She scowled.  “Look, I don’t think I should be teaching you anything right now.  Your job is to go find musicians.  Surely you don’t need a magical song to do that.  Besides, you’re not ready.  You think this is something you can just leap into headfirst?  It could be dangerous.”

“Says the woman who threw me into the deep end yesterday by all but forcing me to learn a song that can control people’s minds.”

“That was . . . come on, that was different!  I was desperate!”

“Aren’t you still?”  Peter stood up and looked down on her.  It was a very basic trick, but a good lawyer will use any advantage, including height, to get the upper hand on a witness.  “According to your plan, I—along with some group of mystery people to be named later—am going to have to perform one of these songs.  I think I proved yesterday that I’m not very good right now.  I need the practice.  And unless you want me going around working on the Beherrschunglied, which sounds pretty dangerous to me, you’re going to teach me something else.”

“I don’t feel like it,” she said, groaning.  “Come back tomorrow.”

He crossed his arms.  “I can wait just as long as you can.”

It was an absurd statement.  The old woman had literally waited more than seven months just to meet someone.  This was longer than Peter Hamlin had waited for anything in his entire life.  And yet . . .

“You’re not going anywhere, are you?”

“You can add ‘persistence’ to that list of traits I may or may not possess.”

“Fine.”  She scowled again as she tried to think of the most meaningless thing she could teach him.  “Here, learn this; it’s absolutely pointless.”

“I’m so glad you decided to be so helpful.”  But he knew when to compromise.  Peter raised his flute to his lips and waited.

Kiyomori appeared to have won
Yoshitomo and co. sure looked done
Though the Taira seemed set
They would later regret
They let live Yoritomo, his son

Event: Birth of Minamoto no Yoritomo, first Shogun of Japan
Year: 1147
Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamoto_Yoritomo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genpei_war

“I don’t know.  That’s up to you.  You’re the one with all the freedom, here.”

“You’re going to be playing that card a lot, aren’t you?” Peter said, grimacing.

“Hey, my deck only has one card.  But don’t worry about it.  I’m sure you can find people.  You seem resourceful.”

Peter shook his head.  “First I’m smart, now I’m resourceful . . . I don’t know what you’re basing all these claims on.”

“I’m basing them on the fact that if you’re not these things, then I’m going to stay stuck down here.”

“So . . . no pressure, then.”  Peter stared at the ceiling.  It wasn’t quite yellow, it wasn’t quite brown, and it wasn’t quite white, but it was certainly unpleasant-looking.  He wasn’t afraid of pressure—was he?

“You said you have a large repertoire of songs with mysterious powers,” he said.  “What are some of them?”

The woman suddenly felt tired.  It was a tiredness that had nothing to do with sleep or the lack thereof.  A week ago she would have thought that she’d be overjoyed to spend hours talking to someone who actually wanted to hear what she had to say, to explain in detail every aspect of her proposed escape plan and, really, her life in general.  But in actual practice, it was just tiring.  The kid was relentless with the questions, and she found there was actually a lot that she didn’t feel like explaining.  There was also a lot that she couldn’t explain.

“I don’t know.  There are hundreds, maybe millions of them.”  Out of those potential millions, the one she had thought of most over the preceding months inevitably came to mind.  “Like, suppose there’s a song that you associate so strongly with a particular place, it’s almost like they’re the same thing inside your head.  You hear the song, and all of a sudden it’s as though you’re actually in that place; you smell the smells and see the sights perfectly clearly in your mind.  Well, from there, it’s not much of a stretch for playing or singing that song to physically take you there, now is it?”

“You’re saying the song can teleport you?”

“I don’t know what the scientific term is, but one second you’re in one place, and then the next, you’re there.”

“It could be any sort of place?”

“Pretty much.  Any spot you have a particularly strong emotional connection to.”

“Could you teach me one of them?”

The woman’s irritation level was gradually rising.  “That’s . . . not the kind you can teach.  It’s kind of a personal thing.”

