Good Job, Brain! - 166: Nuzzle in Puzzles

Episode Date: November 10, 2015

What has 10 arms, 4 mics, and insanely nerdy about things like crosswords, riddles, anagrams, and quizzes? Why, it's this episode of GJB that's all about puzzles- featuring our good friend and crossword king Tyler Hinman! Tyler blows our minds with CRYPTIC crosswords. Learn facts about solving a Rubik's Cube, answer old-timey riddles, and unscramble animal anagrams. How do you move Mount Fuji? Learn why you might get asked to solve puzzles during a job interview, and the "hare-y" puzzle hunt that captivated the world. ALSO: Listener Neville wrote us a crossword for your nerdy pleasure Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Hello, Oslox, Oozing on Outer Ontario. Welcome to Good Job, Brain, your weekly quiz show and off-be trivia podcast. This is episode 166. And of course, I'm your humble host, Karen, and we are, your oddball orators outrunning omelets. I'm Colin. I'm Dea.

And I'm Chris. And we have a special guest this week. It is... I'm Tyler. Tyler Hinman, our old friend and crossword champion. Five-time crossword champion. Second best crossword puzzler in America, which I feel just great about. Before we get started here, we have a small, small bit of housekeeping to get through a quick installment of our...

Errors and omissions segment. Um, actually. So, uh, so this time is, it's me. I got the um. In our all-quids show, I did a quiz about three-syllable four-letter words. And Oahu is one of those three-syllable four-letter words. And I said it was a city. And it's actually an island.

You guys didn't know what I meant, but I was wrong. And so, all the Hawaiian people who, uh, people who live in Hawaii. said that I did. I was like, excuse me. This is how we conduct the surveys and find out where our family. Yeah, yeah. We just keep getting state facts wrong. All right. And without further ado, let's jump into our first general trivia segment. Pop quiz, Hot Shot. And Tyler gets to play. Who-hoo. Tyler has my buzzer, which is the doggy buzzer. And here, I have a random Trivial Pursuit

card. And you guys have your Barnyard Buzzers. Here we go. This is Trivial Pursuit Pop Culture 2. Oh, that's a good one. All right. I'm just skimming just the topics. We'll see. All right. Blue Edge for TV.

What actress starring as a college sophomore on A Different World was obliged to leave the show when she became pregnant? Whoa. Tyler. Is that a Lisa Bonnet? It is Lisa Bonnet. She's married to someone famous, right? She's married to Jason Mama. Caldrogo.

That's right. That's right. And I believe he's playing Aquaman in the upcoming Aquaman movie. Who? Lenny Kravitz? Jason Malo. That would be, guys, we got Lenny Kravitz. Yeah, quite a coup.

He seems so dense. Like, I can't imagine him floating. Like, he just takes us. All right. Next question. Pink Wedge for Fad. What U.S. State is known as Minnie in CB Radio Lingo? Wow, everybody

Minnesota Incorrect Oh, what? Mini and C-B-R-R-A-R-A-N-I-N-C-B-Ratio Is it Rhode Island? Yes, okay, all right Why? Because it's small?

It's a very small. Is it a small estate? Yeah. Wow, okay. We can't we pick on Rhode Island. All right, next question, Yellow Edge for Buzz. You know what?

You're not, Chris, you're not allowed to answer this question. Wow, okay. So it's a video game question. No, it's not. No. What Survivor Star pled guilty to tax evasion for failing to report his $1 million in winnings? Everybody else but Chris? Richard.

Wow. Okay. The first survivor. The first survivor. All right. Purple Wedge for music. What 34-year-old Whippersnapper join Willie Nelson and Neil Young to organize the first farm aid? Uh...

Wow, the first farm maid. I was going to say Garth Brooks, that's way too late. The first farmade. Yeah, 34-year-old whippersnapper at that time. At that time, right. Joined. Billy Joel? No, no.

It is John Mellencamp. Oh, okay. Okay. That's the same as John Pugher Mellon Camp. Is it? I think so. The very same. Okay.

Greenwich for Movies. What movie did Linda Hamilton prepare for? by training with former Israeli Commando Uzi-Gal. Colin. Terminator 2, Judgment Day? Correct. Full title, very good.

She was ripped. She was super ripped. Last question. Sports and Games. Whose blonde braids prompted Pete Sampras to blur Hey, are those real at the U.S. Open? Chris.

Andre Agassie. Incorrect. That's what I would have said. He did have crazy hair Andreax, he did have crazy hair Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like, but not Yeah, maybe it wasn't braids. Venus Williams?

It is Serena Williams. Oh, wow. But you wear braids. Yeah. Good job, Brains. And so Tyler is here, and there's a very good reason for that. I just want to say that today's episode is inspired by many things, but mostly by one of our listeners,

There's Neville Fogarty, who Tyler also knows. Hey, Neville. Neville actually wrote us a good job brain crossword puzzle that we're going to put on the site. So everybody can download and print and play along. The answers are related to things we talked about in the show. Very, very, very, very cool. And so to celebrate Neville and his crossword puzzle, today we decided we're going to dead here a whole episode on puzzles, which is why Tyler is here who is the king, king of puzzles.

King. The king. The king. Good to be king. I appreciate that you're all genuflecting right now. It's not necessary, but I'm about doing it. So this week, it's all about puzzles. The face of puzzle pieces. I have a little puzzle for you guys to start us off. Something we love doing here on Good Job Brain is eating gross candy. Oh.

And we were in F.Y.E. the other day, the, you know, the record store in the mall. So, yeah, so we got this. It's called Jelly Belly Bean Boozel. Oh, crap. This is no. No. There's a spinner in this box. And then what we have is a whole bunch of different flavors.

So, like, but they all look the same. So it might be, it might be tooty fruity or it might be stinky socks. It might be chocolate pudding, or it might be canned dog food. It might be peach. It might be barf. So, with this in hand, we have a little spinner. How is this a puzzle? I hate you.

It's more, oh, I guess it's more of a Russian roulette. But for kids. So I'll pass around the spinner. It's got a real little spinner. And it has a real spinner, and they'll tell you what the two different flavors are for that color. And that's the one that you get to eat. how much fun. And since Tyler is our guest, he can go first.

Oh, boy. The people who invented this should be tried at the hate. I actually don't mind dog food. I'd rather eat dog food because stinky socks or earwax or mom. All right. Here goes to spin. Luck be a lady. Luck be a lady.

