Dude, today is 9/02/10! I’ll see you down at the Peach Pit tonight for the big birthday bash.

Also, by a strange coincidence, that actress who played Andrea turns eighty today! Happy birthday Andrea!

A fun new game to learn and play! Everyone think of something you know exists, but have never seen!

This is not a cuddly object lesson from Bible camp. (“I’ve never seen the wind, but I know it exists…just like heaven!”) I mean actual physical objects that you just happen to have never seen, despite the universe and culture at large attesting to their existence.

Here’s mine: I have never seen a gorilla suit. I assume they exist, but they must appear ten time as often in movies and on TV as they do in real life, because my life up to this point has been 100% gorilla suit-free.

Which is a relief, actually. If pop culture has taught me anything, it’s this: when one guy shows up in a gorilla suit, first people are scared, then they find out it’s really Bob having a laugh, and then OMG A REAL GORILLA SHOWS UP AND EVERYONE TRIES TO KICK IT IN THE CROTCH OR SOMETHING BECAUSE THEY THINK IT’S BOB!!! Gorilla suits lead to gorillas, as surely as a picnic leads to ants.

What is your own personal “purple cow,” never glimpsed in real life? A sombrero? A wooden leg? A jukebox? Ken-Jennings.com wants to know!

Bonus! Wordplay Wednesday! I’m thinking of a word for a type of bird. Reverse each of its syllables in turn (turn “night-in-gale” into “thgin-ni-elag,” for example) and you’ll get…another word for a type of bird! A broader, more general word, but still a naturalist’s term. What are the words?

At the age of seven (right on schedule!) Dylan has discovered Charles Schulz, and has polished off my entire collection of The Complete Peanuts hardcovers, from 1950 to 1976. By my math, he has read nearly 9,500 daily and Sunday strips. Most published before I was born, let alone before he was born.

As a result, every other sentence out of his mouth these days begins with the four words, “Here’s the world famous.” He narrates his own life in Snoopy-style thought balloons. Some are taken directly from the strip: “Here’s the famous World War I flying ace climbing into his Sopwith Camel.” (This one is usually accompanied by “It’s a long way to Tipperary!” sung at the top of his lungs.)

Some are made up. “Here’s the world-famous taekwondo champion driving his solid silver Rolls-Royce!” he announced yesterday, after hopping behind the wheel of my car in the garage.

“Uh, Dylan, your taekwondo teacher is a former world champion, and he’s teaching seven-year-olds out of a strip mall. I don’t think he drives a solid silver Rolls-Royce.”

Having hobbies is actually a fairly recent phenomenon in human history. For most of our species’ lifespan, we were a little too preoccupied by activities like “running from wolves” and “trying not to die in our twenties from smallpox” to play air hockey or collect Fiestaware.

Here’s a list of words meaning “someone who really likes something sort of dumb,” along with the years of their first surviving appearance. Check out the surprisingly early debut of “fan” as a shortened form of “fanatic.”

• enthusiast (1520)
• devotee (1645)
• fan (1682)
• aficionado (1802)
• buff (1820)
• geek (1912)
• wonk (1954)

Also, before I forget: I’ll be playing Alex Trebek for a little geek trivia contest next Friday night. (That’s September 3, a week from this Friday.) The gamer expo PAX is in town, and a local social media marketing company called Banyan Branch will be hosting an after-party at Neumos featuring all manner of music and awesomeness. Looks to me like interested parties can RSVP here.

And Wordplay Wednesday. I’m thinking of a common English word that, if you spell it backwards, becomes its own plural…in French! (Both French and English versions should be familiar to monolingual but mildly educated English speakers.) What’s the word?

Having grown up in a The Man from U.N.C.L.E.-loving household–in fact, we got my Dad the complete DVD set for Christmas last year–I can actually provide a useful public service this morning.

The clip of Man from U.N.C.L.E. that caused such a stir last night on Mad Men was this one: “The Hong Kong Shilling Affair” that originally aired on March 15, 1965. (Note that this helps date last night’s episode for hardcore Mad Men fans. Roger Sterling’s backstabbing at the Honda meeting could have been preceded by a “Beware the Ides of March!” prophecy.)

