Yahoo, Google and the likes have been developing some sort of "defense mechanism" against junk mails, otherwise commonly referred to as spams. Although I have not done any research on junk mails, I have a feeling that most of them have something to do with pornographic materials one way or another.
Because of the unending problems with junk mails, Yahoo has developed the kind of "defense" which can detect some words in the titles of the incoming emails. Whenever suspicious words like "ass", "f**K", "pussy" (and this third one has nothing to do with cats) are found in the titles of incoming emails, they are automatically directed into the Spam Box.
However, junk mail senders are not giving up so easily. They're becoming more creative—instead of coming up with the usual promotion in their titles, they have come up with sentences which comprise meaningless combinations of words. And they have been quite successful in getting their emails into the Inbox!
An example of such emails would have titles like this:
Walk participates for injured stage strut in part of harbour.
The sentence has no comprehensible meaning whatsoever, and there is no story contained therein. It is just a line consisting of words which have no apparent connection with each other. In fact, this was the second question in the Triple-One Hunt. I am convinced that it is the result of wanting so much to beat the hunters—at all cost—even if the CoC had to hit below the belt and bite an ear or two.
I have a feeling that the CoC had intended this question to be his "insurance"—one that is not to be answered, even by the best of the best out there.
I myself am a tricky little devil when I set hunt questions, and I am therefore a little embarrassed to admit that eventhough I am supplied with the answer to the above question, I am still not very sure if I am reading the Captain correctly. I suppose it is possible that the seafaring folks may have a different angle of seeing things when compared to the angle we are used to. It might also be possible that my friend, 2 Romans & 1 Impostor, welcomes the Captain's style. For it is without doubt a departure from the norm which we are used to. 2 Roman & 1 Impostor, if you are reading this, please be careful with what you wish for; you may just get those new ideas in hunt quesetions!
Keeping my fingers crossed on the accuracy of my source, the answer to this question was:
WISMA PATCO
And I can only hope that I have successfully found the exact wavelength of the Captain. OK, so here goes nothing...
WALK PARTICIPATES:
Maybe he's trying to signal to the solver that this has something to do with, well, walking. Then "participates" has something to do with joining the act of walking in a group.
FOR INJURED:
Again, as we have seen earlier, the Captain has a strange devotion to the word "for". I'm not very sure of the explanation of its presence in this sentence, but my wild guess is that he is targeting WALK PARTICIPATES to that STAGE STRUT.
"Injured" is probably the Captain's choice of word for an anagram indicator.
STAGE STRUT:
Here, I had to consult my dictionary to make sure I get the exact meaning of STRUT. And one can only guess that the Captain is referring to CATWALK, e.g. by a model on stage. But instead of taking the whole CATWALK, the Captain only wanted CAT. So on account of the anagram indicator in INJURED, the CAT is reconfigured to ATC.
IN PART OF HARBOUR:
The word "in" is a container indicator. It means that ATC from above is to be inserted into PART OF HARBOUR. But here the Captain decides to make life more difficult for the solver. Instead of taking some letters (part of) from the word HARBOUR itself, he expects the solver to come up with the word PORT which is one possible synonym of HARBOUR. So "part of" PORT is PO. Of course it could have been POR or ORT or RT too.
Therefore we insert ATC into PO to get PATCO
I don't know about the many grandmasters hunting that day, but if I were there, I seriously doubt that I could have solved this question. And I'm sure that would have put a smile on the Captain's face the whole week long. Like I said it's not intended to be solved anyway. Now I'm sure you can understand why I hate junk mails so much.
Because of the unending problems with junk mails, Yahoo has developed the kind of "defense" which can detect some words in the titles of the incoming emails. Whenever suspicious words like "ass", "f**K", "pussy" (and this third one has nothing to do with cats) are found in the titles of incoming emails, they are automatically directed into the Spam Box.
However, junk mail senders are not giving up so easily. They're becoming more creative—instead of coming up with the usual promotion in their titles, they have come up with sentences which comprise meaningless combinations of words. And they have been quite successful in getting their emails into the Inbox!