Oh, yes. I got. Oh, I unfortunately have to land on either the peach or the bark. Yes. Here we go. Oh, I have to eat it, I guess. All right. I'm saying bad flavor, just based on his reaction.

I can't really tell. That's an indictment of their peach flavor. No, it's barber. Here you go. Oh, come on. Are you kidding me? The blue one is berry, blue, or toothpaste. Oh, come on.

You got a white. You did get off. No, no, no. I haven't spent it yet. I'm just looking. What is it? Butter, popcorn, or rotten egg. Oh, no.

Whole thing, Karen. Whole thing, Karen. Oh, my. What is that? You killed a half of meat. Yeah. Want a diet? Oh, I think I ate the wrong one.

Yeah, I ate the wrong one. What did you eat? Caramel corn or moldy cheese. This is moldy cheese. Oh, it is? It's not that bad. It has a jalapenial flavor. People eat moly cheese all the time.

I know, I was going to say. A good buddy for that. Right. Gallagency. Let's record show I swallowed mine. All right, here we go. All right. I guess I'm the big winner.

I got. I got Tudy-Fruity or Stinky socks. Oh, boy. You make sure you get the right color. All right, Dana, let me match here. All right, Dana, do you agree? Tutti-Fruity or Stankies? Here we go.

Oh, I got Tudy-Fruity. Oh. I love now. Boom. All right. Dana's so nervous. Wow. She's trying, she's like, how hard do I have to push the spinner to get toothpaste?

I don't think this game to participate. I would have said no. I think this secretly is, like, measuring if you're a good person or not. I think if you've done wrong, then you get the bad flavors. No, I think if you bring this game to play, you're a bad person. Lickrish or skunk spray?

Both of those are gross. I'll take the skunk spray. Yeah, it's the same. Just do it. All right. Good luck, Dana. It's the skunk or... Lickrish? Oh, okay. Oh, no. I think it wouldn't be funny if you had that reaction for a liquor show.

Man, you've ripped that out of your mouth. Let the record show I'm the only one who got a bad flavor and finished it. It felt like a gas was released in my mouth. Oh, here we go. Oh, perfect. Okay, well, fair enough. Juicy pear or booger. Here we go.

Hopefully you will. Here we go. Come on, booger. This was specifically mentioned in Harry Potter. Yes. With Ron reckons he got a boogie flavor. Book. Come on, burger, come up, burger.

It doesn't even taste like a booger. It just tastes like bad. Was it, yeah. Is it salty? Salty and peppery and... What I love about this flavor is that it puts you on the spot to describe what your own boogers taste like. Right, right.

You're like, oh, it just tastes nothing like, no. Well, thanks, Chris. That was a great. No, no problem. Puzzle. Seemed more puzzling when I bought it. Sure, I did. So right before we started recording, we were talking about selling things on eBay, just purely coincidentally.

So I was clearing out a bunch of stuff from my desk, old toys and collectibles and things that I just don't need anymore. And one of the things I came across was a Rubik's Cube, a Rubik's Cube. You guys have all seen a Rubik's Cube, yes? Smash one. Smash one. Yeah, I took them apart when I was a kid. you know, I would get frustrated and put them... Take the stickers on.

Yeah. Those are sort of the two avenues of cheating, or take the stickers off, or pull the blocks out and reassemble them. And then it's always kind of lovely, you know, after that. It's never really as good. But now, people would just watch a YouTube video. Well, so it's funny you say that, Dana. Because this Rubik's tube that I found was unsolved. It was completely jumbled.

And I picked it out, and I was like, dang it. I'm going to have solved this thing. I had never in my life solved a Rubik's tube. Including today. Well, I had as of now, I did a very, very unscientific survey, and I found out that this may not surprise you, solved Rubik's tubes will sell for more than unsolved. Really? Oh, man. Okay. So I solved it just in the hopes that I would get a slightly higher sale. Oh, my God. On eBay. But so, as I said, I'd never solved a Rubik's tube in my life. Like, as a kid, I would get so frustrated. And, you know, I mean, they had the guidebooks. I mean, even back in the 1980s, you know, pre-internet, there were guides available. And you can't solve it. algorithmically. Like, there is a way to solve them.

But I had never done it. Justin Bieber has done it. Has he? Yeah. He did it in a car in seconds in a few minutes. Yeah, I think he knew the way to do it. So there is a way. There is a way to do it.

Right. My brother memorized the things how to do it yet. And Tyler, you probably did. Yeah, I'm not one of those crazy speed solvers, but yeah, I can do it in five minutes or so, maybe. That's not bad. I mean, yeah, so I went online, and of course I fell into just this subculture of speedcubing. Speed cubing. It's awesome.

And cube solving. And I learned, there's, of course, of course, no surprise. There's a whole notation. There's a whole way of describing how you make the difference. That's so cool. Right. There's a letter notation. And so when you follow these steps, you know, 10 or 12, whatever it is, and you follow them

when you're real life in cube. So I learned all those. Follow the YouTube videos. Right. As a Rubik's cube, when you look at an unsolved Rubik's cube, you think it's a random pattern. But it's not random at all. I mean, it's a very, very big number. but there are a limited number of possible, you know, permutations.

So I solved it. It hasn't sold yet. It's a funny bit. I'll update you guys as of next week. I'll let you know how it did. Hey, maybe we'll drive the price of with mentioning it on the show. Unfortunately, by the time this episode airs, the auction will be over. Too bad.

Too bad. So I was doing some research on this toy that has, you know, undoubtedly one of the best-selling toys of all time. Some people say it may be, it may be the best-selling toy of all time. certainly the best-selling puzzle of all time. Yeah. And just hugely, hugely popular. So I've got a little mixture of some quiz and some trivia nuggets for you guys

about the Rubik's Cube. All right, well, let's get settled away. Who, what, or where? Who, what, or where is the Rubic in a Rubik's cube? Tyler. It's named after crossword favorite Erno Rubic, ERN-O, Peterson Puzzles, quite a lot.

Oh. Favorable later combination. Yes, ERN-O. And I think there's a weird diacritical over the O or something, but that doesn't appear in crosswords. We don't worry about that. You look so excited. You're like, oh, I'm happy.

Crosswordies in real life. It's always good to see. That makes sense. Of course, you'll be a crossword. He has four letters. You've got the R.N. The middle. Yeah, that's right.

Erno Rubik. He's a Hungarian. He's still around, still alive. He was a professor in Hungary, a professor of architecture. And he designed the original Rubik's tube almost as like a study or a thought experiment for himself. He wanted to build something that could rotate freely without the cubes falling out.

