Cluemeister's Corner
Results for October and November
Time for the Cluemeister and his prolonged throat congestion to cough up some answers! First, the presidential puzzle from October.
The Atypically Typical President
No one answered this trivia-intensive process-of-elimination poser during the month in which it was posed, so the Cluemeister decided to extend honors to whoever managed it first. Congratulations to Lisa S. for correctly winnowing down the presidents described by the 42 facts until only one remained:
Chester A. Arthur.
Is Arthur, who served as the 21st president from 1881 to 1885, our country's most boring president? Not necessarily--he's just not very trivia-friendly. (Second place was Franklin Pierce.)
If anyone wants to know which presidents matched which particular answers, they can write to the Cluemeister and ask.
And then we have last month's puzzle...
Dramatis Personae
Twenty characters (and in a couple cases, the word is used loosely) from the works of Charles Stross, Minicon 46's esteemed Author Guest of Honor, were hidden in a 27 x 27 grid of letters. When the letters used in the names are eliminated, the remaining letters from the 9 x 9 box in the center of the grid--the "middle ninth"--spell out the following question:WHAT STROSS NOVELLA ABOUT A RESHAPED EARTH WON A LOCUS
The answer is 2006's "Missile Gap", which won a Locus Award for Best Novella in 2007. Accelerando, written the previous year, is close, but not quite right. It also won a Locus, but in the Novel category, and while the Earth is dismantled in it, the stories aren't set on a reshaped Earth, per se.
Congratulations to Patricia Z. for being the first to pounce on this one.
The December puzzle, which is about chess notation, will be up in a few days.
As always, feel free to write to the Cluemeister at thorin (dot) tatge (at) pobox (dot) com.