Day 61:

Officer Escobar didn’t go back into Simon Park Station after that day.  Now that his colleague was back on the job, the subway tunnels were as safe as they needed to be.  Maybe too safe.  Anyway, for all he knew the woman had finally accomplished whatever the hell it was she was trying to do and was no longer there.  He could almost believe that (Escobar had once witnessed a starving man breaking a window to go into a house and take a loaf of bread.  When the man said he lived there, Escobar took him at his word, but this was just too much for him to swallow).

So Escobar, who got impatient on public transportation anyway, took the subway out off his regular route.

He did not, however, put the woman out of his mind.  Mrs. Escobar, whenever she would see his eyes glaze over, simply assumed he was daydreaming about baked goods again.  And, often, she was correct: though the images changed as the weeks went by—from Leftover-Halloween-Candy Bars to Cranberry Chutney Strudel and Pumpkin Pie Profiteroles to the incomparable Bûche de Noël—her husband’s thoughts never went long before wandering back to the Dough-Re-Mi.  But a man’s mind cannot live on cake alone, and so, every now and then, he semi-voluntarily turned his mind to the woman in Simon Park Station.

She was still there.  He knew this, and grew more certain with every passing day.  Until he saw her outside with his own eyes (even though they had once been called “the least reliable pair of eyes in the Crescenton Police Department”), he would remain sure that she was still underground, still leaning against her concrete pillar, still addressing her pleas to whoever happened to walk by.  He was also fairly confident that the pedestrians she spoke to were continuing to give her a variety of responses ranging from mild curiosity to just short of physical violence.

Because picturing her failing over and over again was almost as depressing as watching her do so, Escobar often switched to imagining what the person who finally answered her call would be like.  He had several competing theories.  Rescuer Mark I, the first to surface, was essentially a younger version of Escobar himself.  In addition to being in better shape than the policeman had ever been he was also a world-renowned pastry chef and had a considerably smoother way with words, but other than that they were very much alike.  Mark I played the French horn, because he had always thought they looked cool.

Rescuer Mark II was her knight in shining armor.  Literally.  The lance was a safety hazard, and the logistics of getting the horse through the turnstiles were nothing short of a nightmare, but hey, the classics are classics for a reason.  Mark II, who had a flair for the dramatic, was most often pictured charging down the entryway steps, knocking over at least one watery coffee stand, picking up the old woman and lifting her onto the horse in one smooth motion, and riding off into the sunset without even pausing to catch his breath.  The knight was too busy jousting to learn to play an instrument, but he had a squire who accompanied him everywhere he went and who performed regularly on the coconuts.  Coconuts are an instrument, right?

But it was the third iteration that became his favorite.  Mark III—whom, in a burst of creativity, he had decided to name “Mark”—was an older gentleman, but not too old, perhaps halfway between Escobar and the woman.  He always dressed stylishly but subtly, and his silvery black hair looked like the work of a laser-guided comb.  Mark was a man of the world in every sense; there was no great city he’d never visited, no notable figure he’d never met, no country in which he’d never narrowly avoided being deported.  He could talk for weeks about all the things he had seen and done, but mostly he preferred to listen.  Mark was proficient in any number of instruments, but his signature sound was playing soft, jazzy riffs on the clarinet.

The woman in Simon Park Station had considerably more free time to devote to this problem, so it should come as no surprise that she developed designs for dozens if not hundreds of potential saviors (she lost count after Mark XXVI).  Still, none of these prototypes bore much resemblance to the man who ended up responding to her plea—though, like all of Escobar’s inventions and the majority of the woman’s, he was indeed a man.  He was no master baker, wore no armor, and his range of life experience was about as broad as the latest cell phone model.  He did have one thing in common with the woman, which was that he also lived in a place where Officer Escobar never went: the suburbs.

At first glance it might seem that the suburbs would have been an ideal posting for the man who prefers to police areas in little need of policing.  True, the crime rates did tend to be lower outside the Crescenton city limits.  However, this was not due to there being fewer crimes committed but rather to their being less obvious.  The crimes of the suburbs are harder to define, harder to prove, and much harder to stamp out, but that does not make them any less wrong.

On this particular day, a crime against cinema was being perpetrated.

At the time, most folks chose to blame Spain
But no one could completely explain
Just what happened that day
In the Havana bay
Simply put: what did blow up the Maine?