He didn't even have it in mind as a puzzle originally. And it was after he had developed it out of wood and rubber bands, the original one, that he and his students kind of hit on, hey, you know, this could be a really interesting puzzle. Right. So he marketed as a puzzle. But yeah, so it hit the international market in 1980 and was just an absolute, absolute smash. I'll give you guys a little bit of a head start on this next question here. A cube has six sides.

All right, I'll give you guys that one. Okay. So what are the traditional six colors of a Rubik's hue? Oh. Oh, my buzzer. Tyler, after some thought. I stole Karen's buzzer. All right, let's see if I can get this.

All right. I believe there's red, orange, yellow, green, white, and blue. That is correct. Yeah. I would have said purple. And, of course, there are now, you know, dozens of dozens and thousands of... I mean, you can get things printed on the side,

you can get your own photos on the side of them. That original, the model of the rotating cube like that, that design, they didn't really enforce the patent on that. So it's one reason that there are many, many third-party, you know, cube makers now that make that type of rotating cube puzzle. You can't call a Rubik's cube. Falling into the subculture, I learned that the professional, the speedcubers actually, a lot of them don't even use the Rubik's cube.

They use, you know, they use basically specially designed speed cubes. with high quality rotating. Oh, and the friction is less. Oh, my goodness. They advertise a lot. Rubik's Cube has billions of combinations, you know, like just, oh, big number, billions of combinations. And while that's true, while that's true,

it would be not unlike me taking you guys into the largest bank in the world and saying, guys, there are hundreds of dollars here. They deliberately downplay the number because the actual number is so big that people have no set. There are more than 40 quintillion possible combinations of the cubes. You have to describe to somebody what a quintillion is for them to be impressed by that. I will make no longer than that I had to go look it up myself.

And yes, that's a one with 18 zeros. Wow. That's one quintillion and more than 40 quintillion. All right, Karen, so back to SpeedCubing. Yes, yes, yes. That's my new life goal. Oh, I believe you could do it, Karen. If you set your mind to it, the governing body is the World Cube Association.

Oh. And they run sanctioned events. They have many different disciplines. There's the fewest number of move solving. There's fastest single cube solve. Most competitions I've learned go, like your fastest average solve. So you do five solves and they take the fastest average time. Would you guys care to guess what the current world record for a single cube solve on a 3x 3 Rubik's cube?

Okay, I'm going to take a guess. We'll do it closest to you. We'll remember when I take a stat out of it. Okay. Two and a half seconds. Chris says two and a half seconds. What? I'd say eight seconds.

Eight seconds. Yeah, I would think it's in. the single digit seconds, too. I was just say nine. Nine seconds. I think it's right around five seconds. I'm going to go right in the middle there. I'm going to give it to Tyler.

It is, in fact, 5.25 seconds. Set just this year, just a few months ago, in fact, by American. Woo! Colin Berger. USA! Yeah. There is a video of it on YouTube. If you want to go see his world record setting time.

And that's one cube, or is that the average time again? It's a single cube. That's the best. single cube solve. And the way it works basically is, you know, you show up, you've got a shuffled jumbled cube. It's covered. All right. They lift up the cover. You're allowed to examine it quickly and then you put it down and it's on a speed pad. So the timer starts when you lift it up to solve and the timer starts when you set down the solve cube. Okay, so you can pick it up and you can look at it and put it down before you step over your time steps. That's right. Wow. You get just a few

seconds to look at it. It is amazing. It really is incredible. I like the technology around that. Like, they have to build the spends, yeah, there's a pad. It's really cool. It's really cool. And if you guys are as nerdy and into competition as I am, go online and watch it because he doesn't even realize he set a world record. Oh. I mean, he sets it down. And then the nerdy reaction of everybody around as they process what's just happened, it's great.

It's just such a nerdy, nerdy moment. So I learned more about the Rubik's Cube than I ever hoped to know, all because I had to sell one on eBay. That's the name of your autobiography. I don't need to take you to solve it. Well, I had to learn the notation first, actually. So once I had a few missteps. It took me maybe 10, 15 minutes total, total time. Can you, what's an example of a notation?

So their notation is like F for front face. Oh, okay. You for the upper face. Got it. And, you know, when they say make a turn, it's always clockwise relative to that face. Okay, so if it says, you know, you, I'm rotating the upper face clockwise. Got it. Then there's a prime notation.

So prime means counterclockwise. So it says, you, I go to the upper layer counterclockwise. Right. Not long. And I didn't feel bad when I found out that it took Erno Rubik himself about a month to solve it. When he first jumbled it. Look, because it wasn't a puzzle. Yeah.

And there's no YouTube for him to go on. Well, now there is. Yeah, now there is. I bet he was so excited when he was. After a month. I bet he was. No Frills, Delivers. Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express.

Shop online and get $15 in PC optimum points on your first five orders. Shop now at nofrills.ca. Here on Good Job, Brain, our favorite slash least favorite candy is Laffy Taffy. Well, actually, I guess our least favorite candy now is jellybellies. There's no fart jellybelly. So we love reading the riddles in the back of Laffy Taffies, which are never getable. And neither are these old tiny riddles that we, so that I've pulled out, maybe you'll get them. Oh, who knows?

Well, we'll find it. Is it because it's really hard or is it because it's just dumb? You know why? It's because a lot of these things, there's not one true. There's not like, there could be many different solutions to some of these. But it's like, it's like Humpty Dumpty. We talk about Humpty Dumpty on a previous episode. And that Humpty Dumpty, the little rhyme was a riddle.

We were supposed to figure out, you're supposed to listen to the verse and figure out that Humpty Dumpty is an egg. But, of course, Humpty Dumpty can be a lot of things, right? Sheet a glass. Right, right, sheet of glass. Thank you, Karen. What I want you to do is, think of, try to think about, like, the most common things that somebody 100 years ago might have answered for one of these reasons. And that's probably the answer. So here's a bunch of old-timey riddles for you.

And no, I'm not going to leave you two hanging. Don't worry about this. All right. So here we go. So here's riddle number one. Who makes it has no need of it. Who buys it has no use for it. Who uses it can neither say.

seen or feel it. I've heard this one. I've heard this one before, too. Yeah, they're classics. Tyler. I believe that's a coffin. That is indeed a coffin. Who makes it has no need of it, who buys it has no use for it, who uses it can either see nor feel it. It is a coffin. There we go. Unless you're buried alive.

