Kevin's Compendium of Useless Fantasia

I also took the word list and wrote a Perl program to eliminate any word that had any anagrams, since the only way to have only a single possible secret word with a word with anagrams is to already have guessed the anagrams, and those would get a score of 5, which is more than the maximum score of 2 for a Jotto puzzle. So, this speeds up the finding of puzzles, since time won't be wasted on words that couldn't possibly form puzzles.

Maybe I'll get around to publishing them in November.

I have yet to put these photos up on my Web page. I did find out about a script called thumbnail_index which will automagically create an index page of a directory of pictures, complete with thumbnails. I used it to finally get pictures up from my sister's wedding in April. I have a lot of pictures on the computer to sort through, but I think having this script might get me motivated to do some initial sorting and actually get them up on the Web.

#!/usr/bin/perl

# Try to solve NPR wesun puzzle given 20 October 2002
# find a word where the first letter immediately follows the ninth,
# the second letter immeditaely follows the eighth,
# the third letter immediately follows the seventh,
# and the fourth letter immediately follows the sixth.
# (immediately follows means alphabetically)

use strict;
use warnings;

use lib ("/home/kevin/perl/lib");
use WordGame qw(&load_word_list);

my @words = 
WordGame::load_word_list("/home/kevin/perl/jotto/word.list.9");

$| = 1;

foreach my $word (@words) {
  my $nope = 0;
  my @letters = split(//, $word);

  for (my $i = 0; $i < 4; $i++) {
    $letters[8-$i] =~ tr/a-z/b-za/;
    if ($letters[8-$i] ne $letters[$i]) {
      $nope = 1;
      last;
    }
  }

  if (!$nope) { print "$word\n"; }
}

The answer is offscreen.

Finding kosher soy yogurt allowed me to give a kosher person her first taste of anything with chicken and yogurt. I cut into the chicken so that the sauce could get into it some. I didn't follow a recipe, since I didn't have any garam masala. The sauce was soy yogurt, lemon juice, garlic, ginger powder, cayenne, garlic powder, garlic granules, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, salt, pepper, turmeric, chili powder, and clove powder. I was only supposed to cover it for the first half hour and then cook it uncovered for an hour, but I had to worry about keeping it kosher so it stayed covered the whole time. It turned out really well. Just the right level of spice, but more like a curry than tandoori. Anyway, it was really good, and I will repeat it often, I'm sure.

I went apple picking and decided to try my hand at fresh applesauce. Four Cortland apples, some water, some cinnamon, and some nutmeg. The recipe in Betty Crocker called for added sugar, but I was advised against that. After tasting it, I was glad I didn't add any extra sugar, since it was sweet enough without it. Very, very good. My first experience with fresh, warm applesauce. Yum.

The word EFFERVESCENCE is unusual because E's are spaced out in it. It 
has 13 letters, and E's appear in positions 1-4-7-13. Now, think a 
familiar two-word phrase in 15 letters, in which the letter R appears in 
positions 1-4-8-12-15. These are the only R's that appear in them. What 
word is it?

I wrote several programs to solve this. The first program found all of the possible first words of lengths three through twelve. The second program found all of the possible second words of lengths three through twelve. The third program put the first words together with the second words. The first merging produced 3700 combinations, too many to go through by hand. I went through the word lists by hand and eliminated uncommon words. The next merging produced 270 combinations. I found the answer, refrigerator car, and sent it in.