Bi-Curiosities, Oscars Edition: Poorly Described Films

To coincide with tonight’s presentation of the Academy Awards, I’ve cooked up this simple little quizlet for you movie buffs. I’ve taken ten well-known films and boiled them down to a roux of technically accurate, but very misleading, summaries of the film’s story. Can you guess what movies are being described below?

1. A man is visited by a ghost, and realizes he has lots of friends.
2. A woman’s first orgasm leads to a suicide pact.
3. Two brothers make lots of money in Vegas, until the authorities separate them.
4. A factory owner hires lots of workers unsuited to the job.
5. A woman visits a psychiatrist to find out more about a tailor.
6. A lowly worker allows his mute friend to control him, which gets him noticed at his job.
7. A bar owner gets friendly with a local law officer.
8. A New Yorker heads to LA to visit his wife and kids for the holidays.
9. A man injures his leg, ruins his son’s hearing, and asks God to forgive him.
10. A man discusses his dead wife, causing another man to travel to California.

Send guesses to puzzleminz@gmail.com. Good luck!

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Bi-Curiosities Update: Vowel Movement Solution

Hey gang! Been a while, yes? Well, I figured a month plus was plenty of time to try to crack the code of the last puzzle. As it turns out, only one person managed to figure out all of the clues correctly, so congrats to Ryan for that! For the rest of you, the solutions are after the jump. And keep your eyes peeled for a quick little challenge a little later today.

Bi-Curiosities: Vowel Movement

Hey ho throat-cutters. Got a nice little puzzle for you to work on here, with a pretty silly pun for its title. Basically, we’re working with word math. Each clue provides a common phrase or pop-culture nugget. Then you either add or remove a vowel (or two) as directed. You’ll wind up with a silly, punny result that matches the solution of the clue’s equation. (Okay, not all the results are silly or punny.) No need to scramble letters or anything; just add/subtract the right vowel at the right place.

Hey, it’s gonna be fun! And some points will result from each correct answer you get, why not! Just send your solutions, questions and/or complaints to puzzleminz@gmail.com when you’ve got ’em. I’ll give you fine folks a couple of weeks to work on this one. Clues after le jump! Good luck!

Bicuriosities: Unavoidable Contemplative Follow-Up

Hey bros. So once again, after a small flurry of initial interest, there were no final attempts to beat the clock and solve the latest Bicuriosity. This makes me sad, because as much fun as it is to design these headscramblers, it’s not the same if folks aren’t into them enough to work stuff out.

For those of you who aren’t privy to my other online social media sources, this past week has been very trying for me, with all sorts of stuff happening, including the death of my father. As a result of it all, I’m feeling wiped out and very disheartened. I’m wondering if applying my efforts to making these puzzles is really worth the energy anymore, or if there’s some way I could tweak them to make them at least approachable and engaging for y’all. It’s a delicate balance right now, but I had hoped this’d be as enjoyable for you folks as they are for me. At this point, I dunno if either side of that equation is being satisfied.

So I’m asking for feedback once again about this little feature of our competitive online community. Be perfectly honest. Say what you have to say, either publicly in the comments, or privately via my email. Thanks fellows.

Meanwhile, after the jump, the groupings I had in mind for the most recent Bicuriosities puzzle, that Threesomes puzzle. Here we go:

Bi-Curiosities: Threesomes

Coming at you like a thief in the night, here’s your next headscratcher, friends and neighbors. In keeping with the wow-that-seems-easy-by-comparison trend, today we have a simple task for you all. After the jump you’ll see a collage of thirty images. Your job is to arrange the images into groups of three (by category, not spatially). Which categories? What might they have in common? Well, that’s the puzzle. You’ll probably come up with a few categories that’ll fit three of the pictures provided, but don’t be too hasty. There’s only one way to get all 30 images into ten separate categories and leave no orphans or overlaps. (Yes, that means each image will only fit into one category when all’s said and done.)

Sound easy? Who cares, it’s probably tougher than it seems. Not necessarily tricky, but tough. You get two weeks to figure out how to a-trois all these menages together. When you believe you have categories sussed out, you can check with me by writing to the usual email address (puzzleminz@gmail.com) and tell me the category theme and the images that go in it. I’ll write you back to say yea or nay. This is in lieu of giving out hints for this puzzle. So yeah, no hints this time around.

Your reward? Five points for every category correctly identified. (This INCLUDES an explanation for what unites the items in the category. You don’t get credit for just guessing at a threesome but not knowing why they belong together.) So that’s a potential for 50 points right there. And…and…whosoever manages to get all ten categories properly identified gets a Bonus 20 points on top of the bargain. Such a deal! And for this you get your usual two weeks. Final answers due before midnight on May 3.

General questions and inquiries can be submitted in the comments section, or write to me. Best of luck, and remember: somewhere in the ancient mystic trinity, you get three as a magic number.

Bi-Curiosities: Letter Tiles Solution

Letter Tiles was a sort of surprising puzzle in that it was mostly straightforward and challenging, rather than being infuriatingly abstract and hyper-clever. And as you might expect, the results of the challenge were just as surprising. Get your heads straight for the results, folks! Right after the jump!

