And in a semi-related story, big ups to Tiger Woods, who won the U.S. Open on one leg and has now shut it down for the rest of the year. Who said golf was a sport for wusses.

Pentagram Interactive provides a quick list of fourteen cryptograms, or word-puzzles, for you to decipher. Each one is fairly simple, with a different trick, and they all come from a holiday book they printed a couple of months ago.

The puzzles are extremely elegant, and if you get stumped, just mouse over the images to get the key. The secret is not to think too hard, even on the ornate-looking ones.

 Adena has come upon some scans of the original versions of the Monopoly cards, before they decided on the whole rich-old-man theme. I’m a sucker for these quick pen-and-ink graphics, and these don’t disappoint.

Bertoletti’s accomplishment is amazing in & of itself (I have a serious appetite, and I don’t know if I could eat 420 of anything at one sitting. Getting 420 Tic-Tacs into your mouth in 8 minutes would be a stretch. Think about it), but what makes this story unique is the invention by CNN (documented here) of the word “sklorks.” It’s a word that had no meaning before this. It sounds like some kind of onomatopoeia that the late, great Don Martin would have devised. Honestly, I like the word. It describes the activity exactly right, it’s easily understood once you get even a hint of context, and I think the IFOCE should totally pick it up as their own. I don’t see CNN running with it, even if they should.

Also, big ups to the Deep Dish. He looks a little green in that video. I hope he’s alright.

[via Andre]

That’s not a typo.

I’ve become a huge fan of the television British manchildren-with-cars show Top Gear (I almost said shows like Top Gear, but that wouldn’t be true. That show is a jewel in the manure pile as car shows go. I’m not a car guy, but something about this one show does it for me. There is something to be said for mouthy bastards going very fast.) My tastes in automobiles tend toward the nonexistent; I’ve lived in big cities most of my life, and I find bicycles and public transit to be perfect for my needs. (The only vehicle I’ve ever owned was a 1971 Volkswagen Hippie Van, rather like the one pictured above, which I nicknamed “El Basurero” and actually lived in for a few months during my wandering time between high school and college. Which is, of course, not to be confused with my wandering time since then, which, well, yeah.)

That said, those guys would love (or, more to the point, have no doubt long since heard of, and maybe even are involved in) the 24 Hours of LeMons, an endurance race to see what very cheap car can go the farthest in one calendar day.

It’s a multi-stage event:

The 24 Hours of LeMons is a weekend-long race for cars purchased, fixed up, and track-prepped for total of $500 or less. Each team may also face qualifying rounds such as the Marxist Parking Valet, the Widdling Rottweiler Slalom, and/or the Stoney Bike-Messenger Shooting Gallery. Generally, track racing consists of two endurance sessions, one on Saturday and one on Sunday, with a late-night intermission for sleeping, eating, and Band-Aid application in between. Count on plenty of noise, prizes, water fights, and questionably civilized fun before, during, and after the track sessions. Finally, assuming you’re still standing, there’s the gala awards ceremony which presents trophies, plaques, and winner’s purses paid out in nickels.

Nickels!

There are six LeMons events on the docket for this year, and the closest to NYC is in Stafford Springs, CT, in August. If you go, even to watch, let me know.

NASA has superimposed a detailed map of where they went when they left the lander over a regulation baseball field, and except for one Neil Armstrong foray of almost a hundred yards out to plant a panoramic camera, everything else happened within the space of your average infield.

No wonder we didn’t find any monsters or restaurants up there.

We have to go back.

Q. Is it possible to score a goal with a head in hockey?

It is doable. But you shouldn’t try – because you can injure yourself very seriously, so that you won’t even realize whether it was you who scored the goal, maybe you won’t even remember your own name. You use your head to think. And also, as boxers say, you use it to eat.

Another popular game is the “Test Your Strength” device in which a lever, when struck by a hammer, catapults a rubber marker up a steel wire. Actually, physical strength has nothing to do with it—a girl can send the marker to the top while the “village blacksmith” might hammer all day and never reach the top. The reason is that by resting his foot on a lever the operator can make the wire taut or loose as he desires. Therein lies the secret. When the wire is tight, the marker goes crashing into the bell; but when the wire is loose, it encounters enough friction to retard it.

 Keep this in mind at Coney Island or the Ex or wherever you go. If you want a square deal, make your own game. Anyone else is in the screwing-you business. (I have a huge compendium-type book about this stuff that’s going to be a future DSO prize.)

He’s by turns unsettled and intrigued by the flow and the controlled violence:

We—Americans—like to watch; we like the adrenalic discharge of vicarious excitement or triumph or success. But we like to do also: the discharge of the personal excitement of the triumph and the fear to be had from actually setting the horse at the stone wall or pointing the overcanvased sloop or finding by actual test if you can line up two sights and one buffalo in time. There must have been little boys in that throng too, frantic with the slow excruciating passage of time, panting for the hour when they would be Richard or Geoffrion or Laprade—the same little Negro boys whom the innocent has seen shadow-boxing in front of a photograph of Joe Louis in his own Mississippi town, the same little Norwegian boys he watched staring up the snowless slope of the Holmenkollen jump one July day in the hills above Oslo.

That the author of Absalom, Absalom! and Light In August would be a little freaked out by body checks and group violence is, I guess, not surprising, but by the end of the game, it’s clear that he, a southern gentleman to the bitter end, comes to understand the apppeal of the sport. (I wonder what a natural northern machito like Hemingway thought of hockey. No doubt he caught a few Blackhawks games in his time.)