I’ve always been a big fan of David McCallum as Ilya Kuryakin (though evidently not as, uh, ardent a fan as ten-year-old Sally Draper revealed herself to be last night) but noticed right away that his partner-in-crime in the clip shown wasn’t Napoleon Solo, the show’s title character. Maybe Robert Vaughn didn’t give permission for his likeness to be used. Instead, I realized it was–well, I didn’t know his name, but “that guy who invented warp drive in the Star Trek episode and then falls in love with the shimmering energy cloud.”

A quick Google search told me that this was actor Glenn Corbett, and after that it was easy to find the Man from U.N.C.L.E. episode. You’re welcome! I predict that next season, Sally will become a Trekkie.

The most despicable thing about taking the kids to Despicable Me last weekend was the price. I don’t know what’s going on around the rest of the country, but Seattle-area Regal theaters just bumped the ticket price to 3D movies up a buck or two, for no real reason that I can see. It’s now $15 (!!!) to see a cartoon here, if you want the privilege of seeing it in a dimmer, less clear (but gimmicky!) format.

We’ve always been sticklers about making the kids return their 3D glasses to the recycle barrel after the flick…just one more piece of plastic crap I don’t want in the back seat of the car. But this time, when Caitlin begged to keep her glasses, I was so steamed about the $15 that I said okay. At those prices, you might as well get a free toy as well. I kept mine too.

What would Thoreau do? After a careful re-reading of Civil Disobedience, I am convinced that he would, were he a fan of the unaccountable 3-D revival, buy tickets to the cheaper 2-D movies from this point on, and then sneak into the 3-D ones with the glasses he and his daughter cleverly saved from Despicable Me. That’s what Thoreau would do. Then he would go back to his cabin and high-five a raccoon or something about how he stuck it to The Man. The Regal Theaters Man.

Not that I’m necessarily condoning such behavior. Oh, no. I’m just telling you what the Transcendentalists would think. This is a purely historical exercise.

The new issue of mental_floss magazine should be out shortly, and page 70 contains the twenty-third (I just counted!) installment of my 6° of Ken Jennings column. Here’s a sneak preview in original-draft form…but the rest of this issue is fantastic, particularly for Beatles fans. Check it out.

Chai Tea to Tai Chi

Don’t call it “chai tea” if you’re ordering the trendy aromatic brew in its native India—“chai” is just the Hindi word for “tea,” so you’d be asking for “tea tea.” Tea vendors called “chai-wallahs” are ubiquitous on the streets of South Asia, and in the days before paper cups, they’d sell their drinks in little clay pots called kullarh, which drinkers could just shatter on the ground when their tea was gone. The title character in the movie Slumdog Millionaire was a lowly chai-wallah before his big game show break.

In the ten-year history of the American Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, only one contestant has ever missed the million-dollar question. In 2009, Harvard law grad Ken Basin wasn’t sure of his “final answer,” but but he wasn’t about to let that stop him! He decided to risk $475,000 on a hunch that Lyndon Johnson’s favorite soft drink was Yoo-Hoo. “Give me a million dollars!” he confidently told host Regis Philbin. Sadly, Regis couldn’t oblige, because LBJ actually preferred Fresca.

The strategy board game Risk was originally called “The Conquest of the World” when it was invented by France’s Albert Lamorisse in 1957. But Lamorisse was a lover of more peaceful pursuits as well: the year before Risk was released, he won both an Oscar and a Palme d’Or at Cannes for his classic children’s short film The Red Balloon, which starred his own five-year-old son Pascal as a balloon-loving Parisian boy.

In 1959, Air Force captain Joseph Kittinger volunteered for Project: Excelsior, a series of parachute test jumps from a helium balloon at the edge of Earth’s atmosphere. In the third and final test, he jumped from a height of almost twenty miles, enjoying four and a half minutes of free-fall before pulling his chute. And that isn’t even the scary part yet! During the jump, the right glove on his pressurized suit failed, and for three hours his hand swelled up to twice its normal size—giving us our first ever look at what might happen to an unprotected human in the vacuum of space.

At the Mexico City Olympics, U.S. sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos decided to follow their medal-winning performances in the 200m by supporting the civil rights movement with a black power salute on the medal stand. But their protest was almost derailed when Carlos realized he’d forgotten the black gloves he’d planned to wear. Australian Peter Norman, the silver medalist, suggested a solution: each man could wear one of Smith’s gloves. Smith took the right glove, Carlos the left—which is why, in the famous photo of the controversial protest, Carlos is giving a black power salute with the wrong fist.

