I should have said no to today's Barry C. Silk puzzle (answers) which would not, of course, have made me a CONSENTING ADULT. I struggled mightily for the second Saturday in a row. Orange found it easier than Friday's but my experience was the opposite. I barely slowed down yesterday. Today was impossible without help, once again making my official solve time infinite. What fun is a hobby that depresses me?
I have no idea what "Lard source" FATBACK means and something tells me I don't want to learn. So many facts I didn't know, and even what I knew I couldn't dredge up. Here's how bad it was. I drove all through the "County west of Dublin" not that long ago and still couldn't remember KILDARE. Depressing.
Once again I'll resort to meaningless statistics in lieu of actual insight. This puzzle uses every letter of the alphabet making it the fourth pangram of the year at the NYT. Only 3.5% of puzzles in my database have that distinction. Now your know.
At least you got all the answers. I had to get a couple from you last night...but I did give you credit ; )
It is sometimes depressing, and I wonder why we're such gluttons for punishment.
Fatback is exactly that...the fat from the back of a hog. I refrained from posting a picture of that one.
Posted by: Linda G | February 23, 2008 at 09:26 AM
That was so worth saying that I said it three times. I kept getting an error message that my comment didn't publish...but it did, and it did, and it did.
Posted by: Linda G | February 23, 2008 at 09:28 AM
I was worried about you when I saw no post after midnight. I only expect that now that you have disclosed your automated methodology. I agree, this was enormously challenging. 45% of the words used would be considered rare and over 10% make their first appearance. And statistics are not meaningless, but they do lie. I won't relate that to your blog though. How did you get HERAT? I wanted FARAH (about the only province I knew and it fit). I hope that if you gave me this puzzle in a few weeks I could do it in less than an hour, however, I am not so sure about that.
Posted by: PhillySolver | February 23, 2008 at 09:35 AM
Sorry about the TypePad weirdness. I've deleted the duplicates. HERAT came from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_Afghanistan which has a depressing number of Afghani provinces. You're right that five letters isn't enought to nail it. Five letters with the same province and capital name isn't enough either. I have no room in my brain for this level of trivia. I wasn't even going to blog on this puzzle but changed my mind this morning when I found a nice picture of Mt. St. Helens which captured how I felt about it.
Posted by: JimH | February 23, 2008 at 09:44 AM
You bring up an interesting point, Jim. The Saturday experience is so often (for many of us) anything but a walk in the park and I often find myself doing what little I can and then checking out the blogs to get it over with. Is that wrong? ;)
It's just that I've got other things to do with my life and I can't spend 10 hours wracking my brain over stuff that will never come to me no matter what I do. And the way you felt about KILDARE (i.e, you should have known it and DID know it) is the way I felt about NETFLIX. I mean I look at my queue several times every week. How could it not occur to me?
Because I suck at Saturday puzzles!!!!!
Posted by: Wendy | February 23, 2008 at 02:28 PM
Wendy, I'm glad to know I was in good company with NETFLIX...which I knew but couldn't get. I guess I suck at Saturday puzzles right there with you!
Posted by: Linda G | February 23, 2008 at 03:35 PM
Jim, go to my Saturday post and click the link for the Jim Gaffigan comedy routine about bacon. How he milks that much time out of bacon...the man's a genius. His bit about the word "fatback" is funny.
Posted by: Orange | February 25, 2008 at 10:06 AM