“Well, what’s one you can teach me?”

A. 田　B. 心　C. 金　D. 隹

E. 立　F. 日　G. 木　H. 里

Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts?  Well, let’s see what kind of wholes turned up.

Seeking to recreate a bell, Theoman put together ‘metal’ and ‘bird’ and ended up with . . . a drill.  Well, they both make noise, certainly, though one of them is typically seen as more pleasant than the other.  The idea of a ‘mind-tree’ was very close to ‘think,’ but he didn’t quite get there–you need to stick an eye in there as well (this is not, however, the same character for ‘think’ that I had intended).  A sun and a village, with an extra line tossed in for good measure, make ‘quantity,’ presumably referring to the large quantity of sun in Sun Village, which is the main reason people like it so much.  Standing in a rice field sure seemed like a lock for ‘gather,’ but the character I was thinking of was gather in the sense of ‘assemble’ rather than ‘harvest.’  So you put birds on top of a tree, because that’s where birds assemble.  Turns out, if you stand on top of a rice field, and add a tail, you get . . . a dragon.  Go figure.

Shirley put B, D, and E together and came up with a pretty good ‘idea’ . . . that is, if you assume that she must have accidentally typed D instead of F.  Heart-bird-stand doesn’t get you much, but stand-sun-heart is an idea, alright.  I’ll make sure to give you guys a stone to work with in the future so you can take care of these birds more efficiently.

A Fan thinks he can make me look silly by making references to a bunch of movies I haven’t seen, but I still know a thing or two.  I remember the octopus scene from Deer Hunter.  At least, I assume there must have been an octopus scene, because that’s what A Fan built with his ‘stand,’ ‘rice field,’ and ‘sun’ (okay, to be fair, you have to stick in a few other parts as well to get an octopus, but with that combo, no other kanji comes closer).  Then again, if he had just left out that field, he could have made some real ‘noise.’  He could have also achieved a similar effect by putting together a bell, which, by his logic, is a combination of Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, and about one-third of Deer Hunter.  Which leads us to the inevitable question: are these movies really that different from each other?

So, to review:

To build a bell: ‘stand’ on a ‘village,’ with ‘metal’ on the left
To build a thought: ‘rice field’ over ‘heart/mind’
To build a sound: ‘stand’ on the ‘sun’ (that’d better have you making some sound, anyway)
To build a gathering: ‘bird’ on top of ‘tree’

I realize that was a bit hard, so let’s make the challenge slightly different this time.  I’m still going to give you a bunch of kanji parts and their meanings, but I’m not going to tell you which is which.  We’re going to assume that Theoman already knows what most of these are, anyway, so assembly will be his job: give me responsibility, a wizard, to like, and a swamp.  A Fan and Shirley can choose to attempt this as well, or they can take on the simpler (?) task of identifying the pieces: a person, a knife, a mouth, a woman, a child, a mountain, a king, and water.

A. 子　B. 王　C. 刀　D. 水

E. 山　F. 口　G. 人　H. 女

Wanting Anne, Henry was quite distraught
And to marry her he the Pope fought
After all of that noise
She could give him no boys
Which was treason–well, that’s what he thought

Event: Anne Boleyn, wife of King Henry VIII, is arrested on charges of treason, adultery, and incest
Year: 1536
Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Boleyn

“Like I said yesterday, you need to break me out of here.  And, as I demonstrated yesterday, that’s not going to be so easy.”

“Sorry about that.”  Peter didn’t know if a muffin was an appropriate way to apologize for making someone run into an invisible wall.  It wasn’t a situation he found himself in often.

The woman chuckled.  “At least you only had me do it once.  You have no idea how many times I tried it before I believed.”

“And this jailbreak,” Peter said, gazing at the old flute as if it were something completely unfamiliar.  “It’s going to involve some sort of song with weird, inexplicable powers, isn’t it?”

