Friday, August 17, 2018

Self Styled Success

     A rainy day, nothing to do but wait. So I tried again with Today's Cryptoquip, which I've found to be the most difficult of  puzzles.  Yet it's published in the daily paper, right alongside the simplest of crosswords, the always solvable Jumble, the Sudoku, solvable if you have the patience, and the mind-numbing Word-Sleuth.
   I reasoned some folks must be solving the Cryptoquip; otherwise it would not be published.  Would it?   So I took another look, determined to test my mental faculties. The Cryptoquip consists of groups of letters, jumbled up, with each letter representing another. The "quotes" are original, not famously uttered, are quite lengthy, and often are based on  a pun for the "answer."  The only given clue is a single letter representing another; the solver needs to find out what each of the other letters is.Sometimes the single letter given appears in the quote only once. So other strategy needs to be used. So the -3-letter nonsense syllables may represent the words "and, but, his, you," or any 3-letter verb or preposition. And you can't be sure. I would have assumed such a puzzle to be unsolvable, but today I persevered:
     Cryptocrypt contained about 90 seemingly random letters and 13 words. The only clue is that Y equals C. The letter Y appeared only 3 times among the 90 scrambled letters.
My persevering led to this quote:  " Burrowing creatures that are incredibly skilled at warding off predators' attacks:   Parry Dogs"
  (Yes, I know---I don't really care, Do you?)

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