Meta-puzzle for Round 7
by Marc Moskowitz
Saturday the boss went out for drinks.
The bartender, a large genial Irishman who's happy to assist you, remembers him. "He was a regular here, always left a couple dollars as a tip. Nice guy. Saturday, he comes in here with a date--real knockout, she was--and buys drinks for the two of them. But here's what blows my mind: he spends the whole time doodling on the napkins instead of paying attention to her.
I kept 'em in case he came back, thought they might be part of his business or something. Wanna see 'em?"
The puzzle answers for this round are:
- LADY ASTOR
- ONE HUNDRED FIFTY
- JAYHAWKS
- EINSTEINIUM
- SECOND PERSON PLURAL
- FISCAL YEAR
- FORTY-FIVE DEGREES
- HALIFAX
Each of these clues leads to a bigram (such as "KO" for "knockout" in
the flavortext):
- MP (Lady Astor was the first female MP)
- CL (Roman numerals)
- KU (Kansas University)
- ES (chemical abbreviation)
- YE (archaic second person plural)
- FY (abbreviation)
- NE (compass direction equivalent to 45 degrees)
- NS (Halifax's province [Nova Scotia])
or, reading down the columns, "MCKEYFNN PLUS EYES." The answer is
MICKEY FINN (yet another kind of knockout).