Egg Hunt Answers

My dear Isabelle has shown once again that she knows me best, spotting all the eggs except Number 5, which was very subtle, and Number 9, which was very complicated.

Thanks and congratulations to everyone that had a go.  Here are the answers:

================

OVER-EASY

1.  Oh! Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me (for Isabelle)
The title of this post refers to...?

Answer:  Title refers to the lifecycle of stars

"Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me"  is an old mnemonic for remembering the different types of main-sequence stars; OBAFGKM.  See the Wikipedia article on Stellar Classification.

---
2.  Rental Man
The beginning of this post is a nod to which book?

Answer:  Reference to "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" by Hunter S Thompson.

A very deliberate nod, recognising HST's influence on Burning Man.

His opening lines:
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.  I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive...."

And my shameless borrowing:
We were somewhere around Reno on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to wear off.  I remember saying something like "We're all falling asleep... maybe we should put the radio on."

---
3. Back to school with a gun
what's the in-joke here?

Answer:  The Easter Egg in this post is that it refers to five *future* posts that I hadn't yet written - and which themselves each contain an Easter Egg.

"I learnt more about where the lost biros went;"
refers to:  Finding Biros on Prince Consort Road

"the work of the Special Randomness Directorate"
refers to:  Going one-way on Earlham Street

"It is just the cat that Alice really has;"
refers to:  Reading Material

"I'll deal with the English Department later." 
refers to:  Back to school with a gun

"First, I've got to return the hire car..."
refers to:  Rental Man

You might be able to spot that I still owe you two posts...

================

MEDIUM GRADE

4.  Back to school with a gun
How many poets can you find?

Answer:  I reckon eight but you may have found others:

Wordsworth ("cloud-wanderers")
Shakespeare (named)
Carrol ("Carolled and Leared").
Lear ("Carolled and Leared")
Chaucer (named)
Larkin (named)
e e cummings (named)
Hughes (named)

---
5.  Kitchen sink Karma
References to... what?

Answer: Post contains references to dharmic religion

The theme of this post is the reciprocal idea of Karma ("in and out" and "up as it went down") or in other words, what goes around comes around.  It also contains some words which I use as made-up onomatopoeia in English, but which are in fact real words in Sanskrit:

"moksha" - enlightenment
"chitta" - awareness
"sat guru-like" - satguru means "true guru"

---
6.  The one with the sheep
References to...?

Answer: References to "The Tin Drum" by Gunter Grass.

In Grass's novel the main character, Oskar, has a mother named Agnes who eats herself to death after being traumatised watching eels caught using a rotting horse's head.  Maria is the name of Oskar's (first) girlfriend.

I reference this at various points in the post - in the names of the characters, in Oskar's mother becoming unhinged after seeing the sheep's body disintegrate in her swimming pool, and in referring to Oskar and I "...squirming in the Horse's Head".

Bonus mini-egg:  I refer to Oskar as "Mr Day" which would make his mother's full name "Agnes Day" - an old pun on the latin "Agnus Dei" meaning "lamb of god".

Bonus mini-egg:  There is - genuinely - a Royal Mail sorting office on Mandela Way, South London, fabled for its ability to lose parcels.

================

HARD BOILED

7.  Reading Material
A double-yoker?

Answer: Post contains references to (a) Polish word order, (b) Alice in Wonderland, and incidentally also to (c) numbers of permutations.

(a) Polish word order: 

Each of the six paragraph-blocks contains a sentence concerning Alice's relationship to her cat.  An interesting property of the Polish language is that these six statements in English can be expressed in Polish using the same three words - Ala, Ma, Kota - in their six different permutations:

Ala ma kota - Alice has a cat
Ala kota ma - Alice does have a cat, and has not borrowed it
Kota ma Ala - The cat is owned by Alice
Ma Ala kota - Alice really does have a cat
Kota Ala ma - It is just the cat that Alice really has
Ma kota Ala - The relationship of Alice to the cat is one of ownership

This set of six statements is sometimes used to teach between the Polish and English languages.  See:  http://www.translation-services-usa.com/polish_word_order.shtml

Spoken with the right emphasis, the first of these - Ala ma kota - can also mean "Alice is crazy"  The encounter I describe really happened - I imagined that the Polish girl at the end of the carriage was called Alice, and was going over her English lessons as she daydreamed, and I used this device to structure the post.

(b) Alice in Wonderland: 

Along with Alice, the six sitters on the train borrow traits from six characters from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:

The dormouse:  "a mousey woman... she is falling asleep" -
The mad hatter:  "wearing an old-fashioned hat... The twitching makes him look odd..." -
The mad march hare:  "with big teeth... furrowed in concentration...  His mind is not following straight lines"
The caterpillar:  "stained brown around his lips, as if from a pipe... he squirms and writhes... transported"
The red queen:  "dressed in a red... She has a sour expression on her face" -
The white rabbit:  "...a fluffy white beret.  She seems nervous and twice... checks the time." 

I am the self-amused and cryptic Cheshire Cat:  "A silent grin grows across my face.  I walk through it and off the train."

(c) Permutations:

There are six (and only six) ways of arranging three things; ABC CBA BAC ACB BCA CAB.

This theme appears twice in the post: in the six "Ala Ma Kota" statements, and also - if A = Alice, B = me and C = the sitter - in the order of the trio of paragraphs in each of the six paragraph-blocks.

Alice in Wonderland contains various linguistic and logical easter eggs.  Chapter VII:  "The Mad Hatter's tea party" contains references to permutations (of people sat around the table).

---
8.  Going one-way on Earlham Street
Find the eggs...