Spooky. I mean, that did happen. Yeah. It's in a lot of movies. For a point. Here's another one for you. Glittering points that downward thrust, sparkling spears that never rust. I think Karen raised her hand.

I raised my hand. Snowflakes? Not snowflake. Collet. I think icicles? Isicles. Oh, okay. Glittering points that downward thrust,

sparkling spears that never rust are icicles. How about this one? This is a classic. This thing all things devours. Birds, beasts, trees, trees. flowers gnaws iron bites steel grinds hard stones to meal slays king ruins town

and beats high mountain down Colin Dana Is it time? It is time Oh I was like, is it like acid rainier? Alive without breath As cold as death Clad in male Never clinking

never thirsty ever drinking a life without breath as cold as death clad in male never clinking never thirsty ever drinking

was this in the Lord of the Rings or something it might have been it might have been I hate these oh yeah oh is it how about a rain spell?

No, the male. The male. It is alive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Imagine Shane male and imagine what sort of creature might have something that looks like that. Armadillo. Well, Armadillo's breathe. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

But this is always drinking. So the answer that they want for this is a fish. It is a fish. They breathe. They breathe. We're taking apart. We can know that. Oh, yeah, that's true.

Yeah. Using a 300-year-old knowledge. Exactly, exactly. Here's a fun one. What question can you never honestly answer yes to? Colin. Are you asleep? Yes, correct.

Yep. Or are you dead? That's on dad joke territory. It is, it is, it is. Two in a corner, one in a room. Zero in a house. One in a shelter. What am I?

Tyler. Is that the letter R? It is the letter R. Two in a corner, one. One in a room, none in a house, one in a shelter. Forward, I'm heavy. Backward, I'm not. What am I?

Tyler jumped right on it. A ton. Forward, I'm heavy. Backward, I am not. Yeah, forward is a ton. Backward is not. Oh. Yeah.

And here's one. This is ridiculous, but I love it. Okay. Whoever makes it tells it not. Whoever takes it knows it not. whoever knows it wants it not this is a physical object

say it again whoever makes it tells it not I thought it was a fart you can hold this in your hand you have probably held some of this in your hand at some point whoever makes it tells it not whoever takes it knows it not

whoever knows it wants it I've I've read this I think this oh yes I forgot what it was oh okay Whoever makes it tells it about You just want us to know that at some point Yeah, I did it, yeah, yeah.

Is it a, so it's something Whoever makes it tells it up. So you make it, you would never tell anybody if you made it. If you take it, whoever takes it knows it. If you take it, you don't, you would never take it if you knew what it was. Okay. And if you knew what it was, you wouldn't lie.

Okay. Yep. It's like donation or money. It was whoever knows it, wants it not. Donation or a tip or. You probably had some at some point. If you ever found out that you had it, you were probably pretty mad. Oh, tax is not bad.

It's a physical thing. We're going to feel so dumb. I'll tell you, but, no, I mean, it's a, yeah. Oh, do you think you know? Okay. It is counterfeit money. Oh. I thought it was like money.

Yeah. Yep. Yep. That actually makes sense. Those are my dumb old-timey ripples. Thank you. So, I have some anagrams for you guys. My ship has come in.

So these are. There are no prizes. These are hundred in normal. Okay. Yeah. So I tip two words. that are of the same type. So today it is the top 24 most searched for animals on Google in 2014.

So there was a list of the most searched Googled animals, and I took two from the list, and I put it through the anagram engine. We're going to have to de-scramble it to get two animals? Yes. Okay. All right. Well, we'll start out, easy-ish. Here we go.

All right. Fig plow. Pig and fowl Pig and wolf I think pig and fowls But it's a search for But it's not top Google search Pig wolf

How about rinks Shakes? Oh, Ranks Shakes Like if you were going to rate a bunch of milkshakes Rank Shakes Rank Shakes Shark and snake Yeah, I got the snake

Well, that's really similar Yeah How about this? London hippie How is hippie spell? Hippie is HIPI Okay The hippo

No Oh London hippie They might be on the Lisa Frank folder Both of the days Oh god Oh Unicorn monkey

No, there's no you There's no E either That's interesting Wow We're stuck on this one Oh, oh, oh, dolphin? Yeah. And that one's left.

P. There's a P. Wait, there's a Y. You guys are so close. Pony. Yes. Oh, pony. If it weren't obvious, we're not writing anything down.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Rebate, slop. Bear. No. Oh, that happens to a bear, too. Rebate? Oh, rebate. Slop? Slop.

Yeah. Okay, lobster. Oh. Really? Ape. Yes. I just couldn't cross it out. How about? Leaky genome? Yeah.

Genome. Wow. Monkey and eagle. Yes. I had just gotten to crossing out Eagle and seeing what was left. Tail ribbon. T-A-L-E- or T-A-L-A-L-E? I-L.

Rabbit uh, no. Rabbit lion. Rabbit lion. I buzzed him. You said no. I got to keep the first one quiet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Give you ample time to solve the second one. Trucked? Yuck. Trucked? Yeah. So past tense on turkey dark. Oh! So I was supposed to hit you.

Yeah, exactly. Some of us are reaching. Oh, I've only got two hands. good job you guys all right I'm going to read to you for four kind of interesting phrases

they'll be explained once I go into my topic here so here are these phrases good job brain co-host's contribution to brunch risotto good job brains co-host company line for the most part

regressive advertisement about one good job brain co-host and good job brain co-host is nurturing you hear These are you sound like slogans Like on the back of the box or something What great Well what I have written here as Chris has deduced

Because we have a little bit of experience Solving these things together I have written four cryptic crossword clues Now you've all heard of the crossword puzzle of course That appears in your local newspaper From whatever source they get it from New York Times, very popular one But there's a sort of a British style cryptic

It's the most common crossword type in England. They've made their way to our shores a little bit, but they're definitely not as popular here as they are over there. This is the cryptic crossword, and it's the default crossword style in England. And as you may have gathered, the clues for these puzzles are, they're much longer than the conventional American crossword clue, which typically just provides a short definition or a trivia quiz or a fill in the blank or something. And what makes a cryptic clue different from the normal crossword clue is that each clue contains two parts. One part is a conventional definition that you might find in a normal, normal straight crossword, as the term

goes. And the other half is wordplay. And so it indicates the answer in a second way. Oh, like a meta way. Yeah, sort of. And there's a bunch of different wordplay techniques you can use to get at that. And they're much harder to solve, but once you get an answer, you can be pretty sure it's correct since you have kind of two ways of getting about it. And you can solve clues either way. You might think of a clue that fits the definition part and then kind of justify it with the wordplay, or you might kind of piece together a bit of the wordplay, and then the answer will jump in your head, and you'll see that matches the definition. But where the tricky part lies is every clue reads like a coherent thought, a complete sentence, or at least kind of a

complete clause. So the tricky part is finding the dividing line between the two parts and in which order they go in. Like which part is signaling the word play and which part is actually the word. Can we have an example? We can absolutely have several examples. Of course, there's the four I read, but I'll start with a simple example. One, common wordplay technique you'll see in cryptics is called a charade, which is simply two parts going together and spelling something else. Just A plus B

