On Sunday, I helped Kevin and his team, Society for Creative Anarchism, with a big question in KVCS's 50-hour trivia contest, "TSI: Trivia Scene Investigation". The question was as follows:
Someone has been murdered, and the only clue is a series of five numbers:
19, 39, 74, 148, 295
What is the victim's mother's maiden name?
Read on to find out the answer to this and other questions...
My first thought was about how the numbers related to one another. From 19 to 39, you double and add one. Then double and subtract 4, double exactly, and double and subtract 1. But that didn't really lead anywhere.
One of the other players thought that the numbers might relate back to previous questions... they found hour 1 question 9, hour 3 question 9, hour 7 question 4, hour 14 question 8, and hour 29 question 5. Those answers were "OH", "BE", "Ink", "hot", and "Jowls". At this point, I had enough information to solve the puzzle.
-Show answer--Hide-
I went to the Wordsmith Anagram Generator, and found hundreds of possible anagrams. I hoped that, if it was an anagram, it wasn't something like "BEL SHH I JOT WOK NO", so I set the maximum words to three, and found one that was quite interesting: "BOOTH WILKES JOHN". Aha!
From there, it was a pretty quick jump to finding the White House biography of Abraham Lincoln, which includes this sentence: "My mother [...] was of a family of the name of Hanks."
I told Kevin, he passed it on to the rest of the team, and they submitted the answer. It was right! That was worth 500 points for the team, which (based on the final ratings) raised them from 26th place to 23rd. Woohoo!
After that, I downloaded mIRC and logged into the channel where they were discussing other questions. Some of the ones I helped contribute to:
Q: "In CSI, what kind of burger does Nick get when he goes to In 'n' Out?"
A: -Show Answer--Hide Answer- Double Double, Animal Style (from the episode "Fur and Loathing")
Q: [Audio clue] "What is the full name of the person heard entering the room, responsible for increasing Darth Vader's heartbeat?"
A: -Show Answer--Hide Answer- Heidi Klum (from a Target commercial)
(Others knew this one as well, but I got it before even hearing the audio clue.)
I had fun. :-)
davidh
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