Nonagenarian Monkey Puzzler

Reformed Unitarian, Ray, ace cruciverbalist (9,6).
Happy birthday, John!

Havana Rollers

If you know some Spanish, it turns out that the sentence "The cat adores fish" can be parsed in two ways. I learnt today that catador means 'cigar factory' and also, according to this Wikipedia entry, a person that

"... sits in the front of the torcedores (cigar rollers) and reads from a daily newspaper or a book so that they do not get bored by the monotonous work."

Things like this and the Buena Vista Social Club make Cuba sound rather fun. The warm weather probably helps.

Two wrongs make a right

Talking of adders, I have always enjoyed sums like this one

+ WRONG

    WRONG

     RIGHT

     =====

where you have to substitute distinct digits for the letters so that the arithmetic is correct. As in this case, the digits are usually specified to be non-zero.

I have been trying to devise some puzzles involving either the capital Greek letter, or the word, 'sigma'. In the spirit of the above sum, I need solutions for this multiplication:

HELP x ME = SIGMA.

I have found one but suspect there are more -- all suggestions gratefully received.

Junctural Metanalysis

In an earlier post I expressed wonder at the human brain's ability to parse a stream of spoken sounds and hear them as a sequence of recognised words that convey meaning. Sometimes, it seems, the process fails. For instance, there are a number of modern English words that arise from misplacing the space between the indefinite article 'an' and a noun with an initial vowel. Take the word newt, for example. The noun was once ewt, from the Old English eft, but 'an ewt' became 'a newt'. Sometimes it works the other way round. For instance, 'an adder' was once 'a nadder' from the Old English word naedre for a snake. In everyday parlance, his process is called rebracketing, false splitting or misdivision, rather than the technical name of the title.

Many nice examples can be found in this Wikipedia rebracketing article, including the derivation of the expression apple pie order from a mishearing of the French nappes-pliées, meaning "neatly folden linen". (I wonder if you can mis(s)hear sheep.)

C'est bien!

On a recent visit to France, we bought a packet of BNs, or Biscuiterie Nantais biscuits, consisting of two layers of crust sandwiching various flavoured fillings, a little like custard creams with smiley faces. They have not been sold in the UK since 2000, when United Biscuits sold the brand back to Lefèvre-Utile. There is even a "Bring back BNs!" Facebook page, with 659,000 followers.

My family informed me the name is intended to suggest the affirming French word "bien", but I prefer to think they were designed for the French mathematician, Jaques Tits, who devised the powerful concept of a (B,N) - pair for studying linear algebraic groups. Tits, Belgian by birth, was obliged to change his nationality in order to teach in the Collège de France.

A (B,N)-pair?

The Matadors Fish ...

... and the cat adores fish. The brain has an impressive space-bar function for parsing an audio stream.

(Solution to cryptic clue in previous entry: mange tout)

Mind the Gaps

In the previous blog entry, the position of the spaces dramatically affects the meaning of a string of letters. It reminds me of the following cryptic crossword clue:

Vegetable for a dismissive feminist ? (5, 4)

(See next entry for solution.)