![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fauxkloreI had no problem checking into the Adolphus, which is an old hotel (opened in 1912) in the heart of downtown Dallas. I said hello to a few people and I apologize for boring them with my tales of HVAC woe. I unpacked and took a short nap, before calling into my book club meeting. (To my surprise, everyone liked Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan). I went down to the major ballroom we were using and was able to get a little bit of the food from the picnic, which was not particularly exciting. I should note that I will continue my practice of referring to members of the National Puzzlers League by their noms, rather than their actual names. I joined Xemu and a couple of members of his family to play War(ped) Games by WXYZ and Whimsey. This was a Mini Extravaganza, loosely based on the movie War Games. It was enjoyable and the solution was satisfying. After that I played Last Minute Jeopardy VI by Saxifrage and Cazique. That was fun, with the most memorable part being a clue that was what I lost final Jeopardy (and, hence, the game) with when I was on, back in 1989. I am fairly sure I played something else, probably up in the hospitality suite, but my mind is blank.
Thursday was a good day for sightseeing. I started out getting breakfast at Starship Bagels which was quite good, though not as good as the best of New York. (Alas, many bagel shops in New York are not all that good, but there are a few that are extraordinary.) It was also conveniently located quite close to the hotel and, more significantly, across an alleyway from The Eye.
I did a little research after seeing and photographing it and it turns out to have been created by a Chicago-based artist named Tony Tasset in 2007 and is modeled after his own eyeball. Originally the site it is on was the home of the Praetorian Building, a 15-story skyscraper built in 1909. The legend is that the eventual owner of that property proposed building a parking garage there and that local people complained that would be an eyesore. The Praetorian Building was torn down in 2012 and the Eye moved to its site in 2013. It’s a must-see for people who are fans of , say, Claes Oldenburg.
I continued westward, with the goal of seeing the 6th Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. Senior tickets are $20 and I thought there was enough to see to justify the price.
JFK’s assassination was one of my earliest memories, so my memories of it are really just a few images. The museum has extensive background information and lots of news footage and oral history recordings, so it helped fill in the blanks for me. A lot of the emphasis is on what the investigators did and didn’t discover in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. You can also see where Lee Harvey Oswald apparently hid among the boxes of books. And, of course, there was plenty of material about Jsck Ruby and info on the conspiracy theories, including scientific evidence for and against the lone shooter theory. The bottom line is that it was interesting and worth a couple of hours.
After I left the museum, I walked around downtown more, though I needed to stop to sit down and gulp down water in the Texas heat. The only other notable thing I photographed was the “whaling wall.” This is #82 of the 101 walls of painted sea life that the artist, Wyland, painted all over the world between 1981 and 2019. It was painted in 1999 but covered over by advertising around 2015. The pandemic led to a decline in large-scale advertising and the ads were removed in 2020.
I did some more meandering around downtown, but there wasn’t anything in particular that I remembered. There’s a long tradition of foodies getting together for dinner on Thursday night. Necromancer organizes this and has people check off which places they’re interested in and puts together the groups. I ended up with Fritz, Tyger, Femur, and Silk at Musume, a Japanese restaurant in the Arts District. I had a cocktail called “ballet slipper” which had (if I recall correctly) Hangar One rose vodka, strawberry, lemon, and basil. To eat, I got asparagus tempura and some sushi special with hamachi. (There were also a couple of amuse bouche, but I don’t remember exactly what.) Everything was very tasty.
We went back to the hotel for the opening of the official program. If anyone doesn’t know, Willz (probably known to you as Will Shortz of NPR fame) had a stroke in February, and it was a little distressing to see him using a wheelchair and having some speech difficulties which, admittedly, were not helped by the less than optimal sound system in the ballroom. After first-time attendees introduced themselves, there were three games for the evening. The first one was Common Sense in which of teams of 4 tried to identify items leading to clues for each of the five senses. I think everyone on the team I was on found at least part of this to be quite difficult, but it was interesting. Threecycling by T McAy (who had COVID, so was represented by Murdoch) involved several groups of four 6 letter words, each of which shared a trigram (i.e. a set of three letters in order). The trick was that only one clue was revealed at a time and the score depended on which clue you solved them on. I was paired with Bluff for this and we did reasonably well with it. More importantly, I thought it was fun. The final official game that night was Pears Trivia by Kryptogram. This involved trivia questions and deducing a category for the answers out of homonyms for the answers. Most of this was fine, but there was a significant accent issue with with one of the answers. The name “Maude” does not sound anything like the word “mode” to those of us who don’t suffer from midwestern vowel deficiency. “Candide” and “candid” were also a problematic pair, since they have different syllables stressed. What would Henry Higgins say?
