Washington Post Post Hunt – The Quintet of Puzzels
Yesterday I began our journey on the Washington Post Post Hunt 2009 by explaining the Opening Questions and giving you a “The Map” that we had to use in order to locate the five puzzles.
So a little more about these five puzzles. First of all, the answer to each one of them had to be a numerical value. From that numerical value, you could then leaf through three pages of that Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine and link it up with various clues. On those three pages, there were only five correct clues. The rest were just superfluous junk to stump you and trip you up.
With our coordinates in hand we ran off in the direction of the first clue, but not before stopping to pick up some money that someone on stage was throwing out.
The Quintet of Puzzels
The following are the five puzzles we had to solve to get the clues in order to solve the End Game. We went in no particular order.
H-6: The Debating Congress-people
Even if we had completely messed up the Opening Questions it wouldn’t have mattered much. All we had to do was follow the throngs of people and look for something totally absurd in the middle of our Nation’s Capitol.
We arrived across the street from where we started from, hearing two “Congress-people” shouting about some bill, House Bill number 98999. They seemed pretty hot about it. Saying over and over that it was a problem with accountability. And insisting that it all lead back to the text. In fact, they both said that they could stand around all day talking about the lack of accountability in House Bill #98999, and that the key word was accountability. They also mentioned that they hoped that the 435 members of the House would do the right thing by this proposed bill.
Well, it didn’t take long for me to figure out that this was the puzzle that we were supposed to use our cell phone with texting capabilities. And I figured pretty quickly that 98999 was the number I was supposed to text something to. And also, the key word was accountability, and that was clearly what I was supposed to text.
Too bad I can’t spell.
I texted the word “acountability” to 98999 over and over again and kept getting this message back saying that wasn’t what I was looking for! Over and over I texted getting the same message back (I rue the day I open that AT&T bill). Suddenly a light went on and I remembered the extra “C.” I got back this response:
The Solution is a simple majority.
Std. msg chgs apply
Simple majority…. Ah-HA! 432 Members of the House divided by 2 + 1! The answer is 218.
Clue #218 said: “It starts five-three.”
E-14: Failed Monuments
Feeling really awesome and sure that we were going to win this thing after solving the Debating Congress-people puzzle we ran over to E-14 on our map and were stunned to find that there were huge concrete statues with seemingly little to do with each other.
There was a ghost with an empty thought bubble, a large artillery unit (a cannon), a vacuum cleaner, a stack of eye-balls, and an hour glass.
But what did it all mean?
Well, if you start sounding out what’s there… and you kept in mind that before you left on your frantic search the guys said it was important that you took a goodie bag… then you started the following:
“Boo”
“Cannon”
“Vacuum”
“Eyes”
“Hourglass”
Hmm…. that’s all starting to sound familiar! Except for the vacuum, which is really a “Hoover!” Suddenly we realized that these statues were Presidents of the United States of America. The ghost and the artillery unit were supposed to represent Buchanan, the vacuum: Hoover, and then the tower of eyes next to the hourglass was Eisenhower.
Now that we have the Presidents that the statues represent we had to figure out how to make them into a number (remember, all the answers have to be numbers). The only logical thing would be to take the order that they were president and smush those numbers together. 153134 is the number that corresponds to the clue “Let it Bee [picture of a cute little bumble bee where the word should be]”
K-6: Post Hunt Stimulus Package
Remember that dollar bill that I picked up on my way to the first Hunt clue? Well, it came back to haunt me. It was most certainly part of one of the puzzles. Immediately, I noticed the logo on the back; Sandy Springs Bank. It made me think of something I’d seen in the magazine — an advertisement in the very back.
But there was more. The “Uncle Sams” throwing out money were also sporting a big chart showing a bunch of random commodities and their prices per whatever (some pound, some ounce, some other various weights / measurements). I was sure that you had to match up the info on the chart to something in the advertisement, since the money told you to go the advertisement.
