Remember my dingbats challenges? (challenge 1, answers; challenge 2, answers) Well; Andy took my engine and made one of his own, which I forgot to link to earlier. Anyway, go take it if you like, but the answers are probably out by now.
It’s a little bit more random and weird and off-the-wall than mine, mind.
Great turnout for Dan’s Dingbats Challenge II. Thanks for playing, all of you who did! Here’s the scoreboard:
| Position | Player | Time Taken | Right Answers | Total Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |
The Amazing Wonko
Best score, great time to boot… beat Jimmy by just three seconds. |
3mins, 42secs | 13.5 | 4mins, 2secs |
| 2 |
Jimmy
Fastest overall time and a very good score. So very close to winning… |
3 mins, 25secs | 13 | 4mins, 5secs |
| 3 | Dimmer | 3 mins, 51secs | 13 | 4mins, 31secs |
| 4 | Claire | 4mins, 36secs | 12.5 | 5mins, 36secs |
| 5 | Paul | 4mins, 41secs | 12 | 6mins, 1sec |
| 6 | Gareth @ SD | 5mins, 32secs | 13 | 6mins, 12secs |
| 7 | JTA | 5mins, 57secs | 13 | 6mins, 37secs |
| 8 |
Ruth
Unfortunatley for her, her second attempt [total time 3mins, 1sec] doesn’t count) |
3mins, 46secs | 9.5 | 6mins, 46secs |
| 9 | Andy K | 5mins, 6secs | 10 (two half-marks) | 7mins, 46secs |
| 10 |
“scatman”
(not me!) |
4mins, 10secs | 8 | 8mins, 10secs |
| 11 | Jen W | 5mins, 52secs | 8.5 | 9mins, 32secs |
| 12 | Matt @ SD | 6mins, 24secs | 8.5 | 10mins, 4secs |
| 13 | Hagen @ SD | 10mins, 28secs | 11 | 12mins, 28secs |
| 14 | Hayley | 10mins, 51secs | 9 | 14mins, 11secs |
| 14 | John K | 9mins, 50secs | 7 | 14mins, 30secs |
Here are the answers. Click on any of the dingbat thumbnails to see the full-size versions:
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Just like the previous challenge, this one began with a particularly difficult puzzle. The words “bird” and “two” appear inside the words “hand” and “bush”, respectively, and the equals
sign states that they have equal worth. Devillishly difficult, but an impressive number of people got it. Half-marks for “a bird in the hand beats two in the
bush”, because it was so very nearly there.
Three cheers.
Finally, a dingbat that everybody can get.
Rock around the clock.
It’s a clock, with the word “rock” repeated around it. Well?
Drinkin’ to forget.
The word “drink” appears in the phrase “24get” (“to forget”), so “drink in 24get”. Anything vaugely close got the marks, but “some kind of low fat drink” didn’t, and neither
did “24 hour drinking”. Difficult.
Head over heels in love.
The word “head” over two (different, just to be confusing) kinds of “heels”, inside a heart (love). Most people got this one, but “feel it head to heel” and “grr argh”
remain the two most spectacularly wrong answers.
History repeats.
I thought this one was really easy, but apparently it isn’t. “History follows history”, “history is history”, “two versions of history” and “past”
are all wrong answers.
Mixed vegetables / tossed vegetables.
Everybody saw the word “vegetables” in here, it seems, and even “chopped vegetables” is worth a half-mark. I thought it would be tougher to put the word back together than it
obviously was.
Once in a blue moon.
Easy, again: the word “once” on a blue-tinted moon. I’ve had complaints from two colourblind participants, but they both got it right anyway.
Green with envy.
More complaints from colourblind participants, one of whom had to hold up something that they knew to be green and squint at them both together to be sure they were actually looking at
something that was green.
Capital punishment.
The word punishment written, quite clearly, in capital letters. “Punishment takes a lifetime” is very, very wrong.
Backseat driver.
My favourite from this set. It’s the words “seat driver” written backwards. Many participants hunted for inner words, anagrams, and all sorts, not bothering to try to read it from right
to left. My favourite wrong answer was “Argh! It looks like revision! Help!”
Tickled pink.
Unpopular again with the colourblind participants. Nonetheless, everybody got it right.
Big Trouble In Little China
The correct answer, which only a few people got, was “Big Trouble In Little China”: it’s the name of a film. “Big Trouble In China” and “Trouble In Little
China” miss the bigger (or littler) picture, and only get half-marks, while “Trouble In China” gets none. Get over it.