They also gave out the con cryptics, which are solved in pairs over the weekend. I did Bank and Unbank by Auro with Jeffurry and we got through it reasonably easily. (Later on I did Four-Part Harmony by Thingummy with Sue++. We did fine up until we got a bit stuck on the extraction to get to the final answer, where we needed a little help.)
There were still unofficial events to go. I know I played Noam’s Silver Anniversary Jeopardy. He always does good trivia games and it was fun, even though I didn’t do very well on it. I think that after that I played a word game with some other people, including Paws, EyeAn, KangaBlue and a couple of others.
I don’t remember at all what I did on Friday during the day other than not quite accomplishing a couple of errands. I am fairly sure I had lunch at the Exchange, a food court place across from the hotel and that I ate a tasty vegan Vietnamese bowl. I’d had the vague intention of going to the George W. Bush Presidential Library and/or the Dallas Museum of Art but, well, it was awfully hot out. At some point I played Slikardy 3: Mission Impuzzible, a mostly cooperative Jeopardy game by Slik. It was a bit heavy on pop culture, but was still entertaining.
The official program had three games/puzzles on Friday night. Spotlight Trivia by Beyond was a really fun trivia game. Everybody stood up and answered sets of true / false questions. The first statement in each set was always true and you had to guess on the second one. If you were wrong, you sat down. My favorite one had to do with whether or not Barry Manilow actually wrote the song “I Write the Songs.” The next game was One to Build On by WXYZ and I’m sorry to admit I don’t remember anything about this one. Finally, there was Consonant Conundrum by Bluff, which had to do with identifying words within a category (e.g. car rental companies) and you had to try to avoid the most common consonant in the potential answers. This was entertaining, albeit complicated, and we did fairly well at it.
I’m sue I did something unofficial after that, possibly one of Murdoch’s games, but my memory is imperfect.
Saturday started with the annual business meeting. There had been previous discussion about how to handle remote voting and there was a report from the committee working on that. There was also an announcement from Jeffurry that he was not going to run for reelection as President, since 6 years is plenty of time to serve. Of course, the biggest topic is always the site for future cons. We already knew that next year will be in Minneapolis from July 17 through 20th. There were bids for 2026 from Bloomington, Indiana and from Philadelphia. Bloomington won, largely because of access to the Slocum Puzzle Collection at the Lilly Library.
After the business meeting, there was lunch, followed by pencil and paper competitions. Manx had an Olympics themed puzzle involving dropping a letter from a word or phrase and anagramming it to get the name of an Olympic sport or host city.Then Willz had 7 wordplay challenges, which I didn’t quite manage to get through. I knew I didn’t have the energy left to do the flats competition. (Flats are a particular type of NPL puzzle. I really only understand a few types of them.) After that Sue++ and I worked on Thingummy’s cryptic and got through filling in the grid, but were stuck for a while on the extraction. (We did eventually get a hint that led us to it.) Then came dinner and the Golden Sphinx Awards, which mostly have to do with contributions to the Enigma, which is the monthly NPL newsletter, aka more puzzles than I will ever have time to do.
The final event was the Extravaganza, which was called Fair Play and written by Fraz, Rasa, and Thingummy and had a theme roughly associated with the Texas State Fair. You can play as either a runner or a stroller, which determines if you are just trying to get through the suite of puzzles quickly or take a more leisurely approach, with slightly different rules for each type of team. I’ve always played as a stroller before, but decided to give it a go as a Runner this year. Let’s just say that I wasn’t completely useless, but I was slower than I’d like. I was particularly proud of myself for figuring out what was going on in a Dr. Who themed puzzle. (Note: I have never seen a single episode of Dr. Who.) Overall, I had fun, which is always the important thing.
I know I played one of Murdoch’s games after that. And I didn’t stay up too ungodly late.