Event: Battleship U.S.S. Maine explodes in Havana harbor, one of the major events leading to the Spanish-American War
Year: 1898
Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_%28ACR-1%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish%E2%80%93American_War

A. 鉛管　B. 小刀　C. 燭台　D. 縄　E. レンチ　F. 連発拳銃

Now that we have all gathered again in the Accusing Parlor, it is time for me to produce a startling series of revelations that will, with any luck, lead to a veritable storm of fainting and monocle dropping.

I aim my first J’accuse! at A Fan, for attempting to distract people from the matter at hand with unrelated information.  I do not recall mentioning a game called “Clue,” or even one called “Cluedo,” and I certainly did not reference any viridian clergymen.  I must also accuse him of being a less-than-stellar plumber, as he seems to think that the best tool to use is B, the knife.  Still, he’s probably better than the maintenance people in my building, who have chosen to address the problem of my leaky sink by wielding the twin guns of apathy and indifference.

Dragon is a little bit further along the road to master plumberdom, but she still has a long way to go, for while she seems to have correctly identified that the wrench and the pipe are key items to be concerned with, she cannot tell the difference between them.  She spotted E as the non-kanji outsider in this week’s lineup, but she called it the lead pipe when it is clearly the wrench.  Or, to humor A Fan, we can also refer to it as the スパナ (supana).  Dragon raises a good point, however: why would a language develop characters specifically designed to represent a lead pipe?  I mean, it’s not like pipes were made out of lead for centuries, nor is it even remotely true that lead’s atomic symbol Pb derives from the Latin word plumbum, also the source of the word “plumber.”  I mean, maybe if you had two characters, one that meant “lead” and another that meant “pipe,” but . . . oh wait, there they are.  They’re at A.  A is the lead pipe.

Finally, we accuse Shirley of actually being right about something.  Her “weapon of choice,” the revolver, is indeed found at F.  Her other shots were a little bit more off the mark, but hey, that’s why a revolver has six chambers.  We already know that A is not the candlestick, which is in fact found at C.  And while she correctly spotted that E is not written in kanji, it is katakana rather than hiragana.  To compare, the same sequence of sounds (renchi) would look like this in hiragana: れんち.  But if you wrote it in hiragana, it wouldn’t mean wrench.  Funny how that works.

But, unfortunately for you all, the crime was actually committed with D, the rope, by 紅さん in the 廊下.  Better luck next time.

Now that A Fan has insisted on introducing the theme of board games, I see no reason not to stick with it.  This week’s challenge concerns transportation: what is the best means by which to travel around a board?  Riding a horse is a popular traditional choice, but why not strike fear into your opponents cruising around on a Howitzer?  If money is a concern, you can always go with the beat-up old shoe or the thimble, and if you want to travel in style, don’t forget your top hat or your iron (to keep your tux wrinkle-free).  Note that this challenge features not one but two non-kanji entries!  That’s right: the title of this game is growing more meaningless by the week!

A. アイロン　B. 靴　C. 乗馬者　D. シルクハット　E. 指貫　F. 榴弾砲

Day 7:

The Week of the Swapped Shift was over.  Officer Escobar was free to return to his usual beat.  He had no work-related reason to visit Simon Park Station.  None at all.

To celebrate, he decided to mix up his routine a bit.  Rather than drive to work as he always did, he took the subway.  Because of his lack of familiarity with LCTA (Laragheny County Transit Authority) schedules, he chose to leave extra time for his commute.  Then, partway there, when he realized that he was on pace to arrive obnoxiously early, he got off the train to walk around.  The stop at which he happened to do so was Simon Park.

No one but an omniscient narrator could ever know that he had planned the detour all along.

Despite coming from a different direction than usual, he found the mystery woman’s pillar with ease.  For a moment he thought that, seeing him as a normal commuter rather than an observer in the shadows—in other words, seeing him at all—she would walk up and deliver her trademark line.  But it seemed she was dormant that day.  He found her with her heard drooped, as unaware of the world around her as she had been when he heard her working on her sales pitch.

As he leaned down to check on her, Escobar thought he heard something.  It sounded like, “Guess I’d better get used to being stuck here forever,” but that didn’t make any sense.  Surely no one outside of a folk song could get trapped in the subway.

