Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Poker gems, #292

Today's poker gem comes with a twist: it's in the form of a puzzle.

When I was growing up, our daily newspaper had a feature called the "Cryptoquote." It's a simple substitution cypher, featuring a quip or aphorism or observation. My father solved them most days, and he gradually got me interested in doing them, too. He taught me about the basic tools for solving them: the one-letter words, looking for "THE," checking for "-ING" and "-TION" word endings, and so forth. As I got into my teenage years and got better at them, sometimes we would copy them out and make a competition out of who could get it done faster. One of my prouder moments in life came during one of my recent visits to my parents in Utah. Dad told me that he had been unable to figure out that day's Cryptoquote. It took me a while, but I cracked it. It was sort of a "when you can take the pebble from my hand" moment.

Today Dad emailed to me the Cryptoquote as published in yesterday's Salt Lake Tribune. If you're interested in trying to solve it, copy and paste it into a word processor, then print it out in a large font, with lots of spacing between lines. By this puzzle's convention, what appears after the dash is the source or author's name.

This one took me 15 minutes start to finish. Can you do better? (The very fact that it is appearing in this blog already gives you a major hint to the solution that I didn't have.)

Enjoy.



SGWSBG IWOBM XG DOKSKRDGM LW JYWI CWI UONC R BGPKYGM PXWOL SKPEGK QKWU SBPERYT SWJGK. --UPKE PODLRY


Addendum

Brags in the comments about solution times are welcome. Spoilers are not. The first two comments submitted both contained spoilers, and I took the rare step of rejecting them. (Sorry to the posters; no offense intended, but I think that the comments show up without additional clickage for some readers, and I don't want spoilers there.) I will post the solution later.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I won't spoil... but I can say that I bet Jerry Yang could say the same thing.

Cardgrrl said...

It took me 20 minutes. I bow my head in shame.