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| Location Walnut Creek, Locust and Olympic | Start Code: STALE |
We were supposed to go to the corner of Locust and Olympic in Walnut Creek. It turned out that we didn't have a map of Walnut Creek. We had many maps of the East Bay, but somehow Walnut Creek's map had escaped. To me, this would have been a disaster. Fortunately, Dwight gets around, and had been to Walnut Creek a few times. He got us to Locust and Olympic.
I hopped out to pick up the puzzle while Bryan and Dwight went off with the van to park. Then I realized I didn't have the PDA with me to tell it that we'd started on the puzzle. Oh well.
A Taftian handed me a little cereal box which had been tampered with: a new label was slapped on the back and its contents had been replaced pieces of paper cut in strange shapes with word fragments printed on them. The label said that this was now a Gemini Croquette box. Oh, another movie reference, cool. Examining the shapes showed that they were Zodiac shapes: both Western and Chinese. I powered up my laptop and started jotting down information I'd pre-loaded.
Soon Brian and Dwight showed up. When we told the PDA that we were starting this puzzle, the PDA told us that this would be a good time to grab a meal.
How nice of Game Control to suggest this. The food choices around Walnut and Locust weren't so great--at least not the choices immediately obvious to an out-of-towner. But we weren't concentrating on taste here. We just needed puzzling fuel.
Soon we were in some awful chain restaurant with bland food, but having a blast. Over at the next table, Team Snout was eating and solving. They were talking quietly, so as not to be overheard. I asked them if they could hear us. "Well, kind of. It sounds like you're just about five minutes behind us." And with that, we all hunkered down over our respective puzzles.
One of Mystic Fish's good word puzzlers (i.e., not me) noticed that there were pairs of paper-pieces whose word fragments went together. One fragment said "O MORNING". Another said "PINION CARTOONS". Put them together to get "OPINION / MORNING CARTOONS". There were more such pairs. Each of them had one Western and one Chinese Zodiac figure.
A hint told us to notice themes amongst the word/phrases formed by these combined pairs. Oh, the first one always suggested an ordinal: first, second, third, fourth (e.g., "second opinion"). The second always suggested a day of the week (e.g., "Saturday morning cartoons").
Chinese zodiac symbols apply to years, albeit Chinese Lunar years. Western zodiac symbols apply to months, sort of, with a ~10-day offset from the usual months. So we started treating each paper-pair as a set of directions: Second Saturday of July (Cancer, close enough) 2005 (year of the rooster, close enough). Look at the date number of the referenced day: probably it's a number in 1-26, that you can map to a letter. Worth a try, anyhow. There was some trepidation: maybe we should really find the second Saturday after the start of the first Cancer period in a recent year of the Rooster? But we got started.
Another hint told us that we were on the right track: Don't worry so much about the exact Zodiac meanings. And soon we had an answer. When we entered it into the PDA, it congratulated us and told us to go to Civic Park, still in Walnut Creek.
Dwight asked a friendly local at the next table (recently vacated by Snout) for directions to Civic Park. And the friendly local had them. Thank you, friendly local. I looked at the remains of the food basket at my place. I'd attempted to eat about half of a huge sandwich. Of the half I'd attempted to eat, about half of the over-stuffed contents had fallen out of the sandwich into the basket. Somehow, it seemed like a good dinner.