She watched him closely for signs of sarcasm before proceeding.  “How did you know?”

“Otherwise you wouldn’t have bothered teaching me one yesterday.  It was a pretty ridiculous plan.  There were any number of simpler ways to get you out of those handcuffs, and you had hours to think of one.  But you decided to go with the preposterously complicated strategy because you knew that I would need to become familiar with this sort of thing anyway, and also as a test to see if I could handle it.”

She grimaced and decided not to tell him that she really hadn’t been able to come up with a better idea.  “You’re a lot smarter today than you were yesterday.”

“Anyone’s smarter when they’ve had time to think things over,” he replied drily.

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that.  I’ve had all the time in the world to think about my situation, and as you can see, I haven’t made a lot of progress.”

“And why is that?  You say that music is the way to escape, and music seems to be your field of expertise.  So why are you still here?”

His tone was casual, but his questions had a strong, demanding force to them.  He seemed so different from the helpless youth of the day before that the woman was put on guard.  The interrogation wasn’t outright unpleasant, but it was a little unnerving.

“There are two reasons, I think.”  The woman spoke very hesitantly, afraid of stretching the belief of her only potential helper to the snapping point.  She wasn’t quite sure why she believed these things herself.  “Keep in mind that I don’t know who put me down here or why, so I’m sort of guessing, here.  But the first reason’s obvious: I don’t know the right song.  There’s a lot of music out there that can . . . affect the world in ways beyond the ordinary, and I know . . . more of it than I can remember offhand.  But I sure don’t know any ‘Subway Station Escape Song.’”

“And you think that I do?”

“I think that someone does.  But you can work on that later.  Because the other problem, I think, is that we’re going to need more people.”

Peter frowned.  Part of the reason he had agreed to help was that he had naively believed that no one else would have to know about it.  “How many more?”

“I’m not sure.  But I do know that some songs are too potent to be performed by one person.  Whatever’s holding me in here is a doozy.  I don’t think a solo number’s going to cut it.”

“And where do you suggest I find these other band members?”

* * *

“Hey, Dizzy.  I was wondering . . . I mean, if you had the time . . . would you be interested in helping me out with something?  Playing your trumpet, that is.  It’s no big deal or anything, but I need some musicians for this project, and . . .”

Of course Peter didn’t actually ask his sister.  He didn’t learn that he would need to look for additional musicians until the following morning.  But even if he had known, he probably wouldn’t have asked her.  It may have been partly out of jealousy and a desire to not be overshadowed.  Deep down he understood that any halfway competent musician would be better than him, but . . . he just didn’t want it to be his sister.  On the other hand, even Peter had enough musical sense to realize that flute and trumpet would make a pretty poor duet combo.

A. 喬治·沃克·布什 B. 比爾·克林顿 C. 理查德·尼克森

D. 林登·约翰逊 E. 本杰明·哈里森 F. 湯瑪斯·傑佛遜

Yup, it’s Wednesday again.  Let it never be said that the pleas of my readers fall on deaf ears.  That’s assuming, of course, that I would have been ready to get this out on Monday anyway.

Theoman returned to his old friend, logic.  And why not?  From a logical perspective, A was so obvious.  It has to be LBJ, because he’s the only one with three names.  Well, three full names, certainly.  I mean, the “W” in George W. Bush is just a letter, right?  It doesn’t stand for . . . oh wait, no, that was Truman.  The W is for Walker, which means that the A is for Bush.  But surely logic wouldn’t fail him a second time!  These characters are intended to represent sounds, so if you see two names ending with the same sound and two answers ending with the same character, you must have a match!  Because there are only two presidents on this list whose names end with “-son” . . . no, no, don’t be ridiculous, “Nixon” is spelled with an “x,” so it’s not . . . oh.  I guess it is.  Theoman still had a 50-50 shot at Benjamin Harrison, and you would have thought that after logic failed him luck would swoop in to pick him back up, but that’s not the way it works, apparently.  However, youthful sentimentality and 100% subjective observation paid off in the end: he found Clinton, whom A Fan called great and Shirley called attractive, at B.  You know, B for Bill.