No harm in trying.
My second-favourite in this set; one which many people got wrong. The word “harm” is being crossed out from the middle of the phrase “tryharming”, which of course leaves the word
“trying”, with no “harm” in it: therefore, “no harm in trying”. Wrong answers included “self harming”, “out of harms’ way”, and “trying to disarm”.
So, thanks again to everybody who participated, and big congratulations to The Amazing Wonko! Congratulations also due to Jimmy (great fast time – if only you could have shaved three seconds off it or got one more half-mark you’d have one) and Dimmer. Also well done to all those who participated in this and the last one, and got better as a result of the practice.
I’ll leave things there for awhile, but I think that Andy may be working on his very own “Dingbats Challenge” (or something like it) in the near future. Watch this space.
Looking for a diversion from the fun of tonight’s vote-counting? Here’s Wikipedia‘s "List Of Frivolous Political Parties.
Hot on the heels (that’d make a good dingbat!) of Dan’s Dingbats Challenge I (results and answers here) comes Dan’s Dingbats Challenge II! The dingbats are, on average, a little easier (and a little more logical), but the penalty for skipping one or getting it wrong has been increased to 40 seconds added to your time. I’m the only person who’s seen them this time around, so Claire is allowed to compete this time.
Will Suz, Andy and Paul struggle to steal first place from one another again? Will Statto or Ruth jump in and take the lead? Will Hayley and Gareth pull their respective fingers out? There’s all to play for…
I’m glad to see so many people took part in Dan’s Dingbats Challenge I; hope you all had fun. As promised, here are the results (and the answers). Don’t forget, the total time is the time taken plus a 30 second penalty for every wrong answer or skipped question. I did award a number of “half marks” for things, as explained further down, each costing only 15 seconds. Here we go:
| Position | Player | Time Taken | Right Answers | Total Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |
suz
Slipped in at really, really the last minute. |
3mins, 2secs | 7 | 6mins, 32secs |
| 2 |
andyr
Slipped in at the last minute. |
4mins, 26 secs | 9 | 6mins, 56secs |
| 3 |
The Pacifist
Surprisingly, considering his negativity to it, almost won, ’til andyr slipped in while I was collating the scores. |
3mins, 50secs | 7.5 | 7mins, 5 secs |
| 4 | Statto & Chloe | 4mins, 52 secs | 9 | 7mins, 22secs |
| 5 | Ruth | 3mins, 45secs | 6 | 7mins, 45 secs |
| 6 | Dim | 5mins, 46secs | 7 | 9mins, 16secs |
| 7 | Jimmy | 5mins, 37secs | 6.5 | 9mins, 22secs |
| 8 | John K | 4mins, 55secs | 3 | 10mins, 45secs |
| 9 | Hagen | 7mins, 10secs | 6 | 11mins, 30secs |
| 10 | Sundeep | 7mins, 53secs | 5 | 12mins, 43secs |
| 11 | Matt In The Hat | 9mins, 10secs | 6 (two half-rights) | 13mins, 30secs |
| 12 | Hayley | 8mins, 39secs | 4 (two half-rights) | 13mins, 59secs |
| 13 |
Knobcheese
(Gareth@SD |
11mins, 58secs | 4.5 | 16mins, 8secs |
| 14 |
Claire
Disqualified because she saw some answers early |
3mins, 28secs | 14 | 3mins, 28secs |
Here are the answers. Click on any of the dingbat thumbnails to see the full-size versions:
Pick yourself up, dust yourself down, and start all over again.
Only one person got this right, but, to be fair, it’s perhaps the toughest of the set. For those that need an explanation, the letters to the left read “pick your self” (upwards), the
middle letters read “dust your self” (downwards), and finally there’s a picture of the word “again” with the word “start” all over it.
Looking back over my shoulder.
“Looking over my shoulder” isn’t good enough: there’s got to be an effort to point out that the word “looking” is spelt backwards. Most folks who didn’t fall into this little
trap got this one right, though.
Beauty (is) in the eye of the beholder.
One of my favourites. “Beauty and the bees” scores no marks. Explanation: the word “beauty” is “in” the letter I (“eye”) of the word hive, which is, of course, a “bee holder”.
Sickeningly kick-yourself-afterwards.
Little Italy
Almost everybody got this one.
An inside job.