On Sunday, I ate breakfast, packed, and went to the awards ceremony. The winners for the cryptics are chosen randomly from the answers submitted and Sue++ and I won an award. Basically, you can choose a puzzle book, as if I didn’t own enough of those. Apparently, a lot of people had trouble with their flights, but (miraculously) American Airlines failed to treat me with their usual disdain and I had no issues getting from DFW to DCA. And I got home to find that my AC system had been repaired and was functioning!
I have several other things to write about, but I am tied up for the next week or so. I’ll get back to normal life eventually. Oh, wait, being too busy is normal life for me.
Thursday was a good day for sightseeing. I started out getting breakfast at Starship Bagels which was quite good, though not as good as the best of New York. (Alas, many bagel shops in New York are not all that good, but there are a few that are extraordinary.) It was also conveniently located quite close to the hotel and, more significantly, across an alleyway from The Eye.
I did a little research after seeing and photographing it and it turns out to have been created by a Chicago-based artist named Tony Tasset in 2007 and is modeled after his own eyeball. Originally the site it is on was the home of the Praetorian Building, a 15-story skyscraper built in 1909. The legend is that the eventual owner of that property proposed building a parking garage there and that local people complained that would be an eyesore. The Praetorian Building was torn down in 2012 and the Eye moved to its site in 2013. It’s a must-see for people who are fans of , say, Claes Oldenburg.
I continued westward, with the goal of seeing the 6th Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. Senior tickets are $20 and I thought there was enough to see to justify the price.
JFK’s assassination was one of my earliest memories, so my memories of it are really just a few images. The museum has extensive background information and lots of news footage and oral history recordings, so it helped fill in the blanks for me. A lot of the emphasis is on what the investigators did and didn’t discover in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. You can also see where Lee Harvey Oswald apparently hid among the boxes of books. And, of course, there was plenty of material about Jsck Ruby and info on the conspiracy theories, including scientific evidence for and against the lone shooter theory. The bottom line is that it was interesting and worth a couple of hours.
After I left the museum, I walked around downtown more, though I needed to stop to sit down and gulp down water in the Texas heat. The only other notable thing I photographed was the “whaling wall.” This is #82 of the 101 walls of painted sea life that the artist, Wyland, painted all over the world between 1981 and 2019. It was painted in 1999 but covered over by advertising around 2015. The pandemic led to a decline in large-scale advertising and the ads were removed in 2020.
I did some more meandering around downtown, but there wasn’t anything in particular that I remembered. There’s a long tradition of foodies getting together for dinner on Thursday night. Necromancer organizes this and has people check off which places they’re interested in and puts together the groups. I ended up with Fritz, Tyger, Femur, and Silk at Musume, a Japanese restaurant in the Arts District. I had a cocktail called “ballet slipper” which had (if I recall correctly) Hangar One rose vodka, strawberry, lemon, and basil. To eat, I got asparagus tempura and some sushi special with hamachi. (There were also a couple of amuse bouche, but I don’t remember exactly what.) Everything was very tasty.
We went back to the hotel for the opening of the official program. If anyone doesn’t know, Willz (probably known to you as Will Shortz of NPR fame) had a stroke in February, and it was a little distressing to see him using a wheelchair and having some speech difficulties which, admittedly, were not helped by the less than optimal sound system in the ballroom. After first-time attendees introduced themselves, there were three games for the evening. The first one was Common Sense in which of teams of 4 tried to identify items leading to clues for each of the five senses. I think everyone on the team I was on found at least part of this to be quite difficult, but it was interesting. Threecycling by T McAy (who had COVID, so was represented by Murdoch) involved several groups of four 6 letter words, each of which shared a trigram (i.e. a set of three letters in order). The trick was that only one clue was revealed at a time and the score depended on which clue you solved them on. I was paired with Bluff for this and we did reasonably well with it. More importantly, I thought it was fun. The final official game that night was Pears Trivia by Kryptogram. This involved trivia questions and deducing a category for the answers out of homonyms for the answers. Most of this was fine, but there was a significant accent issue with with one of the answers. The name “Maude” does not sound anything like the word “mode” to those of us who don’t suffer from midwestern vowel deficiency. “Candide” and “candid” were also a problematic pair, since they have different syllables stressed. What would Henry Higgins say?