A little later, the woman opened her eyes, looked around, and spotted a paper bag on the ground next to her.  An understated logo featuring a couple musical notes and some scent lines was printed under the words, “Dough-Re-Mi Café.”  Inside was a muffin.  Officer Escobar did not eat muffins; he considered them health food.  Since this muffin was the size of a boxer’s fist and covered in chocolate chips, caramel, and walnuts, it was about as healthy as cheesecake, but he believed she would appreciate it anyway.  No matter how good they are for you, broccoli and lettuce will not cheer you up.

Like most people who aren’t named Alice and don’t fall down rabbit holes, the woman knew better than to eat food that appears mysteriously.  After all that she had been through, however, something like that hardly qualified as mysterious.  And a hungry person will eat just about anything, even if it says “EAT ME” on it.  So she scarfed it down and was reminded that there is good in the world.

“It’s still too early to give up.”

Twenty thousand leagues under the sea-
A good start, but we’ve places to be
Round the world by balloon
Take a trip to the moon
Then get down with some geology

Event: Birth of Jules Verne, author of such works as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days, From the Earth to the Moon, and Journey to the Center of the Earth
Year: 1828
Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Verne

A. 浮世絵　B. 歌舞伎　C. 狂言　D. 短歌　E. 能　F. 文楽

Dragon has returned to her old role of first into the fray this week, and she does it with style.  She correctly identified B as kabuki by noting that it had a lot of boxes in it and was therefore flashy.  Her logic may seem difficult to follow, but I will attempt to lead you through it: when you hear the word “box,” the first thing that naturally jumps to mind is a cardboard box.  Now cardboard, as we well know, is not one of the flashiest substances on Earth.  It is, however, something that is stored in large quantities in warehouses.  And what else was stored in a large warehouse?  That’s right: the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark.  That thing was pretty flashy when they opened it up.  Ergo: kabuki.

Theoman was tricksy in his response.  He correctly spotted the noh at E on the basis of shortness (I so desperately wanted to find a counterexample of a word with the same pronunciation that was two characters long, but I could not).  However, he failed to properly follow the instructions, which clearly stated that the object of the puzzle was to identify whichever art form sounded the most interesting, and there is noh way that noh could have been the most interesting-sounding thing on that list.  But he did stoop to making the obligatory pun, so all is forgiven . . . for now (for noh?).

Our newest contestant fell prey to one of the oldest pitfalls of KYPC: assuming that kanji are meant to help rather than to mislead you.  The shared character she identified in B and D can mean either “poetry” or “song” depending on where it is used.  In kabuki it refers to singing, but D is actually the classic tanka or “short poem.”  At 31 syllables, the tanka is almost twice as long as the early modern/modern haiku; the name comes out of comparison to the chouka or “long poem,” which had no set limit on length and was already dying out by the time major poetry collections were starting to be recorded.

A Fan took a clever approach.  And he’s right–the second character in F does look an awful lot like singer/songwriter Paul Anka, recognizable by the beams of light shining off his face and the single hair standing up at an angle on his head.  But, as we have already discovered, the elusive tanka was hiding out at D.  F is the puppet theatre of bunraku, made up of two characters that, sadly, have nothing to do with puppets.  And by way of explanation to TCGU: for reasons that cannot be explained, I have always thought it more fitting to refer to live theatre with the British spelling and to a movie theater with the American one.  It may have something to do with perceptions of classiness.

Shirley’s typically accurate shotgun misfired this week.  Even her last-ditch guess failed to pull through.  That wacky bunch in A is the ukiyoe, or “pictures of the floating world.”  I guess if everything were floating you might convulse in a strange manner, but I don’t think it would be with laughter.  The “crazy words” of kyogen can be found at C.

And now for something completely different.  A murder has been committed!  Who did it?  Where was it done?  And, most importantly of all, what was the murder weapon?  Was it the candlestick?  The knife?  The lead pipe?  The revolver?  The rope?  Or the wrench?  See if you can spot the deadly implement and help solve this heinous crime.  Clever detectives may also note that one of these items is not written with kanji.  Some may chose to ignore it, figuring that they have no chance of identifying something written with characters that aren’t even intended to represent meaning.  Others may be sick of all this kanji business and figure they have as good a shot with that as they do with anything else.  Theoman, however, is banned from guessing about that particular entry, because that’s just the kind of discriminatory jerk I am.

A. 鉛管　B. 小刀　C. 燭台　D. 縄　E. レンチ　F. 連発拳銃

Days 4-6:

A sharply-dressed woman with a sharper eye: “I think the real question is: don’t you feel that something’s missing from your life?  See?  Now we’re getting to the heart of the matter.”

