Friday, September 02, 2011

Off-Day Puzzle #9: Solution

Fame and success has brought Chad Billingsley more than fortune and admiration. It's also made him the answer to yesterday's puzzle.

The puzzle's title ("Now Batting...Josh Bard") refers to Shakespeare, and the lines are from Shakespeare's sonnets. Missing words are represented by pictured players, which you had to identify by sight, browsing team rosters, working backwards, or (if you were really crafty) looking up their MLB.com profile URLs using the numbers in the picture file names.

Filling in the clues gives us:

The offender's sorrow lends but weak [relief (Javy Guerra)] Sonnet #34
dot
null
And they are [rich (Harden)] and [ransom (Cody)] all ill deeds Sonnet #34
And they shall live, and he in them still [green (Shawn)] Sonnet #63
They that have power to [hurt (Frank Thomas, a.k.a. The Big)] and will do none Sonnet #94
comma
dash
And that fresh blood which [young (Eric Jr.)]-ly thou bestow'st Sonnet #11
[Mark (Reynolds)] how one string, sweet husband to another Sonnet #8
dot
To the clear [day (Darren O')] with thy much clearer light Sonnet #43
Doth spot the beauty of thy [bud (Norris)]-ding name! Sonnet #95
Yet who knows not conscience is [bo(u)rn (Michael)] of love? Sonnet #151

Combining the sonnet numbers with the supplied punctuation results in:

34.0346394, -118.4395151

...which looks suspiciously like GPS coordinates. Google those coordinates and you get the location of Billingsley's Steak House in West L.A. (Not affiliated with Chadley, as far as we know, but a good place to go if you like your beef bloody and your restaurants retro.)

Congratulations to the solverati, a highly secretive organization consisting of BCCSweet and Mr. Customer. Updated rankings will post soon. Next puzzle, Monday, Sept 19, at 7 a.m.!

photo by Yelp user Joan S.

10 comments:

Josh S. said...

OH, GODDAMMIT.

I had every step right. I just didn't get that I was looking for a business. The map I used pointed to the 10 freeway, so I wasted a bunch of time looking for a player name in Sonnet #10.

Then I fell asleep.

QuadSevens said...

GPS coordinates!? Damn! I had all the players and the sonnett numbers too. I never thought about GPS coordinates though. Nice puzzle.

Steve K said...

Ah, Billingsley's. What an awesome place! I live close by and Thunder Thighs always comes to mind when I pass it. It's one of the few places I've been to where I feel like I'm the youngest person there by about 50 years. They even have an early bird menu!


As for the puzzle, it never occurred to me to try Googling the phrases to see if they came up. (It would probably help if I had some literary knowledge!) Instead, I tried finding all the pictures, but couldn't find the ones of Ransom or Bourne. (BTW, Cody Ransom isn't even listed on the D-Bag's roster.) When I couldn't find them and couldn't figure anything out about the players directly, I gave up.

This is one of those puzzles, though, that really impresses me. How you guys come up with these things is beyond me!

Todd Etter said...

I thought this was great, too. At first I thought the punctuation was just to get it read more like a poem, so the final aha was very satisfying. Well done, Orel!

Eric Karros said...

Did Orel come up with the first puzzle that stumped ubragg??

Or did he purposely take a knee?

Kyle Baker said...

Nice Orel!

Eric Karros said...

PS I must have gotten one of the sonnets wrong cuz the coordinates I got were 34.038676, -118.438776. I went straight there to try to solve the puzzle.

$2k later I'm still here waiting for the answer to come.

Steve Sax said...

The Answer is just about to take the main stage, EK

ubragg said...

Great puzzle, Orel! Should have come up with the GPS coordinates. Very nice.

Despite the fact that taking a knee was a sound strategy, I did try to solve it and couldn't. Not that I'm counting, but it broke my streak of 40 in a row. Ouch.

Eric Karros said...

Billingsley is taking the main stage?