They also gave out the con cryptics, which are solved in pairs over the weekend. I did Bank and Unbank by Auro with Jeffurry and we got through it reasonably easily. (Later on I did Four-Part Harmony by Thingummy with Sue++. We did fine up until we got a bit stuck on the extraction to get to the final answer, where we needed a little help.)
There were still unofficial events to go. I know I played Noam’s Silver Anniversary Jeopardy. He always does good trivia games and it was fun, even though I didn’t do very well on it. I think that after that I played a word game with some other people, including Paws, EyeAn, KangaBlue and a couple of others.
I don’t remember at all what I did on Friday during the day other than not quite accomplishing a couple of errands. I am fairly sure I had lunch at the Exchange, a food court place across from the hotel and that I ate a tasty vegan Vietnamese bowl. I’d had the vague intention of going to the George W. Bush Presidential Library and/or the Dallas Museum of Art but, well, it was awfully hot out. At some point I played Slikardy 3: Mission Impuzzible, a mostly cooperative Jeopardy game by Slik. It was a bit heavy on pop culture, but was still entertaining.
The official program had three games/puzzles on Friday night. Spotlight Trivia by Beyond was a really fun trivia game. Everybody stood up and answered sets of true / false questions. The first statement in each set was always true and you had to guess on the second one. If you were wrong, you sat down. My favorite one had to do with whether or not Barry Manilow actually wrote the song “I Write the Songs.” The next game was One to Build On by WXYZ and I’m sorry to admit I don’t remember anything about this one. Finally, there was Consonant Conundrum by Bluff, which had to do with identifying words within a category (e.g. car rental companies) and you had to try to avoid the most common consonant in the potential answers. This was entertaining, albeit complicated, and we did fairly well at it.
I’m sue I did something unofficial after that, possibly one of Murdoch’s games, but my memory is imperfect.
Saturday started with the annual business meeting. There had been previous discussion about how to handle remote voting and there was a report from the committee working on that. There was also an announcement from Jeffurry that he was not going to run for reelection as President, since 6 years is plenty of time to serve. Of course, the biggest topic is always the site for future cons. We already knew that next year will be in Minneapolis from July 17 through 20th. There were bids for 2026 from Bloomington, Indiana and from Philadelphia. Bloomington won, largely because of access to the Slocum Puzzle Collection at the Lilly Library.
After the business meeting, there was lunch, followed by pencil and paper competitions. Manx had an Olympics themed puzzle involving dropping a letter from a word or phrase and anagramming it to get the name of an Olympic sport or host city.Then Willz had 7 wordplay challenges, which I didn’t quite manage to get through. I knew I didn’t have the energy left to do the flats competition. (Flats are a particular type of NPL puzzle. I really only understand a few types of them.) After that Sue++ and I worked on Thingummy’s cryptic and got through filling in the grid, but were stuck for a while on the extraction. (We did eventually get a hint that led us to it.) Then came dinner and the Golden Sphinx Awards, which mostly have to do with contributions to the Enigma, which is the monthly NPL newsletter, aka more puzzles than I will ever have time to do.
The final event was the Extravaganza, which was called Fair Play and written by Fraz, Rasa, and Thingummy and had a theme roughly associated with the Texas State Fair. You can play as either a runner or a stroller, which determines if you are just trying to get through the suite of puzzles quickly or take a more leisurely approach, with slightly different rules for each type of team. I’ve always played as a stroller before, but decided to give it a go as a Runner this year. Let’s just say that I wasn’t completely useless, but I was slower than I’d like. I was particularly proud of myself for figuring out what was going on in a Dr. Who themed puzzle. (Note: I have never seen a single episode of Dr. Who.) Overall, I had fun, which is always the important thing.
I know I played one of Murdoch’s games after that. And I didn’t stay up too ungodly late.
On Sunday, I ate breakfast, packed, and went to the awards ceremony. The winners for the cryptics are chosen randomly from the answers submitted and Sue++ and I won an award. Basically, you can choose a puzzle book, as if I didn’t own enough of those. Apparently, a lot of people had trouble with their flights, but (miraculously) American Airlines failed to treat me with their usual disdain and I had no issues getting from DFW to DCA. And I got home to find that my AC system had been repaired and was functioning!
I have several other things to write about, but I am tied up for the next week or so. I’ll get back to normal life eventually. Oh, wait, being too busy is normal life for me.
