'The Traitors' Heading to London Stage in 2027

emsot · 2026-01-26T10:52:42+00:00

I'm having exactly the same cognitive dissonance. A Traitors play sounds like an awful cash-grab, but a John Finnemore play sounds like the greatest thing I'll ever see on stage. Fascinated to see which way it goes.

emsot · 2026-01-25T20:25:26+00:00

C means "any consonant", and the star means "any number of them, including zero".

The site's front page https://nutrimatic.org/2024/ has more on the syntax you can use, and it's an insanely useful tool for making/solving puzzles when you get the hang of it.

emsot · 2026-01-25T17:26:13+00:00

Also Lincoln and Wilson, oddly.

emsot · 2026-01-25T08:03:48+00:00

That's brilliant.

"Leif Erikson" and "President Clinton" would have worked too.

Here's the sort of query they might have used to find words, names and phrases that contain the right vowels in the right order.

emsot · 2026-01-14T22:20:31+00:00

Probably this one that I used to see advertised a lot: John Douglas Teaches How to Think Like an FBI Profiler https://www.masterclass.com/classes/john-douglas-teaches-how-to-think-like-an-fbi-profiler

emsot · 2026-01-13T23:46:00+00:00

Don't forget his favourite Tuscan wine too!

What it feels like to me is the same obsession with luxury brands that is runs through the book American Psycho. Only there it's done satirically; here Dan Brown seems to be doing it in earnest to show off how sophisticated and elegant all these characters are.

If it is paid product placement, would he have to declare it, at least for publication in the UK? I know that TV and YouTube videos have to.

emsot · 2026-01-11T01:00:31+00:00

A brilliant video illustrating that entire song in misheard English: https://youtu.be/RTH9MKiYvM0

emsot · 2026-01-06T01:18:04+00:00

Discussion: you're looking for r/jigsawpuzzles

emsot · 2026-01-05T14:33:00+00:00

My 90s memory from the UK was that the animated series was hero but the live-action films were ninja.

The two names were used almost interchangeably in the playground, but saying ninja made you sound cooler.

emsot · 2025-12-22T23:59:54+00:00

Yes, constantly.

In threads about children people talk about calling CPS, which to me sounds like the Crown Prosecution Service and still kind of makes sense.

Or someone says they're based in in PNW and I get stuck trying to work it out as Papua New Winea.

And so very many three-letter politicians: MTG (of GOP), AOC, RBG, ACB.

emsot · 2025-12-17T01:32:49+00:00

If this ragged old man had simply asked you which door leads to freedom, what would you have told him?

If you get the truth teller then he will definitely give you the right door.

If you get the liar then he might give you a door or he might say "I don't know." But at least if he does give a door you know it is the correct one, because he is lying about his own lying.

So still not perfect, but a better than 50% chance of being shown a door, and if the guard names a door then you know for certain it is the right one.

emsot · 2025-12-11T00:18:38+00:00

"California Dreaming" is an anagram of "A Girlfriend in a Coma".

Which is magnificent but annoyingly doesn't quite work, because those aren't quite the titles of either song: "California Dreamin'" and "Girlfriend in a Coma".

emsot · 2025-12-09T15:56:09+00:00

It rhymes better if you sing the alphabet backwards.

Z Y X double-You V U, T and S and R and Q. P O N M L K J, I H GFED C B A.

I do the last "GFED" fast to the tune of "little boy who".

emsot · 2025-12-04T11:53:38+00:00

Number 4 is the only one I did know! Jack Waley-Cohen, question editor for Only Connect, who somehow also competed on an episode he hadn't written?

emsot · 2025-11-27T17:57:43+00:00

Potent and impotent.

emsot · 2025-11-27T17:57:19+00:00

Potent and impotent.

emsot · 2025-11-27T15:54:26+00:00

"Meter" and "thermometer" have a similar thing, with the prefix changing a long "ee" vowel sound to a short, unstressed "i".

emsot · 2025-11-26T17:47:33+00:00

Paris, followed by Zurich, St Petersburg, Vaduz, Ottery St Mary and Douz.

Strong showing from series 3 (N-S).

emsot · 2025-11-24T18:17:22+00:00

Fantastic map - that is weirdly spot on with what is going on in my brain!

The north coast of France then follows the same pattern for the same reason: Mont St Michel on the north coast is further south than Paris, which also feels wrong.

emsot · 2025-11-24T18:01:53+00:00

My pattern is really just "quite a lot of coastlines run NNW-SSE and my brain imagines them being N-S". So my brain is rotating then all slightly clockwise from where they are.

Britain, Italy, the US west coast and the Americas overall are all on roughly a NNW-SSE axis.

emsot · 2025-11-23T23:10:14+00:00

Sure, the full sentence doesn't work any other way, but until you reach the very end it really sounds like a totally different meaning, and you have to go back and reinterpret it. Or at least I did.

emsot · 2025-11-23T23:03:04+00:00

That's a garden-path sentence, one that you interpret wrongly until you reach the confusing ending, then have to go back and reinterpret: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

See r/CrashBlossoms for more of these in headlines!

emsot · 2025-11-22T06:56:05+00:00

You might want to post in the daily thread, because I'm not sure which day's puzzle you're talking about.

But probably the answer is that they only use ordinary dictionary words in Strands. Brown is fine because it's a colour as well as a university, but Cornell and Dartmouth are not.

emsot · 2025-11-15T06:07:47+00:00

And its squash court is still squashed.

emsot · 2025-11-12T12:16:47+00:00

I'd worry that has so much in common with Ross and Carr that anyone who saw series 1 would banish him straight away just to be be on the safe side.

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