Hideously difficult: I didn’t get this one when first I saw it. The word “an” appears within the word “job”, but it’s hard to see because they’re both very short words. Other
dingbats in this style try phrases like “BOPUSSOTS” (puss in boots), which are longer, or use colour or case to differentiate between the words. Keep an eye out for ones like this, only
a couple of people got it. Things about banjos aren’t even slightly right, but I can see where you’re coming from.
Just around the corner.
I accepted “Just on the corner.” and “Just in the corner.”, too. Pretty simple, afterwards, but a pain in the arse when you have to guess it.
Letters of the alphabet.
Sorry! Sorry! Sorry! I promise never to do one this bad ever again. Surprisingly, a few people got it, and not just ones to whom this phrase is an in-joke with me (for several days on
end, I found the phrase “lettuce of the alphabet”, and the image it conjured, hilareously funny). “Alphabet lettuce” gets half a mark, ‘cos I was feeling nice, but “The
sweedish alphabet” (what?) and “Cabbage with white letters on it” aren’t worth any. Sorry again.
Lioness.
It’s the word “lie”. On the letter “S”. Lie-on-S. Could it be any simpler? Apparently so, as only about half the people who participated got it.
Low Fat Milk.
Didn’t come out as well as I’ve have hoped, so I happily gave half-marks for “skimmed milk”, “condensed milk”, and “reduced milk”.
Blackout.
The word “out”. In black. Might have been easier if most of the word you’d seen weren’t in black, but what the hell.
Potatoes.
Another of my favourites. It’s a pot, followed by eight “O’s”. Incorrect answers included “A binary gardener gathers no moss” (what?) and “Planting seeds”.
Scrambled Eggs.
I’d also accept “Broken eggs” (‘cos it’s a better answer), “Eggs – beaten”, or a million and one other similar things. Lenient.
Just a tick.
You might have thought that the clue, “…hang on a minute…” might have been a giveaway here, but apparently it wasn’t. Anything even remotely similar to the phrase “just a
tick” got through, and “one tick” got half-marks. “I should have said I was Sian” doesn’t get any, I’m afraid, Andy.
What goes up must come down.
In a similar vein to the first dingbat in the challenge, this one had the word “what” upwards and the word “must” downwards. “What must” definately didn’t get any points.
So, congratulations to Suz, who slipped in at the last, last second, while I was adding Andy‘s score to the board, who had slipped in at the last second, while I was collating the scores, prior to which, Paul was winning. I really hope nobody else is submitting results right now, ‘cos I’m sick of re-collating the table (checks). No, they haven’t: big thanks to whoever they aren’t. And sorry to Claire, who’ll take part next time. Now that I’ve seen the patterns in the results, I’ve realised that the penalty needs to be larger (to increase the time people spend on individual dingbats, and to reduce the problems caused by people who “pass” fast), but hey – there’s always next time.
Think you can think laterally: think again!
Remember Dingbats, that board game with the cards with the phrases on them, expressed through cleverly laid-out words and pictures (a bit like Catch Phrase, that old TV show [is that still running]). Well, anyway, it involves pictures a bit like this:
The picture shows the word “somewhere” mysteriously suspended over a sylised rainbow. So what’s the phrase: “Rainbow under somewhere?” Not quite… it’s obviously “somewhere over the rainbow.”
So I’ve set up a challenge: 14 puzzles to challenge your lateral thinking. You’re against the clock, and you sacrifice 30 seconds for every wrong answer or passed question, so you’ve got to judge the challenge to suit you. I’ll publish the answers – and the high scorers – here in a day or two.
Go try Dan’s Dingbats Challenge I
Enjoy.
This is absolutely fantastic. Take a look.
Courtesy of Private Eye, here’s a quick summary of the main points from the three big players’ manifestoes:
Labour
We’re not Conservative.
Conservative
We’re not Labour.
Liberal Democrats
We’re not Labour or Conservative.
Seen this eBay auction?
Would you know it: there’s an “opposite number” to the Dewey Decimal System (introduction to the system [PDF]) – which for the most part of a centurey has been used to categorise books according to their topic and content – for categorising folk tales: the Aarne-Thompson Classification System.
It’s horrendously difficult to find information on it online – most of the resources are in German (Germany, apparently, being big fans of both fairy tales and classifying things) – particularly information about the system itself (rather than about given tales classified by it), but here’s what I’ve managed to glean – it consists of about 2500 categories, subcategories, and themes, broadly broken down in a pretty random way. An entire story can be defined by it’s key themes as a series of numbers, for example:
Little Red Riding Hood is a “The Glutton”-class tale in which an animal disguises itself as a human with the intention of killing a child (I. K2011) . It carries a “what makes your ears so big” theme (Z18.1), and a non-fatal swallowing by a person by an animal (F911.3) which leads to their eventual rescue from the animal’s belly (F913). In some variations of the story, the wolf is then sewn up again – having been filled with stones – such that he eventually drowns (Q426).