A B. A B. A. So a very simple example would be, slim monarch is cogitating. That's eight letters long. Thin king. Slim. Thin king. Right. Right. So the course, cogitating is the slim, thin, monarch, king. And then is sort of a kind of a connector word,

sort of an equal sign, if you will. So, Vain king is thinking. And then you said cogitating. I'm like, okay, that means thinking, oh, as soon as I said that, I was like, ah, yes, and it makes sense because that does double check. Like, that is the one right answer because it works for both cases. And there's a lot of different wordplay techniques you can use. There's the anagram. There's putting a word inside another word. There are words going in reverse. And the clues I've written here reflect a number of these types. For other wordplay types, they'll usually be

words that indicate what kind of wordplay it is. Like for anagram, basically any word that indicates being broken or reorganized or drunk or confused or anything that might convey something in a jumbled up. Jumbled up. Anything like that. Reverse, you know, to indicate like a word being reversed, there might be going up or heading back for or something like that. You eventually wanted to pick out those indicators and you kind of pluck those out and look at

the words around them to see how they might apply. The four clues I opened this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's try to figure it out. Okay, we'll be the first one. This first one actually is a wordplay technique I have not yet mentioned. And it's the kind of thing that's extremely easy to understand, but it's also kind of the easiest to miss when you're actually solving. Okay, okay.

So this first one, good job brain co-host's contribution to brunch risotto. Okay. Brunch risotto. I figured this out. I don't know. Well, first, first, I mean, in this particular case, the straight definition is probably good job brain co-host. As it is for all. Okay.

And then the word play definition is contribution to brunch. Brunch risotto. You don't have to anagram. You don't have to do anything. The person's name appears in the phrase, brunch risada. Chris. Right. So the answer is Chris.

Good job. Brain co-host. It's the straight portion. Contribution to brunch risotto. As one word. Yeah. The letter CHR-I-S contribute to that phrase. If you read it, spelled out literally.

And without, with spaces, but without any letters between or between or that. It helps that three of us have five letter names. And Dana has it. Yes. When we get to, when we get to Dana's clude. That may be, they may stick out a little bit. All right, so the next one, good job, brain, co-hosts, company line for the most part.

Oh, Colin. It is Colin, yes. Cold line. For the most. Right. There's a couple things right here. So, meaning, I'm taking its chunks out of each of them. Well, co is an abbreviation for a company.

You use that a lot. Oh, got it. You do that a lot in cryptic crossers. If a word or phrase can be expressed by one or two-letter abbreviation, like if you see a chemical element a clue. A lot of time, that's going to be the symbol. You see a state. That's going to be the postal abbreviation, things like that. C-O-L-I-N-E. Right. You just drop the E.

Right. Line for the most part. For the most part. So most of the word line is L-I-N. So it's C-O plus L-I-N-E minus that last letter. Okay. The next one, regressive advertisement about one, good job, brain co-host. It's me. Oh, it's all

data. And ad. Yeah. Regressive. Because it's going backwards. And then the last one, which I think we all know. Oh, but I want to know that. Good job, Brain co-host is nurturing, you hear?

She's Karen. Karen. Oh, nurturing. That is the homophone, another common technique. And the indicator is anything that, like, according to the ear, so anything that indicates kind of hearing, you would look and either provide a synonym for

the previous word, the following word. Nurtureen. Yeah, so nurturing, Karen. There you go. There you go. A homophone in there, man. It just takes it so many other angles you could go off in there. Yeah, yeah. But you have double check it with a good job brain part, right, to make sure that's the right answer. And once you solve it, you can be pretty sure of your answer because you have the good job brain co-host part and you have the wordplay part. And so that's the basic kind of technique

of a cryptic clue and obviously these form a conventional crossword puzzle. Although in these grids on the American style puzzles, all the letters are checked. You have basically two shots at every word because every letter crosses. In a British puzzle, only a little more than half the letters will be crossing. So there's a lot more black squares and you have to solve every clue to finish the puzzle because everyone, pretty much everyone is going to have unchecked letters. If you were, if you were making a cryptic style crossword compared to a regular style of approximate equal difficulty, how much longer would it take you to make the cryptic? Well, the grid would take, well, it depends because the grid, it's easier to make because you don't

have to get everything to cross, but you also want to put in like fun words that are going to lend themselves well to good wordplay. And obviously the clues are much harder to write because you have to kind of make it make sense overall, and all the wordplay has to work, and it all just kind of has to line up. If you really get into cryptics and you kind of master these clues, there's also variety cryptics in which

there's additional stuff going on. And they vary about complexity, but a typical example will be something like every across clue, the wordplay leads to an extra letter. And if you read those letters in clue order, it'll explain to you how

you must modify 10 down answers before you put them into the diagram and the letters you drop off from the down answers will spell and it just goes on like that. No thanks. I got to tell you, I love these. They're super fun. I would definitely say if people...

It's a lot of work. It is, but it's like once you start learning the rules for each one, like, okay, people will kind of word play as it, you'll start to recognize them. Then what I do is, it's not really good at them. I start entering in the ones that I know, and then I can kind of look at the cryptic clue and then look at the letters that are already there,

then it'll start kind of popping out at me like what the answer is cryptic crosswords it's like every word you write down it's a little eureka moment it's a little like super fun it's little mini puzzles that you're solving really good so tyler um what's the best where's the best place to try these out like do anything you recommend um there's a there's a good source is actually the uh the wall street journal um they recently started a daily uh conventional crossword and uh once a month it's a variety cryptic crossword by Emily Cox and Henry Rathbond, who have been doing it a very long time and they're very, very good. And I say variety cryptic, which might scares people off given what I just described. But the gimmicks are usually fairly light, fairly straightforward.

