I went on a date tonight- with a known psycho hose beast. It's a long, convoluted story, and I thankfully had very little-to-nothing to do with it except as an innocent bystander. Anyway, the woman is a friend of mine and she's getting her shit together. She asked me out to see a movie with her and I accepted. I have utterly no interest in the woman except as a friend, and I'm fairly sure that's obvious to her, but we had fun. We were originally going to see the Harry Potter movie (second time for me, first for her), but I was late in meeting up with her, so we had to select an alternative movie. Second runner up was "Monsters, Inc.", which was fun, entertaining and made me laugh out loud. I needed to laugh some. Laughter is a great thing to help a person step away from stress. At the end of the movie I was certain that there would be some sort of "capper", which is typical of Pixar productions to add stuff after the credits just for shits and giggles. She was reluctant to wait around, so I bet her that there would be a capper- the prize was a cup of coffee. If I was right, she'd buy. If I was wrong, I'd buy. Sadly, I was wrong (yet another reason why I don't gamble, folks- when I press my luck, it presses back).
We got out of the movie and went back to Cafe Coco, where we bumped into impishlaugh. I bought my "date" her coffee and made off to get today's newspaper, intent on doing the crossword, as is per my usual routine. I try to do the crossword every day (except Sundays... those usually require more thought than I would like to put into them). impy and I had this sort of tradition, which is to do crosswords together whenever possible. She's been kinda absent from the Cafe lately, but tonight we tore into that crossword like it was barely even there (impy did most of the work because I was having trouble filling in blanks from an awkward angle).
With the crossword done, I decided to take a table by myself and check out today's "CryptoQuote" in the business section. About a month ago toastido and I discovered the CryptoQuote and found it practically impossible to crack. Ever since then I've taken a passing interest in it, just the occasional glance, to see if I could pinpoint a pattern of some sort. Until today, nothing about them seemed to make any sense.
But today I beat it.
In about 5 minutes.
Yeah, I'm proud of myself for it. What of it? I mean, toastido and I aren't exactly idiots. My IQ was rated at 182 when I was 14. His can't be lower than 160. Each of us qualify as geniuses- and the two of us combined couldn't crack one of those damn things. But tonight, I guess I was just "on." Here's the encrypted quote (in case you're interested):
B WKBOR B IMSTA WSNO
QOA TBEU GBWK QOBCQTY,
WKUX QNU YM DTQIBA
QOA YUTH-IMOWQBOUA.
-- GQTW GKBQCQO
The first thing that stood out, immediately, was the one-letter words- both of them with the encryption "B." I knew, instinctively, that "B" could stand for only one of two letters- A or I. Since the cipher was a quote, I decided that the letter "I" would have to be it, because personal quotes don't usually start with "A {blank} A {blank}". Therefore, "B" should stand for "I."
I looked at the second word, a five-letter job. Racking my brain, I realized that the word "think" would fit nicely. As in, "I think I...." Working on that assumption, I began filling in the letters, bit by bit and things started to make sense. Before I knew it, I was looking at the thing half-completed inside of two minutes. Here's the answer:
I think I could turn
and live with animals.
They are so placid
and self-contained.
-- Walt Whitman
No math was involved. No real "strategy," either. A little bit of probability analysis, simple deduction and some horse sense and the rest was simply looking at it and trying to figure out what would make sense. I still can't figure out the encryption method used or the code key, but the answer I devised is comprehensible and works perfectly.
Today was a simple exercise in following my "gut" and it seems to have worked out well. All in all, not a bad day.