Tag Archives: knives out

I-Got-The Christie’s: A Puzzly Crime Hashtag Game!

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You may be familiar with the board game Schmovie or hashtag games on Twitter.

For years now, we’ve been collaborating on puzzle-themed hashtag games with our pals at Penny Dell Puzzles, and this month’s hook was #PennyDellPuzzleMystery. Today’s entries all mash up Penny Dell puzzles with TV shows, movies, books, characters, concepts, and anything else that fits the mystery genre!

Examples include: Sherlock Home Runs, Two at a Crime, or The Bricks and Mortar of Roger Ackroyd.

So, without further ado, check out what the puzzlers at PuzzleNation and Penny Dell Puzzles came up with!

Agatha Crisscrosstie

Mixed Bagatha

Murder on the Easy Crossword Express

Murder, She Quote / Murder, She Quotefinds

Mary Higgins Clark’s The Shadow of your Smile

Mary Higgins Clark’s On the Stretch Letters Where You Live

Joanne Fluke’s A Cinnamon Roll Recipe Time Murder

Paige Shelton’s The Killer Maze

Perry Mason’s The Case of the Mystery Melody

The Mirror Image Crack’d from Here to There

The Secret Word of the Old Clock

The Purloined Letterboxes

The Glass Keyword

Secret Word Agent

Double Trouble Agent

Word-a-Mata Hari

Nancy Drew and the Hidden Word Squares

Nancy Drew: Double Trouble Shooter

Sorry, Wrong Number Sleuth

D.O.ABC’s

Alfred Hitchcock and the Three of a Kind Investigators

Alphagrid HitchCrackers

PsyCodeword

To Catch a Themewords

Dilemma “M” for MurDittos / Dial-A-Grams for Murder

Rear Windowboxes

The 39 Stepping Stones

John GrishAnagrams

Miss Marbles

Hercule Poirows Garden

Fill-In Marlowe

Crackerjacks Reacher

The Alphabet Soup Murders

Pretty Maids All in a Rows Garden

They Only Kill Their Masterwords

Who’s Calling the Great Chefs of Europe?

Evil Under the Sunrays

Word Trails of the Pink Panther

Against All Odds and Evens

Body Double Trouble

Se7en-Up

Along Came a Spider’s Web

The Da Vinci Codewords

Trixie Belden and the Secret Words of the Mansion

Knives Out of Place

SpyMasterwords

Whopunit

The Dresden Tiles

Arth-Here-and-Thur Conan Double-Trouble-Doyle, Word Seek Mystery Person!

He’s the WatSunrays to your Sherlock Homeruns

The Sign of the Four Corners / The Sign of Foursomes

The Man With the Twisted Blips

221 ABC’s

Alphabet Soup For Two-Twenty-One-B Baker Street

Matchmaker Street Irregulars

“…What’s Left must be the truth.”

The Seven Percent Solution is on Page 178

I’m not very familiar with the mystery genre. I’ve heard of author Sara Pairsetsky and her novels Critical Masterword and Spellbound Game, though.

APPMystery

One intrepid puzzler went above and beyond by submitting the following pun-fueled message:

I have recently begun reading an author by the name of C.J. Boxes, needless to say he writes Mystery Word Seeks and I believe that that the C.J. is short for Crackerjacks.

Boxes is best known for his Joe Picker Upper series of novels and some of my favorites are “Savage Home Runs,” “Blackouts of Range,” “Breaking Point the Way,” and of course “Vicious Circle Sums.”

Recently Boxes’ latest series featuring a pair of Montana private investigators has been picked up by ABC’s television and the show depicts Double Trouble and the detectives come Face to Face with Deduction Problems in stories such as “Pair Off Dice Game Valley” where they ultimately answer the Big Question.

I’m glad to share this with y’all.

Have you come up with any Penny Dell Puzzle Mystery entries of your own? Let us know! We’d love to see them!

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Famous Director Stumbles Into Trivia Trap!

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[Image courtesy of Buzztime.]

It’s no secret that I love trivia. I enjoy bar and pub trivia nights, I compete in an online trivia league (Learned League), and I’ve served as a quizmaster myself. I delight in slipping trivia into puzzles — from encrypted content to tricky crossword clues — and I happily peruse trivia books whenever I find them.

Recently I was reminded of one of my favorite trivia stories, and I thought I’d share that story with you today.

It all starts with a few tweets by filmmaker Rian Johnson, director of Brick, Looper, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and Knives Out.

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He then shared this text from Wikipedia:

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Yes, as many fans and readers had commented, keen-eyed Columbo viewers had discovered the name “Frank” on Columbo’s ID, but the famous detective’s first name was never spoken or mentioned onscreen.

I had encountered a similar problem with a trivia game years ago that asked for the first name of the character Gilligan from the TV show Gilligan’s Island. I had no idea, and got the question wrong.

But as it turns out, Willy, Gilligan’s first name, was never mentioned on the show. The show’s creator always envisioned the character with that name, but it was never officially canon. (Bob Denver, who played Gilligan on the show, often joked that the character’s name was actually Gil Egan, but it ran together when yelled, as it so often was.)

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[Image courtesy of Gilligan’s Island Wiki.]

As far as I know, the Gilligan error was simply that, a mistake. But the Columbo error, as mentioned in the Wikipedia article, is an example of a copyright trap.

A copyright trap is an intentionally false, seemingly trivial piece of information in a larger work, intended to help demonstrate plagiarism if the larger work is ever stolen or copied. (After all, anyone who had done their own research would have discovered it was incorrect and left it out, or at the very least, not included it as part of a wholesale act of plagiarism.)

And the more you learn about copyright traps, the more ridiculous and intricate they become.

There have been:

  • false cities (aka paper towns) on maps, like Agloe, New York, and the paired cities of Beatosu and Goblu in Ohio, as well as trap streets, fake mountain peaks, and more
  • false dictionary entries (like esquivaliance in the second edition New Oxford American Dictionary)
  • false encyclopedia entries (like the story of a photographer named Lillian Mountweazel who exploded on a shoot for Combustibles magazine)
  • false movies (like Dog of Norway, a fictional film mentioned in The Golden Turkey Awards, a book I actually own, alongside its sequel, Son of Golden Turkey Awards)
  • a false member of the German parliament
  • false Google searches (which were used to purposely expose the search engine Bing for copying Google’s search results)

columbo

[Image courtesy of RadioTimes.]

Although Mr. Worth’s Columbo trap did reveal the thieving nature of the designers of the original Trivial Pursuit, it failed to protect him. It also failed to protect trivia fans, as this and other spurious bits of trivia continue to percolate throughout trivia books, webpages, and other sources. (I’ve found easily misproven false trivia everywhere from IMDB to Ripley’s Believe It or Not books.)

So enjoy your trivia, but keep your eyes peeled, fellow puzzlers and trivia-hounds. You might just get tripped up by a copyright trap one of these days.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!