The Mandarin words for “supreme ultimate fist” are t’ai chi ch’uan, the name of the Chinese martial art that the West calls tai chi. Last year, Purdue University professor Henry Zhang invented the “tai chi scooter,” a sort of hand-free Segway that you steer by striking tai chi poses on the platform. If your yin and yang are out of whack, you’ll fall flat on your face, so you might want to try a soothing glass of chai tea before you climb on.

Back from vacation. Wow, that may have been longest gap in the history of this blog. But I cleverly built up to it by posting fluffy, minimalist content–the closest thing possible to no post at all!–for weeks in advance. That way, I figured, you’d hardly notice when the content began to asymptotically approach zero.

Here’s something I thought you could help me with. A few weeks ago, I remember hearing an interesting factoid–something about how the only two animals on Earth with no ecological niche, the ones that could go extinct tomorrow without leaving a ripple, were dogs and wasps. Dogs and wasps.

I can’t remember where I read/heard this, but I’m pretty sure it was someplace non-trustworthy: an overheard conversation, or a sitcom, or a comic book. (I think the sentiment was meant to be anti-dog and possibly pro-cat; I apologize to any wasp fans who were offended incidentally.)

A little online research makes it look like wasps actually do help keep down certain pest insects and clean animal carcasses in a timely manner, and maybe provide a pollination vector for some plant species as well. Dogs…not sure, but I assume that, say, the African wild dog has more of a place in the Circle of Life than a domesticated French poodle on the Upper West Side.

Anyone know more? What are the species we can safely gun down without collapsing Nature? If we bomb the giant panda back to the Bamboo Age, for example, the world would lose a lot of net cuteness, but do they fill any vital environmental niche or not?

Edited to add: Credit for the waspish wit in the title goes to reader naurae29, who suggested it.

I’m at scenic Crater Lake, Oregon today, and also trying to finish up some promotional materials for my book–which now has a provisional release date, by the way! September! Uh, 2011. Publishing lead times are crazy.

This pre-supposes I will actually finish the book by that time, of course! You don’t want to get to chapter 11 only to see a page that reads, “This chapter only available on scribners.com! Your password is D7CVB85!” In the future, I will be able to press a button on my laptop and the next chapter will be immediately published to your iPad…which will be awesome, but I try not to mention it much to my editor, since for some reason publishing houses are not in love with this Utopian vision of the future.

Oh, I just realized I haven’t written this week’s Tuesday Trivia quiz either. (See sidebar to subscribe!) Look forward to seven questions about America’s deepest lake, volcanic calderas, etc.

Two quick questions–possibly both about things you’ve never heard of but can guess.

1. What airport name is also an oft-used Internet abbreviation indicating sarcasm and disbelief?
2. I was watching a movie the other night, and realized that if you put the title’s two syllables in the opposite order, you get a plausible-sounding word. When I looked up the word, I found out it was a British slang term (particularly common in Wales) meaning “talkative.” What’s interesting is that, in the slang word, only one letter makes the same sound it does in the movie title! Can you figure out what well-known movie I was watching?

Edited to add: Answered within the hour here.

I opened a pack of gum yesterday, only to see this surprising slogan:

So yeah, the joke is that banana and strawberry are different colors and they’ll still have a beautiful relationship (IN YOUR MOUTH!) even though their small-minded parents thought they should stick to their own kind. Is this part of a broader ad campaign, in which Extra turns the “national conversation on race” into a national conversation on delicious fruit flavors? I don’t follow chewing gum ads very closely, so I saw the slogan clear out of the blue.

It’s been forty years since interracial marriage was really a taboo theme, but obviously the advertisers think that, even in the post-Obama era, there’s still a little bit of edge to a joke about THE MISCEGENATION OF THE FLAVORS!!! or they wouldn’t have made the joke in the first place. My first thought, I have to admit, was this: it took decades for interracial marriage to become “safe” joke material for an ad campaign. When we start seeing gay marriage as an advertising punchline, that’s how we’ll know that fight is over too.