A Fan sat right down in his director’s chair and, as usual, immediately began casting.  We don’t doubt that John Travolta would have made an intriguing Thomas Jefferson, or that Philip Baker Hall could have handled the role of Dubya.  We are also very curious to see a TV series that features Walter Cronkite as George Washington, Mario Cuomo as Martin van Buren, Billy Graham as James Garfield, and Colin Powell as Taft.  As usual, A Fan impresses more with his capacity for tangential thought than with his accuracy, though he did manage to track down LBJ at D (presumably by shouting “Hey, Hey!”)  Also, John Adams was the best character in 1776, but he couldn’t compare to Morley Safer’s Adams in The American President.

Shirley continued the trend of each participant getting one answer correct, though she may be disappointed to learn that her intuition served her best at A, George Walker Bush.  But her descriptions weren’t all so far off.  She called C, the one that looks good in the beginning but troubled at the end, LBJ, but couldn’t that description apply equally well to Nixon?  F, the cute one, may not be Bill Clinton, but Thomas Jefferson was certainly a looker in his day as well, or so 1776 would have us believe.  Also, he played the violin.

E is Benjamin Harrison, a shining example of the Era of Forgettable Presidents (1865-1901).  I wonder why he was included in this quiz . . .

I’m giving my lovely assistant the week off, so we’re back to Japanese this time around.  This week we’re going to try something different.  I’m sure you’re all tired of simply passively picking characters; wouldn’t you rather create some of your own?  Don’t worry, there won’t be too much creativity involved: I’ll give you the parts, and you simply have to put them together.  Here is a list of kanji parts that have the following meanings (in order): rice field, heart/mind, metal, bird, stand, sun, tree, and village.

A. 田　B. 心　C. 金　D. 隹

E. 立　F. 日　G. 木　H. 里

Of course, you are more than welcome to create any sort of combination, with whatever meaning you choose to assign to it.  But for those who like something to shoot for, you can try to build me characters with the following meanings: bell, think, sound, and gather.

To see clearly out into space
You must put yourself in the right place
Just beyond the Earth’s bubble
We set up the Hubble
Got that atmosphere out of our face

Event: The Hubble Space Telescope is launched
Year: 1990
Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope

“So, are you going to tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“What you were really doing with Mom’s flute yesterday, of course.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be meeting your friends?”

“There’s no rush.  Most of them have older siblings, too.  They understand that it’s important to take some time out of every day for harassment.”

“How about I list all the things that I didn’t do with the flute, and you can figure it out from that?”

Peter had no intention of telling Dizzy what really happened to him that day.  It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her, or that he was afraid she wouldn’t believe him; on the contrary, he was a little worried that she would believe him.  They just weren’t that close.  They got along well, they teased and they bantered, but it’s hard to have an “I tell you everything and you tell me everything” sibling relationship when you’re six years apart in age, especially when there’s no domineering older sibling against whom it becomes necessary to join forces and bond.

“That sounds pointless and potentially disgusting,” she said, glancing at her watch.  “And ordinarily I would be all for it, but you’re right; I don’t have the time.”

“You’re just going to let me get away with it?  I could be using this flute to commit crimes or something.”

“They’re not crimes if you don’t get caught,” she answered coolly, leaving Peter to wonder what exactly his little sister was going out to do on a Friday night.  He was also briefly distracted by the image of the old woman in handcuffs, preventing him from getting in the last word.  The honor thus fell to Dizzy.  “But I don’t think you could be getting in too much trouble.  You are my brother after all.  Just remember: if you break that flute, Mom’s going to be really disappointed.”

He thought of Mr. Abrahamson and his inaudible fury.  For most people, disappointment was a tame, barely noticeable emotion.  In the hands of some, however, it was a devastating, soul-crushing force.