Officer Escobar had originally planned to take notes on all the old woman’s conversations, with the idea that he might puzzle over them during his off-duty hours while savoring a cream-filled something.  But it turned out that he was no better at taking notes than he had been in school.  Besides, the kinds of clues he worked best with usually had less to do with the subtleties of language and more to do with people’s hands being a striking shade of scarlet.  So instead he just wrote down some of the more interesting responses.

A series of people carrying a variety of brightly-colored pamphlets and dressed in a variety of New Age garments: “No, but have you heard the good news of Althena/Farore/Yevon?”

He did manage to discover one thing, namely, why the woman fascinated him.  It was not sexual attraction, not that sexual attraction had ever been high on his suspects list.  Escobar was a happily married man, as happy as the next, which is to say that he could not imagine a reality without Mrs. Escobar.  He could come up with plenty of fantasies, but none of them ever felt remotely real.  In any case, if he was going to have an affair, it would be with a woman ten years younger, not thirty years older.

A desperate but seemingly harmless man: “I—I think my wife might be cheating on me . . . with my other personality!”

It was her voice.  He had picked up on it the first time he saw her; he just hadn’t attached much importance to it.  She spoke with a sweet clarity that you would normally expect from a singer or professional speaker.  You might think such a tone would feel out of place in normal conversation, but somehow everything that came from her mouth sounded perfectly natural (or it would have, if she weren’t talking about some magic quest).  All he wanted was to continue listening.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t the one doing most of the talking.

One of King Larry’s free people: “No, no, you’re doing it all wrong.  First of all, you want to avoid the subway.  People are in a hurry.  They don’t want to stop for anything.  Second, don’t try to persuade them.  When people plan to be charitable, they do it with an organization so they can deduct from their taxes.  You want to appeal to their most primal sense of pity.  Don’t ask questions; don’t give them a chance to say no; don’t speak.  Just look.”

Whatever power her words may have had over Escobar, they were ineffective in convincing anyone else to stick around.  As they days went by the woman appeared more and more depressed, and Escobar, feeling sorry for her, fell into a funk as well.  He had two options: step in to save her by answering her call or stop watching her.

Officer Escobar, the man in blue, one of Crescenton’s finest, chose the latter.

In his defense, he couldn’t play a musical instrument either.

Finding definitions far too scant
They sought to dictionaries supplant
After twenty-six years
Hundreds of volunteers
They had gotten from “A” down to “Ant”

Event: Publication of the first fascicle of what would become the Oxford English Dictionary, covering words from A to Ant
Year: 1884
Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary

A. 巨蟹宮　B. 金牛宮　C. 獅子宮　D. 処女宮　E. 人馬宮　F. 双魚宮

G. 双児宮　H. 天蠍宮　I. 天秤宮　J. 白羊宮　K. 宝瓶宮　L. 磨羯宮

This week featured a plethora of multiple-guess entries.  Those familiar with KYPC, however, would probably assume that this did not in any way lead to a greater quantity of correct answers.  And you would be dead wrong.  Clearly my readers are well-attuned to the heavens, because there were more things guessed right this week than any I can remember in recent memory.

Theoman, of course, outdid everyone else in his typical shameless manner by getting not one but two correct answers.  Despite it not having anything to do with his own signs, his eyes leapt immediately to Virgo the Virgin at D (we will refrain from making any comments related to personality regarding this choice).  Then, looking inward, he sought out one of his own signs, and he decided that J was Aries the Ram because rams are white.  It would be great to make a joke about it, but unfortunately I don’t think there’s really anything else on this list that is usually thought of as white.  Goats, maybe.  Anyway, he was correct, though he could have made it a lot easier on himself by remembering that the second character means sheep.

As usual, A Fan picked out a seemingly meaningless method of guessing and, also as usual, it earned him an undeserved right answer (not that there’s such a thing as a “deserved” answer in this game).  He slipped up with his former sign, misidentifying C, which is in fact Leo the Lion (though, as misidentifications go, you could do worse than mistaking a lion for a crab.  I wouldn’t recommend getting especially close to either).  But he came through with his new sign, picking out G as Gemini, his favorite baseball team.  Out with the old and in with the new, as they say.

