All Terrain Thinking

A Compendium of things I think are Important

Generally Speaking, Think on this...

I Had One Grunch But the Eggplant,
    Over There Really Sucked Wind!

Fun with puzzles!

I have a weakness for puzzles. Many of you share that weakness, I think. It's closely related to the addiction to games and the passion for competition that also afflict many of us who mess around with software, but it's subtly different from either of those disorders.

Dr. Dobb's has fed our puzzle hunger from time to time. Michael Wiesenberg published puzzles in DDJ for years, and I have slipped a few in myself. I first started publishing puzzles, though, back in the Upper Thoracic Era on the back page of InfoWorld magazine. Those puzzles, published weekly, featured a detective named Mr. Usasi and incorporated computer news and trivia into a puzzle presented in the form of a 1000-word mystery story. Sometimes they got pretty complicated: I remember one that required me to create a full-page reverse-Polish-notation maze. I reflect sometimes on how I got this way. The influences are not hard to find (although they probably merely encouraged a tendency that would have found its expression anyway). I was reading Will Shortz in Games magazine before the NYT and NPR discovered him. I was obsessed with Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American.

But those are the kind of influences you brag about. I was also influenced, probably more profoundly, by some pretty low-culture puzzlers. Like Roger Price.

Price is known for inventing Mad Libs, Droodles, and other hard-to-classify creations that combined humor, puzzles, and an anarchic sensibility. Mad Libs is a kind of Chinese menu approach to story writing, or a system for producing humor through randomness, or something. Droodles are obscure doodles that take on meaning only when given a title. One of Price's Droodles, a trapezoid and a triangle sitting on a horizontal line and titled "Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch," was used as a cover for the Frank Zappa album of the same name.

In an attempt to recreate something of Price's anarchic style, I'm offering a puzzle. It's pretty simple: Each sentence below is a scrambled news item. Each consists of a subject noun phrase, a verb phrase, and a predicate noun phrase. To help you sort them out, the verb phrase is in italics. (Uh, don't worry about the grammatical categories I'm using. I may have got them wrong. The point is that each sentence has three parts and the middle part is in italics.)

The parts are all scrambled. No verb phrase is with the subject noun phrase it belongs with, and no predicate noun phrase is with the right subject noun phrase or verb phrase. Your job is to put the verb phrases and predicate noun phrases in the right sentences so they all make sense. So if you see "Charles Simonyi" and "is dating," you might look for "Martha Stewart." (He really is!) But it's not there, so you'll have to hook Charles up with other words. Good luck.

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