Okay, as I mentioned, I’ve decided to stretch my puzzling abilities.
This is a first. It’s rusty, it’s awful, but I believe it works.
Here is your clue: if smitten is the key then where is the lock.
If nobody guesses in a while, I’ll issue some more instructions. This is a multi-part challenge, so you need to find the text to “translate”, find the marker, then figure out the “decryption” (I use this term loosely).
Clue 1: There is a specific post in Ensight’s archives (now) which contains the text to decrypt. To find it, you’ll need to use the key.
Clue 2: Assuming you’ve found the post with the word “smitten” in it, you should see the ugly text. There were two basic kinds of ciphers in the Roman times. One was simple letter replacement (ie: a is b, b is c, etc). The second was a counting system. So if you knew where to start counting, and knew the interval, you could pull out, say, every 5th letter starting with “the” (or whatever).
Clue 3: I’m not even sure anyone is reading this. However, one last clue before giving away the whole shebang. “Smitten” is not only the key word to helping you find the post in question, it is also the ’starting point’ for the cipher.
Clue 4: I’ve been asked to not simply give away the secret to this. I’ll say this, this IS a counting cipher. So if you know where to start (either before or after ’smitten’) on the page, then the only thing you need to know is the length of the ‘count’ (ie: get every 5th letter, or every 12th letter, or whatever). The only other clue I have to give is how many letters, and I’ll leave that until tomorrow. Also, final clue, don’t count spaces. Don’t count hyphenations. Don’t count apostrophes. Don’t count punctuation. Just letters.
February 14th, 2006 at 7:56 pm
It’s your hair.
February 15th, 2006 at 3:45 am
With you so far but I need a little more information.
February 15th, 2006 at 10:42 am
hehe – looks like we need to give Jeremy a few extra jobs over at b5
my head hurts just thinking about puzzles
February 15th, 2006 at 12:43 pm
Will you beauty and pitt blog for me today so I can work on this DAMN thing? And you might need to do some management consulting for my hubby as well…
February 15th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
And then teach me how to spell my name too.
February 15th, 2006 at 5:11 pm
I used to feel smart. Now I feel stupid. I blame you!
February 15th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
I got as far as:
I weee mee y
And agve up. :p
Was I close?
February 15th, 2006 at 7:54 pm
Dont you give it up just yet. Please
February 16th, 2006 at 2:03 am
Oh don’t hold it off cause of me. I just don’t have the time it will take for my lame brain to figure it out.
February 16th, 2006 at 2:13 am
I turned in what I have. We’ll see if I got it right