National Puzzle Day

In honor of National Puzzle Day (January 26), Cherry Hills Library hosted a crossword puzzle tournament on January 14!

Puzzles were taken from the New York Times Archives and the fastest correct completer from each round moved on to the finals.

Congrats to Jennifer and Jason, our stellar final round contestants.  Below you can see them locked in a dead heat for the grand prize:

Both their puzzles were correct, but Jason came in a hair before Jennifer to claim the title.

Here's a close up of the winning puzzle.

Many thanks to all who participated!

The Library has books on puzzles, as well as novels featuring puzzles and movies.
For a fun cinematic look into crossword culture, there's Wordplay.

There are several Crossword Puzzle Dictionaries available for check out, including:
Crossword Puzzle Dictionary
The New York Times Crossword Puzzle Dictionary
The Everything Large-Print Crossword Dictionary

Nero Blanc and Parnell Hall are two mystery authors who feature crosswords.
The first of Nero Blanc's Belle Graham series is The Crossword Murder.
Parnell Hall's first in the series is A Clue For The Puzzle Lady (also available electronically).

If you're looking for puzzle books, but not necessarily crosswords, we have:
Sudoku Easy To Hard
Sudoku 200 Fun and Challenging Japanese Number Puzzles
The Sudoku Book

Mystery authors who feature Sudoku include Kaye Morgan, Parnell Hall and Shelley Freydont.  Some of their series begin:
Murder By Sudoku
The Sudoku Puzzle Murder (a continuation of her crossword puzzle series)
The Sudoku Murder

The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament is in the beginning of March and information can be found on their website.

The Books That Made You Cry! The Books That Made You Laugh Out Loud!

We asked  the folks who follow the Ernie Pyle Facebook page "What book made you cry at the end?" Here are their responses:

 

 "The Outsiders makes me cry every time I read it."

"Where the Red Fern Grows."

"The Fault in Our Stars, The Lottery by Patricia Wood, Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince, Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows, The Last Song, Marley and Me."

 

 

We asked the folks who follow the Cherry Hills Facebook page "What book made you laugh out loud?" These are their responses:

 

"Anything by Dave Barry."

"Adrian Mole books by Sue Townsend."

"Will Grayson, Will Grayson."

 

 

What book has made you cry?   What book has made you laugh out loud?  Let us know in the comments!

 

Fads & Trends, Curiosities & Wonders

I don't profess to be fashionable.  I am on the cutting edge of nothing.  So, when the Weekly Alibi ran a feature recently on "Planking/Flanking", I was fairly clueless.  Then, yesterday, a co-worker turned me on to Tebowing, & as a corollary, I discovered Owling.  How have I missed all the fun fads?

As I am wont to do when I want to learn about something, I turned to my friendly local library catalog.  A keyword search of "fads" turned up titles such as Panati's Parade of Fads, Follies, and Manias: The Origins of Our Most Cherished Obsessions, Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall for Fads,& Poplorica: A Popular History of the Fads, Mavericks, Inventions, and Lore that Shaped Modern America.  A good background, but none of these books were going to keep me au courant.  We do have the I Can Has Cheezburger?: A LOLcat Collekshun book-wasn't that all the rage not too long ago?  Are people still doing PostSecret? How about Sh*t My Dad Says?  I guess people are still loving The Onion, since you can now pick up a copy locally.  The literary mashup genre still seems to be going strong, though I stopped reading at Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter.

However, what my search for fads did lead me to was a couple of very interesting subject headings (when looking an item record, you can find subject headings under the "Find Similar Items" tab): Popular Culture, seven glorious pages of off-the-wall books from Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now to Hip, The History; & Curiosities & Wonders, which brings you New Mexico Curiosities: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities & Other Offbeat Stuff, The Book of Useless Information, & Charles Fort: The Man who Invented the Supernatural. I'm sure I'll be reading in these subjects for quite some time.

Some other fun things you might enjoy:

Garfield minus Garfield

Simon's Cat on YouTube

Awkward Family Photos

The Bad Fads Museum

Cake Wrecks

'Twas the Night Before...

Just click on these links to read the rest of the parodies of Clement Moore's famous poem. & whatever you may be celebrating this season, hope it's happy!

'Twas a Star Trek Christmas

'Twas the night before Christmas on the Enterprise-D,
On a routine short hop to Starbase 03,
With Data on duty in the command chair,
At Warp 6, the Enterprise soon would be there.

A Visit from St. Nicholas in the Ernest Hemingway Manner

It was the night before Christmas. The house was very quiet. No creatures were stirring in the house. There weren't even any mice stirring. The stockings had been hung carefully by the chimney. The children hoped that Saint Nicholas would come and fill them.

'Twas the Night Before Catmas

'Twas the night before Catmas,
When all through the house,
Not an animal was stirring,
Not even the mouse.

Xena's Night Before Solstice

'Twas the night before Solstice and all through the village,
There were no celebrations, not even a light pillage;
Joxer was nestled elsewhere in his bed,
While heroic visions danced through his head.

X-File Night Before Christmas

'Twas the night before Christmas and all of the Feds,
Had gone home to their families and were tucked up in bed.
Fox Mulder was stirring, he'd be up for a while,
With high hopes that Santa would bring him an X-File.

I Write Like

We found a link to the I Write Like website on Facebook. All you need is a sample of your writing-a couple paragraphs of a story, some poems, a blog post-& this statistical analysis tool will analyze your word choice and writing style and compare them with those of famous writers. We write like George Orwell. Have you noticed?

This is just for fun-obviously it's not completely accurate, as Margaret Atwood used it with a sample of her own writing & found she writes like Stephen King. Rogert Ebert has also given it a try (he writes like Margaret Atwood); Yann Martel writes like Kurt Vonnegut; a writer for the New Yorker's Book Bench says, "According to the machine, an invitation to a birthday party was worthy of a comparison to James Joyce; an excerpt from a term paper on Renaissance literature, though, more closely resembled Dan Brown’s fiction." (The program, written by a Russian software programmer whose second language is English, only pulls from a list of 50 authors right now, but we gather more are being added.)