Answer: Post contains the names of 12 "Number Stations"

This post is about hidden messages, and apparent randomness that is anything but. 

Number stations are shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin, broadcasting voices reading streams of numbers, words and letters, strange tunes or snatches of morse code.

Although a casual listener thumbing through their radio dial might mistake them for random noise, there is evidence that they are in fact the carefully-engineered broadcasts of the various intelligence services, sending secret messages to their agents around the world.

The post weaves the unofficial names of 12 Number Stations into the narrative:

Random Pop
The Linconshire Poacher
Counting in Polish
Chinese numbers
magnetic fields
the buzzer
cherry ripe
the pip
Spanish Man
Czech lady
Russian man
Moscow coup attempt

Most if not all of these are listed here:  http://www.sleepbot.com/ambience/album/conet.html

---
9. 
There's a time machine Kingly Street
Meet me at St Pancras
Finding Biros on Prince Consort Road
Going one-way on Earlham Street
Connected how?

Answer: (deep breath...) Thematic posts drawing a parallel between unrequited love and the four excessions of Newtonian Physics

These four posts are a complete set or cycle, and are connected in a number of ways:

(a)  The title of each one contains the name of a specific London location, and each one of those locations itself contains a word meaning a senior male figure or, if you prefer, a male fool:
1. Kingly Street (King)
2. St Pancras Station (Saint)
3. Prince Consort Road (Prince)
4. Earlham Street (Earl)
The only real purpose of this was to clue that these posts are connected in some way.

(b) Each post has unrequited love as its theme:
1.  Unrequited self-esteem (i.e. loss of love for yourself)
2.  Unrequited romance (i.e. missed chances)
3.  Unrequited past love (i.e. lost love and old flames)
4.  Unrequited, obsessive love
[NB I concede the first of these is a bit self-referential... As I explain in the post: "This is just posh wanking isn't it."]

(c) Each post is structured around the consequences of a different phenomenon in physics...
1.  Relativity / time travel
2.  Quantum mechanics / waves and particle nature of matter
3.  Chaos theory / "the butterfly effect"
4.  Thermodynamics

...and (d) each makes at least one reference to a specific experiment which (more or less) demonstrates that phenomenon:
1.  "Drag my frame over to a hotel lobby bar..." (frame dragging e.g. in a ring laser)
2.  "...where the columns have forced the flow of people through two slits, they've coalesced into not two, but three patches of footfall on the other side."  - (Young's slits e.g. particle diffraction)
3.  "...felt a strange attraction" (The double pendulum / strange attractors)
4.  "Not impossible, just very improbable." (Irreversibility of particle mixing)

Collectively these four phenomena are the four known excessions of Newtonian physics, i.e. four observable phenomena which simple classical mechanics cannot easily explain.

And if you're wondering, these four posts were an attempt to rationalise (as essentially irrational) - and thereby hopefully lay to rest - my feelings about the girl I describe ("summer herself") in the last of the four.  I hope you got as much from reading them as I did writing them.

Bonus mini-egg:  [Which the illustrious Moonke spotted first time around]  What am I implying was the cause of "The accident"? in the third of the series?

Bonus mini-egg:  In the second of the series, the means of finding out which London you are in (dialling 17070 from a British Telecom landline) is real.  It's an old, automated service which tells you the number of the phone you're dialing from.  Try it (if you live in the UK)!

Bonus mini-egg:  The phrase "HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME" appearing twice in the fourth of the series is borrowed from T S Eliot's The Waste Land, for no particularly good reason.

So - Why do I put any eggs in at all?  It isn't to confuse you, or show off how clever I can be.  They're construction lines; the purpose of the eggs is to give me a framework I can fill in, a starting point I can work from.  Think Dave Gorman and his high-concept travelogues, or how an artist might do a rough pencil sketch on the canvas first, before painting over it.

That's why some of the Eggs are very hard to find; they're not really meant to appear in the final post at all.

Comments

[Angelalala]

You may not do this to show how clever you can be but it still can't help but show.

Human failings aside you are quite massively and immensely intelligent in a mentally sexy way - hence, by the same token, quite scary to lesser mortals.

Only Isabelle can match you, only Isabelle deserves you.

[Ani]

I didn't realise that your references are so carefully planned. I'm sure you could find hundreds of eggs in my writing (and thousands of bugs, probably), but 98% of them are completely subconscious.

I liked this exercise as a way of seeing into your writing process. Thank you for that.

[I love nine. I had seen a) and c), but didn't make the connection on b) and don't know enough to pick up on d)!]

[clarissa]

You are a genius, or a mentalist, or both.

You don't come across like you're trying to show off how clever you are -- not at all. And now that you describe how those eggs get in there, it makes sense, a frame (of reference) on which to build I suppose.

[edvard moonke]

I think you're MI6...

I'm right, aren't I?

confess! you know you want to tell us...

[Aishwarya]

ok, wait, the fact that the words karma, moksha, chitta and satguru actually mean something to me, given my religion, worked against me?!

[oe]

Angelalala - Thank you. And mentally sexy at you too.

Ani - Easter Eggs are everywhere if you look hard enough.

clarissa - I choose mentalist. If you're a genius people have expectations.

edvard moonke - Not MI6, no. But then I would say that, wouldn't I?

Aishwarya - Yes I'm afraid it probably did. If you already know about something then it isn't a secret you can find.

[pocketpunk]

a feel slightly uneducated....sniff

[camille]

I feel like I've picked up a book I put down months ago and am now so overwhelmed with its information and intelligence I need to sit down and have a good glass of red wine (which is, incidentally, what I am already doing, thankfully).