I guess it might be a future ad for Extra’s “Double Banana” gum or something. “Banana’s parents were heartbroken when they found out he only wanted to unpeel with other bananas…”

I just noticed that Amazon is now listing me as a co-author on something called The Colossal Book of Wordplay, coming soon from Sterling’s Puzzlewright Press.

That overstates my contributions a bit. This book was the final manuscript completed by the late great Martin Gardner, the prolific thinker and mathematician who created Scientific American’s “Mathematical Games” column back in 1956. Gardner was a personal hero of mine as a kid…pretty much everything I know about math and logic and rigorous thinking and puzzle-solving and insight comes filtered through the lens of his books. (In hindsight, I probably should have written him a check for half my game show winnings.) This manuscript was a collection of the 95-year-old (!) Gardner’s favorite discoveries from a lifetime of playing with words, both new and collected from his past writings. Sterling needed someone to edit it, and I couldn’t say no to a chance to work (virtually, anyway) with one of my idols.

I read this spring–on my birthday, actually–that Gardner had passed away, and I counted myself lucky that, although I never got to meet him, at least I got the chance to help out with his last book. I understand The Colossal Book of Wordplay will be in bookstores this fall.

What bands are represented by each of these picture trios?

Edited to add: Solutions quickly piled up here. Also: more rebuses! (Rebi?)

I was recently reading an interview where Eddie Murphy was asked why he made the Shrek movies. He said he was still kicking himself from having turned down the lead in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which Michael Eisner had apparently offered him back in the ’80s. He didn’t want to miss the animation boat twice.

This is a staple of trivia lore: the dumb star turning down the eventual megahit. Mel Gibson turning down Gladiator. Sean Connery turning down Morpheus and Gandalf. George Raft turning down (insert iconic Bogart role here).

Nowadays, these are almost always recounted by the star himself, with a dry chuckle. What’s interesting is that I never hear them tell the other kind of story: “I really wanted Shakespeare in Love but they offered it to Paltrow first!” or whatever.

The lesson is this: movie stars, on some fundamental level, would vastly prefer looking stupid to looking unwanted. Maybe this is a sad truth about people in general, but it’s certainly true about the kind of weird, shallow personality that, well, either goes into movie acting or that movie acting turns one into, take your pick.

In most geek culture, the equation goes the other way. Rejection is par for the course, but ignorance–that’s a cardinal sin.

This blog has a fine tradition of notifying readers of the occasional 50% sale on Criterion Collection DVD and Blu-Ray at Barnes & Noble. The sale is on now and continues for another week and a half! If you don’t own the newly-released Blu-Rays of The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus yet, what kind of human being are you?!?

Yesterday I was over in Bellevue having lunch with none other than Ilya Ber, Russia trivia king and head writer on the Russian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. (He’s on a whirlwind trip of the U.S.) After dropping him off at the mall so he could meet up with his wife and cousin (uh, these were two different people), I swung by Barnes & Noble to check out their Criterion selection. (The Bellevue B&N is one of the few I hadn’t hit yet during this incarnation of the sale.)

I brought my DVD and coupon up to the desk. The clerk was a mental_floss fan and recognized me. Pressing my luck, I asked if I could use a second coupon as a “special Jeopardy! discount.” She broke B&N policy and let me get away with it! Luckily she did not ask the reasonable follow-up question: “Listen, cheapskate, how many games would you have to had to win before you decided you could afford full-price DVDs?”

I am now the proud owner of Army of Shadows and Bigger than Life for $13 each plus tax. Thanks, mental_floss!

If you’re an alert subscriber to Tuesday Trivia, the official weekly email quiz of Ken-Jennings.com (also of the 1976 Toronto Paralympics, interestingly) then you already know I goofed in this week’s mailing. I said that the mathematician who figured out water displacement and yelled “Eureka!” in his bathtub was Aristophanes. Well, no. It was Archimedes, of course. Apparently I’m a total racist and think that all dead Greek men in togas with Ar*es names look alike.

If you’re not a subscriber, why not? Don’t you like things that are fun?!? Sidebar’s just to your left, get cracking.

Here’s a Wordplay Wednesday that, I hope, shouldn’t take you long. Can you fill in the blanks in each of these sentences with an English word that makes phonetic sense there? All the answer words can be found on the same page of my little pocket dictionary, interestingly.

