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Happy National Puzzle Day!

Discuss on the Puzzlehead forums

You say you’ve never heard of National Puzzle Day? Don’t be surprised. It’s just one of a long list of obscure holiday celebrations. Lists of these wacky holidays are readily available online.

Listed below are 300 obscure holidays in random order: 286 of them are real, 14 are fake. Find the fake ones, and you’ll be able to determine the coordinates of the final location of a geocache I placed to celebrate this holiday. Here’s how:

Continue reading Happy National Puzzle Day!

What Makes Merl Mad

I saw a link on Amy Reynaldo’s blog today about a new blog by Merl Reagle, one of the best crossword puzzle constructors around. (Those of you who listen to NPR’s Puzzle on the Air or have seen the movie Wordplay know who he is.) Specifically, Amy referred her readers to Merl’s Pet Peeve No. 1:

[…] It’s something I’m tempted to call a “flansir,” which stands for “familiar looking although never seen in reality” (pronounced “flancer,” let’s say).

Merl goes on to clarify:

I tend to differentiate this from a traditional “crosswordese” word, which is generally a short, obscure word that occurs often in puzzles because of its handy letter combinations, like ERN(E), ODA(H), and PROA. And one reason that these words have truly earned their crosswordese badges is because there’s no way to know what they mean simply by looking at them. However, they do exist in the real world, outside of puzzles. If you were online doing research on a sea eagle or a harem room or a Malayan canoe, you would probably come across these words. Odd as they are, they are the actual terms for these unusual things. A flansir, though, not only is something that only occurs in crosswords, it virtually never occurs outside of crosswords — it’s an entirely crosswordcentric thing.

Amen, brother! Read the entire article here. And while you’re at it, check out the rest of Merl’s blog.

Puzzlement

I write trivia, word games and other puzzles for game shows, books, websites and magazines. While you’re here, solve some puzzles, read my bio and feel free to get in touch.
— Shawn Kennedy

If you like puzzles and but don’t like paying for them, look no further than to Puzzlement, a new web site by Shawn Kennedy that offers free daily and weekly puzzles.

Shawn Kennedy has written trivia and word games for six game shows. Each year, he invents puzzles for the Google U.S. Puzzle Championship and is a judge at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. For three summers, he helped Will Shortz edit the New York Times crossword. As a longtime contributor to Games and World of Puzzles magazines, Kennedy writes all types of teasers from word games and logic puzzles to 10-page puzzle mysteries. He has written games for CBS, ABC, National Public Radio, boxed calendars, newspaper syndicates and various websites. His books include Funny Cryptograms, Sip & Solve Word Hunts, Sexy Cryptograms, USA Today Sit & Solve Word Searches, Scratch & Play Mystery Word Puzzles, Cluesome, and Japanese-style logic puzzles for The Giant Book of Sudoku Presented by Will Shortz.

Puzzles Worth Solving

What makes a puzzle worth solving? I don’t have a good answer that would apply to all people. But I do have an idea for what I feel makes me feel that a puzzle was worth the time I invested in solving it:

  • It was neither too hard nor too easy. If it was too easy, I wouldn’t have tried to solve it. If it was too hard, I would have given up. I know this property is entirely dependent upon the individual’s experiences and preferences, so there’s no one puzzle that will make everyone feel that way.
  • It used a puzzle technique I had not seen before. Obviously, the more puzzles you solve, the less new stuff there is to see. But puzzle constructors never cease to amaze me – they either create new puzzle ideas altogether or they synthesize a new idea out of many existing ideas.
  • If it was a series of smaller puzzles, the puzzles grew incrementally more difficult. This all goes back to the need to feel like I’m making progress. Similarly, mountain climbers don’t climb until they reach the top, they break the climb up into various stages and focus on one stage at a time. Without mini-goals, the challenge seems to daunting. (Crossword puzzles are extreme in this regard – solving each across or down clue is its own mini-goal.)
  • I felt like I had really accomplished something. All puzzles require work, and the “aha!” moment of when the puzzle solution becomes clear should come right when I’ve had to work for it for a while.
  • I felt the puzzle was fair. Puzzle constructors should not let would-be solvers wander down intentionally-constructed dead ends for too long, or they risk eroding the feeling of accomplishment (see previous item).

I’ve started a new category of links on the right side of this page – Puzzles Worth Solving. I’ve included them on the list either because I did solve them and I thought they met the criteria I described above, or because I haven’t solved them and I believe that they will.

My first entry there is a link to a bookmark list on Geocaching.com of puzzle caches I think are worthy of your attention. These are all solve-at-your-desk puzzles, which means that you can solve them no matter where you live even if you’re not a geocacher.

If you know of any links to other specific puzzles of any sort that you feel are worth solving, please send email to me or let us know in the Puzzlehead forums.

Announcing the Puzzlehead Forums

I’ve added a set of phpBB forums to this site. There’s now a link in the header of this page, or if you’re too lazy for that you can just click here.

If you want to post there, you’ll need to register. Users can self-activate their accounts as long as they supply valid email addresses.

The WordPress site (this blog) and phpBB site (those forums) user lists are independent and are not synchronized. If you registered on the blog, you’ll have to register again with the forums. (I have not yet found a plugin that bridges their user lists in a way that makes me feel comfortable that I won’t have to spend a lot of time debugging it and fixing it.)

If you have any problems with the forums, let me know. Click on my profile and send me a message using whatever feedback mechanism helps you relax.

Have fun!

-eP

Ba-da-Bing!

Can you find it with Bing?

Use Bing Maps to navigate New York City and answer four questions. If you’re spot-on, you’ll be entered to win a $100 gift card!

Microsoft has completed its beta test period of Bing Maps, and to generate some buzz it’s set forth the Bing Maps Challenge.

The challenge requires you to download and install the player for Microsoft Silverlight, which is a web application gizmo kinda sorta like Adobe Flash. The download is free.

Good luck!