Shirley came up with a correct answer as well, and she came so close to the difecta.  Perhaps because of years of harsh treatment at the hands of her offspring (of whom at least one and probably two were the same sign as her), she was able to spot Cancer the Crab at A.  Actually, the first character has nothing to do with claws; it simply means “giant.”  The crab is the second one.  As for her new sign, Gemini, she had it narrowed down to two but, sadly, picked the wrong one.  However, perhaps more impressively from a kanji standpoint, she picked up on the fact that the first character in both G and F (which is Pisces) refers to there being two of something.

But one participant this week was entirely out of alignment.  First she ran away from F, the fish, because they’re pretty horrifying, I guess.  Then she attempted to measure things with B, Taurus the Bull, and I have no idea how that would work, other than that it wouldn’t.  One possibility is that Dragon’s confusion (as her name might suggest) stems from the decision to exclude Ophiuchus the Serpent-Bearer from the list.  And there is a reason: Japanese, unlike English, has different words to distinguish between Cancer the zodiac sign and Cancer the constellation.  Those listed here are for the signs, and, as far as I am aware, Ophiuchus only has a word for the constellation.  So apologies to Dragon for upsetting her heavens and knocking her out of her house, but if she has complaints, she can take them up with the dictionary.

Oh, and I still have to identify the rest of this lot.  First I will horribly confuse half my readership by saying thing that mean nothing to them: E is Equius, H is Vriska, I is Terezi, K is Eridan and L is Gamzee.  Then I will (hopefully) placate them by explaining that E is Sagittarius the Archer, H is Scorpio (do I really have to explain what that is?), I is Libra the Scales, K is Aquarius the Water Carrier, and L is Capricorn the Goat.

Anyway . . . let’s get it arted in here!  The next puzzle will be about identifying important Japanese art forms.  And, just in case you’re not familiar with Japanese art forms for some strange reason, I will briefly describe them.  From the world of theatre we are featuring the flashy, fast-paced kabuki, the steady, stylistic noh, the slap-stick comedy of kyogen and the puppet theatre of bunraku.  From the world of poetry we present the classical tanka, and representing the visual arts is the ukiyoe woodblock print.  Pick out whatever sounds the most interesting.

A. 浮世絵　B. 歌舞伎　C. 狂言　D. 短歌　E. 能　F. 文楽

The old woman, pleased that someone had finally responded to her question in the affirmative, took a moment to grin with satisfaction.  Allowing the girl an opening, however, proved to be her undoing.

“It’s like, all my life, I’ve felt that I was different, you know?  That I was special.  That maybe, just maybe, I was put on this Earth to accomplish something.  Something real, you know?  Not like being an actuary or a dentist or a mailman or a . . .

“My psychiatrist says that I’m just using fantasy to explain why I was picked on so much as a kid.  But I’m all like, what the hell does he know about my destiny?  He’s just some moron who flunked out of med school and now gets paid a hundred bucks an hour to pass off his psychoses onto other people.  And anyway, I totally started learning Elvish before they stopped inviting me to their birthday parties, so really he’s just completely full of . . .”

At first the old woman remained calm.  She needed time to think—it was obvious that she hadn’t planned what to say if she ever got this far.  Once the tirade passed the five-minute mark, however, she looked more and more exasperated, waiting for any gap long enough to get a syllable in edgewise.  Eventually the patient lioness was rewarded when the flying gazelle stopped at a water hole.

“Good!  Good.  I can, uh, sense that your . . . spirit is ready for your quest.  But first I must ask: can you play a musical instrument?”

“Huh?  No.  Mom was always trying to get me to learn piano, but I was like, ‘No, Mom, I’m not going to be the perfect little girl you always imagined I’d be.’”

“Oh . . .”

Escobar was becoming an expert at recognizing when the old woman was disappointed.  This was no mere tropical depression: this was a full-blown Category 5 crestfallen.  “Well, in that case, I—I sense that your destiny lies elsewhere.”

The gazelle, spotting the lioness for what she really was, fled.  As she left, she made sure to get in a few parting shots.  “Okay.  I get it.  Fine.  You mystics are all alike.  You’re all like, ‘Sure, you’re special, but your destiny lies elsewhere.’  You know what?  My destiny does lie elsewhere.  And when I figure out where that is, oh man, you’re totally going to wish that I let you in on it.  You sylrehy-rydehk cyjyka!”

The lioness, wounded and perhaps upset at her own lack of good taste, limped back to her pillar to lick her wounds and wait for another unsuspecting antelope to pass by.