

#367  "Liar cretan.  Gordon Serjak sent me a Moebius strip with the words typed on it, 'The statement on the other side is false.'"

#386  "Cyclamates and Cancer.  Cyclamates in enormous quantities cause cancer in mice.  Perhaps small quantities (in humans) would give an immunity to cancer!"

(A cyclamate is a salt of a synthetic sulfamic acid.  When combined with sodium, it was once used as an artificial sweetener. Check me out on this.)

#397.  "Evolution is an enease.  Evolution may be a viral infection: see Newsweek, December 1974, p. 42, and relate this to one of Gordon Serjak's earliest ideas referring to a disease which does good instead of ill. [an 'enease?']"

(Gordon Serjak.. or GS.. was one of Good's most prolific suppliers of ideas.)

#398.  "Bleeps for the Blind.  Install bleep sounds at cross walks to assist blind people to cross the street."

(A heavily used intersection in Hanover, Pennsylvania has for years broadcast sounds when it is safe for vision impaired folks to cross the street.   I can't believe that other cities would not have that yet. While crossing that street, Elaine told me that she enjoyed the flirting-like emanations.)

#407.  "The Birth of Venus.  ... perhaps the red spot on Jupiter is a radio star's version of a sun spot... The red spot has dimensions 30,000 miles by 7000 to 8000 miles and the diameter of Venus is 7700 miles.. so perhaps Venus was thrown out of Jupiter at its red spot.  Is the material of Venus right for this hypothesis?  Israeli Immanuel Veliklovsky suggested that Pluto originated from Jupiter."

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Somewhere there is a book with all 800 of Good's "partly baked ideas"... but I can't get a handle on it. It was put together by Erik Smith and published by STAX  (I think.)