Philately will get you nowhere - except in this case.
I got the Declan clue straight away. Then again, I am a Gooner. Think geographically for three of those words.
This is just my achilles heel.
I think:
Sirius: Satellite, radio, star, dog (canis major)
Pitch: Tar, card game, baseball/cricket, music
Radio, music? Is that the thread (no).
I didn’t expect them to go Hogwarts there.
So I backed all the way into the answer on that by identifying the letters that go into the final solution and figuring out a Christmas word that hits those letters: Pudding
Now pudding is a topic I feel most Brits have a knowledge of to rival American, say, peanut butter brands and textures. But we Americans know next to nothing. So there’s a lot I might miss here.
However, with that answer in hand I was able to back into Pitch black, Sirius black, Black pudding.
I had to wrack my brain to come up with any other words that would tie into pudding but eventually linked sticky and jasmine to “rice.”
I can’t find a third word to join either of those pairs?
The last one I’m wondering if there is such a thing as Irish pudding and if Declan and Pudsey are considered stereotypical Irish? Again, if all that is true, I have no idea what the third word would be.
Anyway, when I’m done with the others I’ll circle back to see the full solution to this one. It was a disaster from the start for me.
I only have #6 left and it appears to be a simple binary puzzle that I just haven’t gotten to.
Apart from 3 this has been a really fun thing. And, to be fair, it’s fun to complain about 3.
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Oh, Declan Rice plays for Arsenal. Shocked, shocked!, I didn’t get that.
Looks like the answers are not available yet but working backwards I was able to tie all the words to their category.
It’s not, though. Only four rows have notes in them, and you’d need 5 to encode the alphabet (and to connect the 16-8-4-2-1 clue).
I just recycled the paper but I think it was? I just converted the notes to 0/1, converted to decimal, and assigned the result to the standard order alphabet. Got me CAROL.
Edit: Oh I see. You mean using the relative pitch as information. But actually only the empty/full (or half note / quarter note) has any signal. Pitch is just a red herring.
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Oh, right, the bars were significant after all. That seemed like such an obvious red herring.
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We do a quiz at work in my team where we each contribute a round of five questions. Here’s my effort for this year. It’s “guess the celebrity”.
I’ll put the answers up tomorrow.
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I have 2 of them. The others I have no idea!
Answers for above
Taylor Swift (Tailor who is swift)
Cardi B (bee in a Cardigan)
Leo Messi (the messy bit is attached to Leo)
Harry Kane (hairy cane)
Ryan Gosling (rye on gosling)
Zendaya (zen on day “A”)
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Well, I had half of the fifth one. I’m calling that a success.
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“Putting the equine creature after the philosopher.”
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I concur with my learned fellow
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Descartes before the horse. That’s clever.
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Anyone want to guess exactly how many flaps I found inside this book?
I’m always curious when I see these claims.
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Sixty one?
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I bet it’s less than 60, but some of them are double ones, so they’re counting them twice.
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I always feel that, with flaps, you really want quality over quantity. A substandard flap is no flap at all, as the kids say nowadays.
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62 point zero
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