A. 阿不思·鄧不利多 B. 芙蓉·德拉库尔 C. 哈利·波特 D. 赫敏·格兰杰

E. 罗恩·韦斯利 F. 西弗勒斯·斯内普 G. 汤姆·里德尔

Apologies again for not getting this out until Wednesday.  I’m certainly not winning any awards for consistency this month.

Theoman had a good idea, but unfortunately it was thrown off by a few discrepancies between the Chinese versions of the books and the English ones, such as the fact that the Chinese Book 1 is pretty much entirely about Fleur Delacour, or that Harry himself doesn’t actually appear until Book 5.  Hmm . . . my lovely assistant appears to be telling me that I’m making things up again.  On a more serious note, doesn’t Dumbledore appear before Harry anyway?  Still, despite his handicaps, Theoman managed to stumble across Hermione at D.  In conclusion, the spell checker’s seeming capriciousness can be explained by the fact that “Severus” is the name of a Roman emperor and “Albus” isn’t, and by the fact that “Hermione” is a name invented by J.K. Rowling that had never existed previously.

Shirley, as far as I know, has never read the books, but she knows her stereotypes well, spotting Hermione, the smart one, at D and Ron, the sidekick, at E (raise your hand if you kind of wish Ron had been kicked in the side a little more in the books).  I, personally, also feel inclined to give her credit for identifying Severus Snape (F) as the most heroic character in the books, and also for pointing out that Harry Potter (C) is basically just a pretty boy.  And if we’re thinking about the movies, calling Dumbledore (A) the mean teacher might not even be that far off, though we agree with A Fan that he got slightly better after he died (we’re assuming here that A Fan was referring to the death of the character, not the actor).

A Fan, shockingly, decided to turn the conversation to movies.  He makes a good point about Alan Rickman, though he seems to have him cast as Fleur Delacour (B), which I might call a curious choice.  Daniel Radcliffe, on the other hand, would have made a much better Dumbledore than Michael Gambon.  Alan Rickman would have, too, for that matter.  Or Bruce Willis.  Or anyone else from the cast of Die Hard.  But I digress.  A Fan almost correctly identified E as Ron Weasley, but then he seemed to be saying that Rupert Grint grew up to be a pretty okay actor, so I can only assume he was thinking of someone else and simply got confused.  And the duel between Harry and Voldemort was ruined by sunspots.

G is Tom Riddle.  Wasn’t he basically just misunderstood?

Remember that part in the first book when someone made a flag that said “POTTER FOR PRESIDENT,” and it didn’t make any sense, because why would kids from England want to be president?  Well, after that not-at-all tenuous segue, the puzzle provided for this week by my lovely assistant is about U.S. presidents.  I know we did presidents once before, but there are two key differences: 1. these are in Chinese, and therefore actually mean something to someone other than me, and 2. these are not merely the first presidents but are in fact the greatest presidents, each one of them the absolute best at what he did.  We have the president who opened up relations with the most Chinas (well, communist Chinas, anyway; Richard Nixon).  We have the only president to share a last name with a president who was impeached and not be impeached himself (LBJ).  We have the president who survived the most pretzel-induced choking incidents (George W. Bush; isn’t it funny how that joke never gets old?).  We have the president who was the best saxophone player (Bill Clinton; little-known-fact: John Adams also played the saxophone, but he was terrible at it, primarily because it wasn’t invented until twenty years after he died).  We have the president who holds the record for most high schools named after him in western Bloomington, MN (Thomas Jefferson).  And, finally, we have the president who holds the record for greatest percentage increase in length of term from the previous president of the same last name (Benjamin Harrison, whose time in office was approximately 4600% longer than William Henry Harrison’s).

A. 喬治·沃克·布什 B. 比爾·克林顿 C. 理查德·尼克森

D. 林登·约翰逊 E. 本杰明·哈里森 F. 湯瑪斯·傑佛遜