An example of such emails would have titles like this:
Walk participates for injured stage strut in part of harbour.
The sentence has no comprehensible meaning whatsoever, and there is no story contained therein. It is just a line consisting of words which have no apparent connection with each other. In fact, this was the second question in the Triple-One Hunt. I am convinced that it is the result of wanting so much to beat the hunters—at all cost—even if the CoC had to hit below the belt and bite an ear or two.
I have a feeling that the CoC had intended this question to be his "insurance"—one that is not to be answered, even by the best of the best out there.
I myself am a tricky little devil when I set hunt questions, and I am therefore a little embarrassed to admit that eventhough I am supplied with the answer to the above question, I am still not very sure if I am reading the Captain correctly. I suppose it is possible that the seafaring folks may have a different angle of seeing things when compared to the angle we are used to. It might also be possible that my friend, 2 Romans & 1 Impostor, welcomes the Captain's style. For it is without doubt a departure from the norm which we are used to. 2 Roman & 1 Impostor, if you are reading this, please be careful with what you wish for; you may just get those new ideas in hunt quesetions!
Keeping my fingers crossed on the accuracy of my source, the answer to this question was:
WISMA PATCO
And I can only hope that I have successfully found the exact wavelength of the Captain. OK, so here goes nothing...
WALK PARTICIPATES:
Maybe he's trying to signal to the solver that this has something to do with, well, walking. Then "participates" has something to do with joining the act of walking in a group.
FOR INJURED:
Again, as we have seen earlier, the Captain has a strange devotion to the word "for". I'm not very sure of the explanation of its presence in this sentence, but my wild guess is that he is targeting WALK PARTICIPATES to that STAGE STRUT.
"Injured" is probably the Captain's choice of word for an anagram indicator.
STAGE STRUT:
Here, I had to consult my dictionary to make sure I get the exact meaning of STRUT. And one can only guess that the Captain is referring to CATWALK, e.g. by a model on stage. But instead of taking the whole CATWALK, the Captain only wanted CAT. So on account of the anagram indicator in INJURED, the CAT is reconfigured to ATC.
IN PART OF HARBOUR:
The word "in" is a container indicator. It means that ATC from above is to be inserted into PART OF HARBOUR. But here the Captain decides to make life more difficult for the solver. Instead of taking some letters (part of) from the word HARBOUR itself, he expects the solver to come up with the word PORT which is one possible synonym of HARBOUR. So "part of" PORT is PO. Of course it could have been POR or ORT or RT too.
Therefore we insert ATC into PO to get PATCO
I don't know about the many grandmasters hunting that day, but if I were there, I seriously doubt that I could have solved this question. And I'm sure that would have put a smile on the Captain's face the whole week long. Like I said it's not intended to be solved anyway. Now I'm sure you can understand why I hate junk mails so much.
I suspect the Captain got carried away with trying too hard to complicate matters that he did not realise that he has breached the permissible boundary of question-setting. Whenever we are using the hidden words indicator such as SOME, PART OF, FEW and the likes, we can't use indirect words.
For example, when we say:
Grooming business for some Asian nerds.
We can only take the letters found hidden in ASIAN NERDS because of the indicator SOME. So in this case, perhaps if we can spot a signboard bearing, say, ANNE BEAUTY SALOON, then we can accept the answer. But we can't change ASIAN NERDS to, say, BUNG MOKHTAR, and then spot a signboard bearing NG MO MORGUE as the answer. Otherwise the hunters can all come up with their own words and then take some of the letters therefrom to get their answers; and the CoC would have a nightmare marking the answers.
But anyway, I want to repeat, I just hate those junk mails.
1 comment:
I guess, all babies should be given time to learn how to walk. Wobble and fall they may along the way, but eventually they will master the graceful strut.
I am not condoning our Captain's style (graceful it is not) and neither am I saying it is downright awful. Instead what I have noticed, is a marked improvement in the effort he has put in when compared to his first hunt. And that deserves some applause, although there is still a lot of room for improvement as pointed out by my fellow editor of A Hunter's Tale and the author of this blog.
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