We had the following:
- Oil: $50/barrel
- Corn: $5/bushel
- Kobe Beef: $102/pound
- Gold: $893/ounce
- Steel: $1000/ton
- Caviar: $90/ounce
We hastily settled on “Caviar” because it was the only commodity that had the same number as any number in the advertisment, 90.
Later we returned to this puzzle because our original answer just didn’t seem right. Dad turned the bill over and over in his hand and started to read everything on it. Suddenly he realized that on the back there was a convenient typo: “In Gold We Trust” Suddenly, it was all clear! The commodity that we were looking for wasn’t Caviar, it was Gold, and the number that corresponded to that commodity was: 893 (“Do not foreclose on this home, Snidely!” “Indeed I shall not — for two thousand dollars, your daughter’s virginity and 24 toy poodles!”).
O-8: Weird Dude Handing Out Papers
Before truly solving the Stimulus Package puzzle we headed over to the last two puzzles. At O-8 we were ushered through a single file line and a very silent guy handed us a piece of paper:
“Find the missing letters in what I said.” Weird. What could that mean? Suddenly, I remembered that I had seen that guy somewhere before… somewhere pretty familiar…
THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE!!!
Yes, there was an article about him… so it must mean that there are missing letters in the article, maybe misspellings? So we started tearing through the article and we came up with “I” and “X”, so that could be either 9 or 11 in Roman Numerals. There was no “9″ on the clue page, but there was an “11″ so we settled on that one. The corresponding clue was “Kitsch me, you fool.”
Too bad we didn’t go through the article twice because we might have found that we missed a letter. The letter “S” was also missing, which would have indicated that the appropriate answer was “S-I-X” or “6″ and the corresponding clue would be “At 3 p.m. we will give you the end.”
S-9: Mimes? Or Statues?
We arrived in front of the Old Post Office to throngs of people surrounding mimes… no wait… not mimes… Living Statues! Two people were dressed up as Classical Greek Revival Statues (or maybe Roman?) and they were posing. We also noticed that there was another handout.
What? This one was worse than the last one!!! We sat and puzzled and puzzled and puzzled over this one. First, after having studied Native American Studies in at W&M during my fond Anthro years, I don’t recall on single creation story that said the Earth was pooped out of an eagle. Second, we could tell that this was clearly supposed to be something that we were adding and subtracting and getting a numerical value for.
We did the only thing we knew how to do… we counted the words.
“According to ancient Native American legend, the Earth was originally pooped out of an eagle.” is 15 words long.
“It is believed to be the world’s largest freestanding polyp.” is 10 words long (if you count “world’s” as only one word).
“Little Alice loved hanging out with Uncle Henry, but she kept a sledge hammer ready in case he got frisky.” is 20 words long. So…
15 + 10 – 20 = 5
“5″ was one of the clue answers and corresponded to “You don’t want it, you want what ababcdcdefefgg.”
Again, too bad we were completely wrong on this one. I’m not even going to begin to explain the right way. Just watche the video.
In summary
OK, so in summary, here is what we arrived at
Our Answers
- Clue #218 “It starts five-three”
- Clue #153134 “Let it Bee”
- Clue #893 “Do not foreclose on this home, Snidely! Indeed I shall not — for two thousand dollars, your daughter’s virginity and 24 toy poodles”
- Clue #11 “Kitsch me, you fool”
- Clue #5 “You don’t want it, you want what ababcdcdefefgg.”
The Correct Answers
- Clue #218 “It starts five-three”
- Clue #153134 “Let it Bee”
- Clue #893 “Do not foreclose on this home, Snidely! Indeed I shall not — for two thousand dollars, your daughter’s virginity and 24 toy poodles”
- Clue #6 “At 3 p.m. we will give you the end.”
- Clue #580 “For cinematic realism, madam, you will be tied to a four-poster bed and compelled to squeal as we tickle your feet with an emu feather.”
And because I’m especially evil like that I’m not telling you a think about the end game until maybe tomorrow… maybe not till next Monday! 