And I actually, if you want to get into cryptics and variety cryptics in particular, I think that's a fine entry. Also, the nation, the magazine. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, thank you for the reminder. My friends, Josh Cosman and Henry Pitchiato, they make the the cryptic crossword for the Nation magazine, which just started up a few years ago. the basic, straightforward, quick, cryptic, and they're, and they're very clever. Cool. Well, if you guys are into that, check those out. I've tried some of these before.

It takes practice to know kind of what they're kind of asking, but also, like, gives me a giant headache afterwards. That's how you know it's working. Yeah, that's how you know it's like Listerine, yeah. All right, let's take a break, a word from our sponsor. Did archaeologists discover Noah's Ark? Is the rapture coming as soon as the Euphrates River Drive? rise up. Does the Bible condemn abortion? Don't you wish you had a trustworthy academic resource to

help make sense of all of this? Well, I'm Dan Beecher, and he's a award-winning Bible scholar and TikTok sensation, Dr. Dan McClellan. And we want to invite you to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where our mission is to increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and also to combat the spread of misinformation about the same. But you know, in a fun way. Every week we tackle fascinating topics. We go back to source materials in their original languages. And we interview top scholars in the field. So whether you're a devout believer,

or you're just interested in a clear-eyed, deeply informed look at one of the most influential books of all time. We think you're going to love the data over dogma podcast. Wherever you subscribe to awesome shows. Hello, this is Matt from the Explorers podcast. I want to invite you to join me on the voyages and journeys of the most famous explorers in the history of the world. At the Explorers podcast, we plunge into jungles and deserts, across mighty oceans and frigid ice caps, over and to the top of Great Mountains, and even into outer space. These are the thrilling and captivating stories of Magellan, Shackleton, Lewis, and Clark,

and so many other famous and not-so-famous adventures from throughout history. So come give us a listen. love to have you. Go to explorerspodcast.com or just look us up on your podcast app. That's the Explorers podcast. Well, you know, I don't need much of an excuse to indulge in some word nerdery. So I have a puzzle-themed edition of Collins' word nerd corner. Yes. When you're kids, I feel like, at least I was this way, puzzle meant one thing. When you're a really young, kid. Puzzle was very literally like, oh, a jigsaw puzzle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's only as as you get older that you're like, oh, a puzzle can be more metaphorical as well. The term jigsaw puzzle

goes back to about the early 1900s. The earliest reference that OED has is from 1909. And one of the reasons they're not super, super, super, super old is that a jigsaw puzzle was actually made from a jigsaw. Yeah. What is a jigsaw? Who wants to take a very quick stab? Like, Karen? I know carpentry. Okay, go for it. It is a jigsaw is a more flexible saw. It's not like a giant saw. It's flexible kind of like on a, not a string,

but it's a very thin, flexible blade that you can cut really tight corners on a sheet of wood. The really key thing about it is that the equipment that the blade is mounted in. It's like a giant vertical frame. It's what's called a reciprocating saw, it's supposed to a circular saw. So it goes up and down, fancy way of saying up and down. And, yeah, you can cut very fine curves and detail into wood. You know, they use them for, like, architectural details originally is what the machine was made for.

And it just seemed like a natural fit to go and make puzzles out of them. All right. Why jigsaw? Where's the jig and jigsaw? What does it, what does that mean? Chris. Is it like dancing a jig? Yes.

It's like dancing a jig. And the illusion of the jigsaw is that's operating. It's kind of going chak, chak, chok, chok, chok, up and down. It's all herky, jerky, really rapidly. And the illusion was like, oh, this all is like doing a little jig. See, I think it looks like something else. but that's cool. Like punching or stabbing.

Okay, stab saw. Yeah, I also accept stab saw. I was doing some more research. I guess in the early days of jigsaws, so it was a fad in the early 1900s, when jigsaws kind of, you know, became very popular. They were really popular.

Oh, yeah, big jigsaw. Well, it was like almost depression error, right? There's no TV. Yeah, yeah, there didn't. There's nothing else to do. In the early years, the term also morphed into zigsaw. You'll see a lot of references is from the early 1900s talking about

zigsaw puzzles, or zigzaw as well. What? Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a quote even, I'm going to shame this person. There's a quote from 1912. Yeah, take that. Dead guy. One of those zigzaw puzzles,

which had a fleeting vogue two or three years ago. Shots fired. Yeah, so that's it. That's the jigsaw puzzle made by a jigsaw, and the jigsaw, because it looks like it's dancing a jig. Of course, these days, you know, if you buy a jigsaw puzzle,

there's no jig involved whatsoever in the construction of them. I mean, like the cardboard ones, they're just stamped out of a sheet of cardboard, basically. So, do you guys know that I'm super into jigsaw puzzles? Did not know that? No. Did not know that. Most of the jigsaw puzzles that you go buy, it's probably made by the same company.

There's only in, like, three or four companies. And the thing is, their cut patterns are generally the same. So what I used to do as a kid is I would buy two sets of jigsaw puzzles, same number of pieces, same company, which, assuming it's the same cut pattern. And what you can do is you do a montage, you do a mashup of the jigsaw puzzles. So, like, you can have, like, a giant pizza puzzle and then another puzzle of ponies. And then you put them together. So you have pony pizza puzzles.

So that's something you can do because they're of the same manufacturer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've seen, like, puppies and burgers before. Yeah, it was a fun thing. At my old job, we got really into jigsaw puzzles, like, on a lot. our little down time. Like, we make video games, but we got a really little bit of jigsaw. Let your hair down.

You know how, the first thing when you have a jigsaw puzzle is you find the edge pieces, the corner pieces. So there are a lot of jigsaw puzzles that make corner pieces in the puzzle. To trick you. Yeah, hard edge is, yeah. So you're like, what? Why are there like eight corners in this puzzle?

So the really big puzzles we put together, we saw the instructions or the how to order new pieces if you lose a piece. And it was so cool. It was like, oh, you just count, basically like a grid, just count how many over and how many down it was, and then they can mail you the piece. Wait, they can just mail you pieces willy-nilly?

You have to pay for it? Or you have to prove that you... I think it was an honor system. Oh, that's kind of cool. I'm trying to imagine the scam that you had a toll by sending in a thousand... A thousand times I can sell a whole puzzle. While shipping and handling.