1. Our boat’s heaviest weight ________ in the same spot when the wind and waves pick up.
2. We ________ tonight, honey; the Justice of the Peace is out of town.
3. ________ vote Labour once in a while without getting interrogated by his mates?
4. “Why ________ Alone” is my favorite George Strait song.
5. ________ among livestock be a sign that a storm is coming?
6. You ________ my feet, but if you start on my ribs, I’m saying the safe word.

Edited to add: Solutions (and some ingenious alternate answers) in this thread.

Mindy told me last night that she had a dentist’s appointment this afternoon. “What time?” I asked.

“2:30.”

I laughed like an idiot, and she looked at me like I was, well, an idiot. Apparently she’d never heard the old joke. Her appointment really was at 2:30.

I wonder if 2:30 is an unusually busy time for dentists for this very reason. From now on I will insist that all my dentist’s appointments be at 2:30, as a point of pride.

A few years ago on the blog I mentioned my obsessive love for the intricately painted puzzle books of British artist Mike Wilks, and lamented that all his books, particularly The Ultimate Alphabet, were long out of print.

A reader named Shân emailed me to say that a company called Toytek has licensed The Ultimate Alphabet for use in an iPad app that came out late last week. The YouTube demo makes it look like you can just enjoy the pictures the old-timey way, or get clues via a couple clever word games, including one that offers cryptic crossword-style clues for each word.

The site implies that the app is available for the iPhone as well, but I don’t see it available in the app store just now (which is probably for the best, given the limited screen size) so I haven’t been able to tinker with it. The pricing seems borderline-nuts: $2-3 or more per letter? Yikes. I’d be interested to hear how it plays, if any iPad owners wish to report.

So the song “Non, je ne regrette rien” is a major plot point in Christopher Nolan’s latest puzzle movie, Inception. It’s not giving anything away about the movie to note that the song ties in closely with Nolan’s central theme: the relationship between dreams and waking life.

In addition, French actress Marion Cotillard has a key supporting role in the movie. It’s not giving anything away to note that her character also fills a unique and crucial niche in the movie, pertaining to, again, the relationship between dreams and waking life.

The weird thing is that “Non, je ne regrette rien” was a signature song of the late, great Edith Piaf, and Marion Cotillard’s breakout role (for which she won an Oscar) was for playing Edith Piaf in the biopic La vie en rose. Not being much of a pre-existing Piaf fan, I still associate Cotillard heavily with that song.

Given all that, the coincidence sort of yanked me out of the movie for a minute. Imagine “What’d I Say” being used prominently in Jamie Foxx’s scenes in some movie…with, apparently, nobody realizing the connection audiences would make to the movie Ray. Or “Ring of Fire” in a Joaquin Phoenix movie. Anyway, weird choice.

Pretty solid movie, I guess. It has about ten times the completely arbitrary rules that other similar Nolan movies do (Memento, The Prestige) and yet doesn’t use any of them quite as cleverly. But c’mon, what else is there to see this time of year? Prince of Persia?

Even though I didn’t stay for the after-party karaoke, I had a lot of fun as a guest of the inaugural Too Beautiful to Live live show last weekend. The podcasts are now available here…the regular shows are usually free, but they’re apparently charging 99 cents for the live shows. I wouldn’t pay that just to hear my brief segment, but I can recommend the rest of the show so unreservedly that it might just be worth your hard-earned dollar. Host Luke Burbank has filled in for Peter Sagal on Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! in the past, if that holds any water for you in your NPR tote bag.

Here are two ad- and consumer-themed questions for your Wordplay Wednesday:

1. Put together the name of two liquid products you’d find in any supermarket: one from Coca-Cola and the other from Procter & Gamble. Together, they’ll phonetically make the name of a classic 1941 film noir. What’s the movie?
2. Take the name of a company perhaps best-known for its iconic spokesperson. Remove the letter “PRI” from the company name, and you’ll have the iconic first name of a musical star. Interestingly, both the spokesperson and the musician grew up in and around the same major world city. Which city?

Edited to add: Both were quickly answered by my imaginary_friend here.

Today I’m working on the chapter in my book about geocachers. A nicer group of obsessives you couldn’t hope to meet.

