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It’s “New Phonebook Day”. Which means it’s also “Throw Your New Phonebook in the Trash Day”. When is AT&T going to realize no one needs these things? I haven’t opened a phonebook in at least six years. I know I’m not the only one who finds things faster online… when will it no longer be profitable for the phone companies to waste money with these phonebooks?
WIRED 17.07—Arrived in the mail today. That’s me on page 18. Although my mother wonders why the picture makes me look 20 years older.
—A lot of you have asked what swag I scored after the New York Times article mentioned that JJ Abrams would be sending a few things my way for being the first to solve his puzzles. Well, a couple of packages showed up at my doorstep this afternoon. First off was a copy if the May issue of Wired signed by JJ. Also, a few items he rated in his “Playlist” article: a copy of “Catcher in the Rye”, a copy of Kenny Shopsin’s “Eat Me”, Thomas Dolby’s “The Golden Age of Wireless” on CD, and most awesomely—the complete 156-episode, 28-DVD box set of The Twilight Zone. One of my favorite TV shows… as a kid I used to religiously watch WPIX’s annual marathons and tape as many episodes as I could so I could watch them again. Now they’re finally all mine! But it didn’t end there, the second package was a tube—containing two “Star Trek” movie posters signed by JJ as well. Some of you know I collect autographed movie posters, so these will get some prime real estate on my walls!
—Jon at Good Times has finally cracked the second page of the “LOST” numbers puzzle. I’m not a “LOST” viewer, so I missed the WIRED magazine that appeared in the season finale. Apparently, running the numbers against the time travel article in that issue (an article I actually do remember reading!) will give the solution: “The four toed statue is Taweret”. So there you go.
—D’oh! I was looking pretty hard for the hidden word “expostulate” and had actually looked at the staff member names a few times and compared a couple of them to old issues, but didn’t compare the right ones! Oh well, at least I wasn’t the only one who missed it!
“This Bevacqua guy must be a maniac. He solved the thing in a couple days and he’s already taking on the biggest mystery”
— madamimadam, on the unfiction ARG forums.
To be honest, I just get a little obsessive over unsolved puzzles. I’m nowhere the caliber of anyone who can tackle a Sunday New York Times crossword. But it has been fun googling my name the last week or so!
—Still trying to answer some of the leftover questions in the WIRED issue. Based on an idea from Nick Tierce on the Brad!cal blog, I converted the code on the “LOST numbers” page to letters based on a repeating cycle, where “A” could be encoded as 1, 27, 53, or “B” could be 2, 28, 54, etc. Anyway, once the numbers were converted to letters, I tried a Vigenere cipher (inspired by the Kryptos article) and took random guesses at code keys. Sure enough, by my sixth or seventh guess, I decoded the message:
“USE LETTERS BACKWARDS FROM END”
from the first page of numbers. Now I have to figure out what the second page is all about.