Perplex City: Season 1, Cards #013 - #016
Continuing my Perplex City solutations. Spoilers!
- #013 - Sphinx: I first heard this riddle in elementary school, probably spurred on by an early lust for devious questioning or the inevitable Greek courses taught as part of History. Even without prior knowledge of its origins (or its first solver Oedipus, who answered "Mankind!, The human crawls on all four when it is a baby and at its weakest, when one is an adult one walks on two and when mankind suffers old age, it walks on three - with the help of a cane." -- depending on your source, of course; Perplex City only accepts "man"), a quick hop to Wikipedia's Sphinx gives it away. The card's painting is "Oedipus and the Sphinx" by Jean-Auguste-Dominque Ingres.
- #014 - Cracked Crackers: Some of these I didn't actually understand at first and had to poke around to determine their meaning (though some I still don't "get" - lemme know!) The correct matchups, helped along by process of elimination, are: "What do you get if you cross a river with a bike?" ("Wet feet"), "When do astronauts eat?" ("At launch time"), "What's ET short for?" ("Because he's only got little legs"), "How does Bob Marley like his doughnuts?" ("Wi' Jammin"), "What goes 'Splish Spolsh' and comes from cows?" ("The Isle of Wight Ferry"; I've read that Cowes is a port of the Isle of Wight), "What do you call a man who has lost his spade?" ("Douglas"), "What's purple and shouts 'Help'?" ("A damson in distress"; being a purple plum), "How do you spell 'hungry horse' with just four letters?" ("M.T.G.G."; GG or 'gigi' is slang for a horse?), "Which bird always succeeds?" ("A budgie with no teeth"; why no teeth?), and "What do you call a reindeer with no eyes?" ("No idea").
- #015 - Milo: I started with no clue on this one. The three phrases certainly looked and sounded like a crossword puzzle (a 5 letter word for pinnacle being "crest", with enough Google results for "needle crest" to make me believe it was right), but the picture of the cat or the title of the card (Milo of The Adventures of Milo and Otis?; though he was a tabby not Himalayan) left me puzzled. After a few hours of fruitless searching and "not thinking about it", I devolved for a hint: this was a cryptic crossword, something that isn't entirely common in the United States. No wonder -- I was treating the clues too literally! "Cool, teach" is an anagram (or "mixed") of "chocolate", which is a candy. It's not "crest", but "point", also the first letters of each word in that clue. Finally, the answer to "he's a-restin' in the mountains" is "him-a-layin'", or Himalayan. Together, the puzzle's solution is Chocolate Point Himalayan, the breed of cat on the card, whose name is Milo. Milo is owned by Jason Berkovi, who was an answer on card #008.
- #016 - XXX: This one took all of five seconds - to guarentee a win, Tippy would need to play her next X in either the bottom middle or bottom right squares.