Here’s another you might be familiar with:
Rapunzel (“the Maiden in the Tower”) is a tale of type 310 (“Magic Tales”), with four key themes: (a) a man promises his unborn daughter to a witch in order to save himself from death (S222), leading to a girl in the service of a witch (G204), (b) the girl is imprisoned in a tower (R41.2) [also, potentially – T381 (“Imprisoned virgin to prevent knowledge of men (marriage, impregnation)”)], and “lets down her hair” to allow the captor to climb (F848.1); a desirable suitor (prince or king) follows this technique and becomes her lover (L162), (c) the witch discovers what the girl has done, cuts off her hair, and abandons her in the desert (S144 – abandonment in desert); the prince comes, saves himself from the witch, but in doing so is blinded (S165), (d) finally, the couple are reunited, and the woman’s tears restore sight to the blinded man (F952.1).
I find this system a little bit scary and overwhelming. As Andy R said to me, “Perhaps Aarne and Thompson should have spent their time… I don’t know… finding a cure for cancer or something.” They’ve certainly spent a lot of time developing this very deep, very complex system for classifying fairy tales.
There’s a good-looking – but expensive – book, “A Guide to Folk Tales in the English Language: Based on the Aarne-Thompson Classification System” by D. L. Ashliman, which, according to Voyager, can be found in the academic library at UWA. I’ve asked Paul to pick up a copy (Paul: it’s published by Greenwood Press in 1987 and can be found on the Arts and Humanities floor (Level F) of the Hugh Owen library – classmark Z5983.F17.A8). Could be interesting.
Anyway; sorry if that bored you. Here’s more information:
Is this actor real? Seymore Butts (say it out loud) is listed on the IMDb, director of such films as Anal Surprise Party, Female Ejaculation Review, and Tongue In Cheeks, as well as over 60 other films. Also performed in 50 films… most of which don’t have an IMDb score…
…so it’s an anonymous pornstar with a thing for doing it up the arse, big deal. But here’s the interesting thing: he was most recently in a film called Slaughter Party, which also starred… Lloyd Kaufman.
The world is a funny place.
In related news, you can read the full story of Will Keenan‘s appearance on the Troma Night bulletin board, including a video we sent back to him and Lloyd, thanking them, on a special thread we set up. Have fun!
I have a hard time believing that this story is true: it’s just too crazy – but the photos are good and hard to forge without more resources than your average internet prankster. So, here’s the tale as it was told to me…
There’s a company in the States that sells automatic car washers as a complete solution, including the washing system, cash box, installation of the building, etc. These are completely automated: you drive up, put your money into the machine, then drive through.
In any case; after the installation of a particular one of these machines, the owner noticed that the return from the machine was not so much as should be expected. Diagnostics were run and the cash processor seemed to be okay, so everybody was at a loss. The owner even went so far as to accuse the supplier’s staff of having keys to his cashbox, and returning to the scene to steal the money.
Eventually, at his wits end, the owner set up security cameras to try to catch the thief in the act. Here are some stills from the footage:
The first image. Yes, that’s a starling that’s just landed on the coin return slot.
And there’s the starling, wriggling in to the coin return slot, where, presumably, it’s pushing it’s way up into the cash box through the return chute.
The starling with some coins!
The starling’s dropped a couple of coins, but is still wriggling to get free of the slot with it’s remaining prize.
Apparently, they later determined that it was not one, but several, birds who were robbing the car wash. Following them discovered a cache of loose change on the roof of the car wash and beneath an exposed root of a nearby tree.
So; what do you think – real or fake?
You won’t find these from Crayola…
The photograph, above, appeared on an eBay auction: the item for sale was the table and chairs – a full dining set (not including the things on the table, of course). However, there’s something about the photo that suggests that the seller is a man. Can you tell what it is?
Don’t read the comments until you think you’ve got it, in case somebody’s already posted the answer.
Thanks to Matt for the idea for this one – on the RockMonkey wiki, it’s now possible to play Scissors, Stone, Paper! For some reason, I keep losing, but it’s supposed to play fair! See for yourself.