There are well over 1.1 million active geocaches in the world today. Wow! That’s a lot, right? Considering it’s 1.1 million of something that most people have never even seen or heard of.

Here’s your homework. What are some common things that there are fewer of in the world than geocaches? For example, you’d think McDonald’s are everywhere, but their website says they only have 31,000 restaurants. Or zebras! Must be more zebras than geocaches, right? Wrong: there are only 663,000 zebras.

Would you like to be mentioned in my book? Suggest some other theoretically “common” items that are in actuality less numerous than geocaches. Unicycles? Gingko trees? Fire stations? The only rule is: you must provide a cite or link to an actual world population. Or you must count them all and then go “Ah ah ah ah!” while lightning flashes.

The phrase “meteoric rise,” to describe the career or a Hollywood actor or Elizabethan courtier or something. News flash: meteors don’t rise. In fact, if there is any object that is famous only for descending and never rising, it would be a meteor. From now on: “meteoric descent,” “zeppelin-like rise.” Okay?

Ah, good to get that out of my system. I forgot to mention that I’m a guest tomorrow night (Saturday, July 10) at a special live “Summer Slam” presentation of Too Beautiful to Live, Luke Burbank’s beloved Seattle onetime-radio-show-and-now-insanely-popular-podcast. Columbia City Theater, 8 p.m. Act now: Friday night’s show, with Sir Mix-a-Lot and The Long Winters, is already sold out! Apparently I am a much smaller draw than Sir Mix-a-Lot. (Though, like Mix, I am also on the record as being tired of magazines sayin’ flat butts are the thiiiiing.)

I assume the Summer Slam shows will also be available in convenient podcast form next week, for those in other, less fortunate cities.

Once again, this is just your quick daily reminder that my crushing map book deadline is the reason for the delicious, calorie-free, no-content version of this blog lately. Give me six weeks and everything should be sorted out.

For example, here’s all I got today: “jaw harp.” They call Jew’s harps “jaw harps” in toy stores now, I noticed yesterday. Did everyone know this but me? I am fine with the rebranding, since no musical instrument in history has actually been played less by Jews than the Jew’s harp. True fact. You might as well call a shofar a “Methodist’s horn.”

But here’s my question: was the new, less anti-Semitic name chosen because “jaw” sounds like “Jew”? Or is this an independent derivation, since you hold the instrument against your jaw to play it? I like the idea that some toy executive was just looking for some winky-winky word that almost sounds like “Jew”…but not quite. Sort of like when gangsters or action stars on TBS say, “Set my clock, you feather-mucking Anbesol!”

Very excited this morning about the “sync” option in Google Chrome…I’ve been a happy Chrome user for about a year, but I’ve never played with sync. You just log in with any Google account (I used my Gmail info) and it takes a snapshot of your browser: history, bookmarks, everything. Use Chrome on a different computer (say, for example, the new laptop I just bought and am trying to get up to speed) and all you have to do is hit the magic Sync button again, and presto, it grabs everything from your other Chrome. I’m too lazy to be a big tech-lifehack kind of guy, but that little feature saved me a lot of headaches yesterday.

This is going to sound like an odd complaint, but I’ve been an Entertainment Weekly subscriber for years, and I’m confused by a new editorial tic: any mention of a movie, no matter how in passing, seemingly has to contain the movie’s MPAA rating. Even one of the two-sentence blurbs in the weekly “Must List” will do this:

PLEASE GIVE. This endearing R-rated film is about neurotic Manhattanites vying for a dying old lady’s apartment. Sound bleak? It gets a dose of sincerity from superb performances by Amanda Peet, Catherine Keener, Rebecca Hall, and Oliver Platt.

Oh, it’s endearing and R-rated! It seems like the MPAA rating is about the fiftieth most useful thing about a movie that a two-sentence blurb could tell you. I assume this is some new public-spirited initiative, so the mag can’t be accused of recommending R-rated movies to teenagers. But teenagers (a) will go to R-rated movies anyway (though not Catherine Keener ones) and nobody has ever cared ever and (b) don’t read magazines. Is there some new nanny-state law that EW is trying to comply with all of the sudden? Somebody explain this to me.

Oh, Wordplay Wednesday! Can you make a sensible sentence by filling in the blanks with the same word?