Bi-Curiosities: Letter Tiles

Okay kiddiewinkies, another Bi-Curiosity has magically appeared. This one relies heavily on your word-recognition skills. Below you’ll find sixty-four tiles, each with three letters on them. Your job is to place the tiles in the correct order so that the result spells out three riddles and the riddles’ answers. You’ll note that there are a lot of question marks as well…those are missing letters, which you’ll need to figure out in order to complete the puzzle correctly. The number of missing letters increases the closer you get toward the end of the riddles/answers. So you can start out concentrating just on the tiles without question marks. But eventually, you’re gonna have to do some educated guessing.

Because of the nature of this puzzle, you can’t really ask for any hints: everything you need is right there below. You can ask for clarifications, but please do so in the comments below, so everyone can read them.

Once you’ve correctly constructed the riddles and its answers, send the three riddles to puzzleminz@gmail.com for a whopping 50 points! You have two weeks to complete this puzzle. So answers are due before the end of the day, March 27th.

Good luck, puzzlers.

Bi-Curiosities: Pop Quiz Answers

I don’t have as much luxury time to spend on this post as I’d thought I would have, so I’m just gonna post the answers with a little explanatory text, and let the appropriate authorities know who among you earned points. Nobody was able to earn the bonus 5 points for getting these all right. But that’s okay. Hopefully there was some amusement to be had in the exercise anyway.

So the common theme for the letter-shifted secondary answers were: each one was the name of a popular music artist or group (hence “Pop Quiz”!). Here’s how they look all solved and stuff.

1) HALL AND GATES (HALL AND OATES), a place in a mansion and a place surrounding a mansion.

2) FIR SUPPLY (AIR SUPPLY). Fir trees is one of the things people use for Christmas trees, from what this Jew guy was able to find out.

3) GAMY GLITTER (GARY GLITTER). I would also have accepted “Gory glitter”.

4) TOM WATTS (TOM WAITS). Tom cat! Aha!

5) THE BEE G.E.D.S (THE BEE GEES). I’m really pleased that one person got this.

6) PINK FLOOD (PINK FLOYD). This was one my favorite clue.

7) LADY GALA (LADY GAGA). It’s iffy to refer to debutantes as ladies, I guess. Because they’re so young.

8) RADIOHEAP (RADIOHEAD).

9) TRON MAIDEN (IRON MAIDEN). Yori was the name of a female character in Tron!

10) YOLO TENGO (YO LA TENGO). This was the one that inspired the whole puzzle.

Okay! Any questions or confusion, drop me a note or comment or something. New puzzle to follow once I’ve figured out a better method for constructing it. Thanks for playing!

Bi-Curiosities: Reminder

Hey folks, just a heads-up that the current Bi-Curiosities puzzle will be reaching its deadline this coming Sunday, March 2nd! There’ve been a lot of people getting hints, and even a few guessing some of the clues correctly! But so far, nobody has had it in them to guess every answer correctly for that sweet, sweet bonus of 5 points! It’s still waiting to be claimed by the first person to correctly answer all ten clues!

Even if you’re only sure of a few of them, don’t forget to submit your guesses. You get 5 points for each correct guess, friends and neighbors. And there’s plenty of time to ask for more hints. Or, y’know, just drop me a line and shoot the breeze. Whatevs.

To refresh your memory about this current puzzle, clickity-click right here. And address all guesses, entries, or clue requests to puzzleminz@gmail.com. Happy bi-curiousing!

Bi-Curiosities: Pop Quiz

We’re back folks. Bi-Curiosities makes its dubious return with a puzzle that’s guaranteed to leave you scratching your head and perhaps other people’s heads as well. No more crossword grids, but a whole bunch of confusing-seeming clues.

This time, you don’t have to do much other than answer the clues below. You’ll earn yourself 5 points for each correctly guessed answer, with a bonus of 5 points to the first person who solves them all. Each of the clues are deliberately strange and whimsical. The correct answers will be too. However, the answers all have a commonality to them. For every correct answer, if you change one letter, it will form another word or phrase that identifies some people of whom you may have heard. And these people can all be grouped into a specific category.

Make sense? No? Good. You can ask me any questions you like in the comments below, or privately at Puzzleminz@gmail.com. (If you ask a question privately that I think would benefit the rest of the folks, I’ll add it to the comments section below.)

As for hints, well…you can ask for them. You get a total of FOUR hints, though, and they can be used either to help you get a specific answer to a clue, or to get help understanding the common theme of the slightly-changed answer category. In addition, I’m going to keep this puzzle open for three weeks, rather than two. Just so folks have a chance to work their way around to it.

As always, send guesses and hint requests to Puzzleminz@gmail.com. Good luck. Here are your clues:

1. A place in the middle of, and a place at the outskirts of, a mansion.
2. Datum for a Christmas tree distributor.
3. Meaty fairy stuff.
4. Energy measurement for a cat.
5. A series of certification tests for hive-minds.
6. Mishap at the Pepto Bismol factory. 
7. A debutante ball, perhaps.
8. Pile of boomboxes.
9. Yori.
10. The American kids say, “seize the day!” The Spanish kids reply, “I have!”