Well, speaking of work, Dana, like office puzzles, so this episode made me really curious, and you see this online a lot. I'm sure, like, people who are into trivia puzzles probably see this like, oh, here are the hard questions that Microsoft will ask you in an interview or riddles that Google will ask you in an interview. And I've been hearing this for a really long time. And I've honestly never been into an interview where someone asked me a puzzle and I have to try to solve it. And so I'm kind of like, oh, is this for real? And this did happen. I know they did have. Why they adopted this is because people have at, well, what they feel like is they perfected the job interview system.

You know, what are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? And I think for a lot of people that are like, oh, we're getting the same answers. People know how to answer those questions really well. Let's throw them like, put a wrench in this whole machine and trying to like loosen them up. They ever tell you this story before that when I was doing college admissions interviews, one of the interviewers. You have the interview for college admissions? Yeah, yeah, I did.

Yeah. So I did the interview and they were just like, the interviewer was just like, okay, so I have to ask you this question. You have a balance. You have a scale and you have six balls. And one of them is heavier than the other ones. And you can only weigh it twice. So how do you find the heaviest one? And I'm like, well, he said that you have a scale and have a balance.

And I'd done all chemistry, physics, everything. And there's many kinds of balances. And I was just like, I said, and I had not heard this problem before. Or, I mean, I heard variations. I was like, so like I said, like a centigram balance. And he goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, like that. And I'm like, yeah. I thought about it a little bit.

And I'm like, yeah, I don't really know how you would do that. How do you do that? He goes, well, you put three balls on one side and three balls on the other side. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. A centigrant balance only has one pan. And he goes, oh, oh, oh. So I didn't end up going to a stupid school, which was a. They don't even know centigram balances.

And some of these questions, there's what they call a monologue and a dialogue. A monologue question is usually logic and you're trying to like figure this is how I'm going to figure it out and I have the balance and I'm going to do this and this and this. A dialogue is inviting people to ask questions to like, oh, how many ping pong balls can you stuff in the Mediterranean seat? And it's like, oh, well, you know, what kind of ping ball? It invites people to kind of problem solve together. And what they say for a lot of hiring managers or HR recruiting is, unless it is a logic puzzle, just assume all of them are dialogue. It's a conversation starter.

It's how to talk to someone. If they ask you a question, one of the questions is like, how would you move Mount Fuji? Yes. Right. And they're not, they're not, they don't expect you to like deliver them a plan for how to move Mount Fuji. They're expecting you to say, where are we moving it to? Can we take it apart? What does it need to be if we move it?

Yeah. How long do we have? So there is a book. It's titled How to Move Mount Fuji. Oh, wait, it is? Microsoft, how about how Microsoft kind of started this, a lot of these famous puzzles and stuff like that. I don't think people do logic puzzles now because all the answers are online. And they're all studyable.

They're all like, you have a rope and it burns for blah, blah, blah. And what is the current thinking on how valid they are? I think sometimes people ask you those questions, yeah, just to know what your personality is like and if you're going to be a fun person to work with or not, because there's so much collaboration. And people are so good at pretending to be like reasonable adults when they're answering just basic questions. So you have to like ask them something weird to see what's underneath the rock. If they're just like, oh, I can't do it. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Okay, well, thanks for much time. I mean, I've interviewed people before, and they, like, freeze. They don't say anything. Maybe, like, just won't answer anymore. Really? Like, shut down. I totally bombed an interview this way. It was, like, how would you design, how would you design a system that works like this?

And I was like, oh, well, let's see. And I'm kind of, like, sitting in my corner and, like, working things out in my head, not knowing that I have to, like, talk to people. One of my old co-workers got, was, like, if you could be any animal, what animal would you be? And then they got graded on what animal. will they pick. Frog, frog is wrong.

I was like, this is not like. Wait, really? Like there's a right or wrong answer? I mean, this was not a good interview, but that's, can I be Pikachu?

Electrical account, yeah. Can you be Manbat? So I think we got close to discussing this once on good job, Ray, but we didn't. But we definitely don't want to have a puzzle episode without discussing something that I think a lot of our listeners are familiar with.

Yes. It is a book that was released at the tail end of the 1970s, and this book is called Masqueray. Masqueray! It is considered to be the book that launched the quote-unquote

Armchair Treasure Hunt craze. And the book, in a nutshell, the book promised, it looked like an illustrated children's book, and it promised that there was a puzzle hidden in the book, and that if you could solve the puzzle,

you could win a one-of-a-kind, golden, made out of 18-carat gold, hair, a rabbit. That was encrusted with jewels and buried somewhere in England. This is like the French golden owl. It is. And it happened around the same time. The difference is that Mascarade was actually solved.

The golden owl thing you talked about a long time ago, no one's ever solved. Mascarade was pretty tough, but it was eventually solved. And the way that it was solved, sadly, did not quite work out the way that they wanted. Oh, really? Yes. Now, I should say that a lot of the information that's out there on the Internet about Mascarade for a long time, has come from the website of none other than your friend in mind, Dan Amrick. Holy crap, really? Yep. Works for Ubisoft now here in San Francisco, and he's a good friend

of ours, and he is a huge fan of masquerade and for well over a decade now has maintained the ultimate Macquarie band page. Yes. Yep. Of course he did. So that's a great starting place to learn more about masquerade. So the book was written by an English illustrator slash painter slash author named Kit Williams. His work is extraordinary. I mean, I think his paintings are, like, they're beautiful and they're just captivating. He paints these people with amazing facial expressions. It's sort of in the Dutch style, like really lifelighting, the imagination of the work.

They're so surreal, really talented guys, still working, still doing just paintings at this point that sell for quite a lot of money. Anyway, in the 70s, he was approached by a friend in book publishing who said, Oh, your paintings are so interesting, they're so good. You should do a children's picture book. And he was like, no. Like, that's, no, no, that doesn't sound like something I really want to do. But then he started thinking about it.

He realized something. He realizes if I were to make this book into a puzzle book, and if I were to tell people that there was something hidden in the images, they would not just glance at my paintings. Because, I mean, you work on these paintings. For a long time, yeah, yeah. They're not just going to glance at it. that and go up, that's weird, and then walk away. They're going to study these paintings.

Like, they're going to spend a lot of time staring, really contemplating. And they're not going to be thinking about, like, oh, this is art. They're thinking this is a puzzle, you know, and that's more approachable. So then Kit Williams really started to think, like, okay, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. Looks like a children's book, but is actually a really complicated puzzle. He makes, he finishes the book, he comes up with the idea, he submits it to the publisher, he makes the hair himself out of 18-carat gold and jewels, and he bears.