Don’t take your best friend to the of______h area if he has ______!

Edited to add: Answered by skullturfq here.

My deflowering at the gentle hands of the National Puzzlers’ League was a blast! They kindly listened to my (admittedly disorganized) reminiscences about the world of international quizzing, and let me play in their big yearly Extravaganza: twenty-one fiendish puzzles solved by teams in an evening-long marathon. I stumbled home after midnight with many still unsolved, though one answer actually occurred to me in the car driving home. (Peter Pan + Vietnam marines + James Bond = tinker(bell) soldier spy! Well, maybe you had to be there.)

Anyway, thanks to the NPL for letting me hang out. And I hope no one was offended by referring to their convention as “nerd hell” in the anagrammed title of Friday’s post. It was totally nerd heaven!

NPL member Martin Eiger reminded me that I’d used a trivia question of his on this blog over three years ago, but (as far either of us can remember) I never ran the other question he submitted, which was also very good.

Can you explain why this presidential analogy is correct?

Garfield : Cleveland :: Wilson : Washington

Oh, and a reader named Jill, apropos of last week’s Tuesday Trivia, sent in this account of one man’s lonely crusade to discover the etymology of the term “bulldog edition.”

Edited to add: A Wray solved the presidential analogy first.

This weekend, the National Puzzlers’ League is holding their annual convention in downtown Seattle. This secret society of word gamers has been around for over 125 years, amazingly enough. Their monthly puzzle magazine is a curious throwback–no crosswords, no sudoku, nothing you might find in an in-flight magazine. Instead, the NPLers prefer a variety of elaborate verse riddles that no one else remembers seeing since C. Montgomery Burns was in short pants.

From what I hear, the convention is a lot of fun…Seattle-area puzzle-types are encouraged to drop in. (The schedule is here; visitors are apparently welcome.) I’m going to stop by and check out the action on Saturday night; I’m also scheduled to speak briefly on the world of international quizzing.

For this puzzle, you’re going to be placing one person’s name inside another, the way you might put HANK inside TED to get THANKED. The names belong to two of the biggest movie stars of the late 20th century.

Take the last name of one star (leading man in the Oscar-winning Best Picture of 2002) and put it inside the first name of another star (leading man in the Best Picture of 1985). You’ll get the full name of one of the most influential people in American film during that time frame, even though he’s never even been nominated for an Oscar and never will be. Who is it?

Edited to add: This one is basically Google-able, but for the very lazy, a solution can be found here. Well done, AnotherKen!

Mindy knows, when she comes home and all the laundry that was sitting in front of the laundry room door has been cycled through the wash, that my book must not be going well. Because when writing is not going well, any interruption–even getting up and changing the laundry every 48 minutes–is more attractive than writing.

I just pulled a pair of Dylan’s underwear out of the wash and was alarmed to see that it had a picture of Jesus on the rear. Wow, that’s a little much, I thought. Upon closer examination, it was Obi-Wan Kenobi from Clone Wars.

I need a new font on my browser: I misread all of last night’s headlines about how “Senator Byrd Is Ill” and thought that he was 111. Seriously 111! That would be big news.

I’m way behind on a ton of stuff today…I spent this morning helping a friend move. Which, obviously, is the worst, but I have to admit, these movees had it together. Pretty much my worst pet peeve in life is showing up at someone’s house to help them move only to find that nothing is boxed, closets are still full of clothes, etc. What am I, the heavy from the bank? Presumably you people knew you were moving today, right? Get it in gear!

But these efficient people had everything boxed, to my experienced eye, perfectly. Books and other very-heavies in Trader Joe’s wine boxes, medium-weight stuff like kitchen items in apple boxes, light stuff in bigger banana boxes. Canned food all neatly arranged in low-sided cardboard crates. Pictures off walls, bed taken apart, etc. It was all like a dream, a wonderful, wonderful dream. Normally I like to be the Tetris guy arranging stuff inside the van, but we had somebody else there who clearly outclassed me at box-stacking skills, so I let him do his stuff. Two hours later, we were all done.

Not like you were asking or anything. Back to work on a section of my book about map thievery. Boo! Map thieves! Hopefully, when it comes to sentencing, the judge won’t give them much latitude. (Note to self: don’t use that in the book, because it sucks.)