Wait, is he also like a jewel-joler? He is. He does. He does. The paintings that he does now, he makes the frames himself, and he hides things in the frames. What? And sometimes the paintings kind of extend into the woodworking of the frames. Oh, cool. So the story of Masquerade, the book comes out late 1979. Then it tells a story of a rabbit named Jack Hare, who's acting as a messenger between the sun and the moon. The moon is in love with the sun and wants to give the sun a present.

which is this golden hair, but Jack Hare loses it somewhere, and that's how the book ends. It's lost and you can't find it. Immediately, you start reading this book, which has basically story on the left page and then pictures on the right page, you know, for page to page. And it's really fascinating and beguiling. And then around every picture,

there's this cryptic quatrain of poetry or whatever. Quatrain. Yes. And so the first page, it says, I am as cold as earth as old. as earth and in the earth am i one of six to eight i mean just these really kind of like da Vinci code i mean there's a puzzle going on here and it's just as you go through and there's these pictures of these really weird creepy looking people like nightmare fuel type stuff you know

like stuff that not not you know like the facial expressions that just can't get out of your head and these these lines of poetry around them that are so there's got to be some meaning in here Later, there's a painting with a swimmer, and around that it says, I am hydrogen, two of one to eight, of oxygen, am I, crystal aquamarine. So, of course, you might think that one of six to eight has something to do with elements, too, so you go start working on that. Well, elements are a red herring. He's dropped a lot of stuff in the book about elements for you to waste your time on,

and there's nothing to do with the solution. As you start looking at the words, there's some letters, which you very clearly see, are in red. and if you start pulling out the red letters they start spelling things like hair or you know whatever dawn, dusk then what people takes people a little while longer to get

some of the letters have little thorns on them and then those spell out words but those don't you can start solving little puzzles but they don't get you any closer to the thing but people start spinning up all kinds of conspiracy theories about where it might be and they start writing him letters because he said

in an effort to sell more copies of the book around the world like it's in English but if you tell me where it is, I'll confirm it. I'll confirm it here. Turns out, masquerade is a real tough puzzle, especially in the days before Reddit. Because these days, Reddit would have solved it pretty fast. Back in the day, it's just, you know, very small groups of people,

maybe a couple of people working on it, you know, and all sort of siloed away. Here was the solution. Spoiler. So this was clued in various ways in the book. But what you had to do was find each of the creatures that were in, the book and then draw lines from their eyes through their longest fingers and toes and then keep the line going and you'd land right in the middle of letters that were around the borders

you could figure this because the book was published in many languages but the the english homes around the pictures still the same yes and this was included in various ways to try to get you to think about eyes and fingers and drawing lines and once you did that you would get this message Catherine's long finger over shadows, earth-buried, yellow amulet midday, points the hour in light of equinox, look you. First of all, if you do a cross stick with this, it spells out close to Ampt Hill, which is the place in England where this was sort of close to. The Catherine's long finger doesn't really mean a finger, it's actually the grave of Catherine of Aragon. Who is Catherine of Aragon? She was the first of King Henry VIII's six wives.

Oh, one of six, two, eight. Yep. There were a lot of, like, confirmers in this book that would let you know you were on the right track. She had a big old cross up on a hill. The book clued you in about the equinox and it clued you into midday to noon. On the day of the spring equinox, at noon, the shadow of her cross will point to right where the rabbit was. There were two physicists who were working together who, years later, they, they, figured this out. They were

just a little bit too late. Unfortunately, the hair had been found, had been dug up by a guy named Ken Thomas. And when Kit Williams talked to Ken Thomas, he sent in the right solution, they kind of dug it up together. He realized,

Ken Thomas knew what the final, like he knew where the hair was and what the cross pointed there, but he hadn't solved the puzzle. He didn't understand what, he didn't get there by solving the puzzle of the book. But he found it. So, I mean, it was pretty much just, you just have to find it. Years later, quote-unquote, Ken Thomas sold the rabbit at auction at Sotheby's.

Kit Williams tried to bid, but it went way higher than he was willing to pay. As part of the auction, a little bit more information came out about Ken Thomas, and that was not his real name. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. And he was, in fact, a friend of a friend of Kit Williams' ex-girlfriend. Damn it! Who had been living with him at the time. knew some of this, knew enough of the solution that she sort of vaguely knew where it was buried and although she doesn't admit it like basically it turns out that three of them

her and a guy that she knew and then Ken Thomas who was the the fall guy essentially they went out there and they dug it up yeah yeah yeah people they say that like it was not uncommon to see a lot of people out in England just digging stuff 79 and 1982 because that's about how long it took. Just digging up... Random stuff. For the rabbit. Yep.

And he did. I actually... I don't have a copy of Mascarade here with me, but I have a copy of the sequel that he did, which is really interesting. I want to show it to you guys. Oh. So you may notice something interesting

about this book that I'm passing around is that it actually doesn't have a title. And so the puzzle of this book, the title is the solution to the puzzle. Oh, cool. And this is a lot... I'm not going to say the title of this book because this book is easier to solve.

Okay. You could solve this. Well, so here's a problem. If I want to get this from Amazon, how? It's known as Untitled or the Bee Book. Okay. But no one, there's no spoilers. Don't do too much research on it because you might find the answer.

Okay, got it. All right. Cool. All right. And that's our puzzle episode. Thank you guys for joining me. Thank you, Tyler. Oh, my pleasure.

We don't really get guests that often. I'll come back anytime. Oh, I can't believe we. in a puzzle episode without a puzzle in it. Oh, I know. That's so weird. So weird. We should have put it in the beginning, maybe in the alliteration.

I don't know. We should have tried to hide a puzzling word somewhere in the alliteration. Yeah. Good point. Oh, well. Well, I hope you guys learned a lot today about masquerade, about cryptic crosswords. You can find our show on iTunes, on Stitcher, on SoundCloud, on Spotify, and on our website. at good jobbrain.com.

And don't forget, our listener friend, Neville Fogarty, wrote us a crossword puzzle. So check the site, and maybe you can solve this puzzle. We'll see you guys next week. Bye. Bye. the Minute Earth podcast. Every episode of the show dives deep into a science question you might not even know you had, but once you hear the answer, you'll want to share it with everyone you know. Why do rivers curve? Why did the T-Rex have such tiny arms? And why do so many more kids need glasses now

than they used to? Spoiler alert, it isn't screen time. Our team of scientists digs into the research and breaks it down into a short, entertaining explanation, jam-packed with science facts and terrible puns. Subscribe to Minute Earth wherever you like to listen.