It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "point".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump (egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk) ahem You know, I'm still hung up on yesterday's story, or rather the aside in yesterday's story: The crazy story of the day Elon Musk decided to personally rip servers out of a Sacramento data center.
ThrowBack Thursday: Musk had just acquired Twitter. He wanted to cut costs, was sure he could make things run more efficiently. He laid off a bunch of Twitter workers, and then was surprised when the remaining workers didn't know how to keep things going. And, to cut costs keeping machines running, he personally went to a Twitter data center and started disconnecting machines, even though people told him that this would break things.
Do you see parallels to the way D.O.G.E. makes the US Government "more efficient" by laying off workers and canceling programs…and then, shockingly, things stop working?
Anyhow, I made you a word search. Can you find the many, many synonyms of "point" that are hidden in the grid below? Cross them out (like I did with Label, and the leftover letters will explain Elon's point.
Oh no! Elon got into the grid and yanked some rectangles out and dumped them on the floor. I guess to solve the word puzzle, you'll need to figure out where to put those back in.
The server rack:
| I N D | I C A | T E D | F M T |
| H | | D I A | N E E |
| I O S | T P N | R C O | O A R |
| I A E | I S M | ||
| T T O | M C O | T I A | T U I |
| S N M | T R A | I N M | R R N |
| S O O | T C E | J B O | O E A |
| C C N | P O U | P P L | |
| P O L | F A D | D A N | |
| M E A | N I N | I I C | |
| A T N | O C C | ||
| T A R | G E T | N E M | E L E |
The yanked rectangles:
| A R P | E T C | O R A | |||
| S T P | G N T | M A U | |||
| O T O | T I N |
Word list:
AMOUNT
COMMAND
CONTACT
CONTROL
DIRECT
DOCTOR
ELEMENT
FACTOR
IMPORT
INDICATE
LABEL
LOCATION
MEANING
MEASURE
OBJECT
PORTION
REPAIR
STATE
TAPER
TARGET
TERMINAL
TRAIN
Clues, rot-13'd:
- "Pbageby" tbrf hcjneq va gur frpbaq pbyhza naq cnffrf guebhtu gur BEN erpgnatyr.
- "Ercnve" tbrf qbjajneq va gur frpbaq-gb-ynfg pbyhza naq cnffrf guebhtu gur ZNH naq NEC erpgnatyrf.
- Pgey-S gryyf lbh gurer'f whfg bar W va gur tevq, juvpu zvtug uryc lbh svaq "bowrpg".
Solution, rot-13'd:
Here's the restored grid; leftover letters are Capitalized; letters used in words are lowercase:
|vaqvpngrqszg| |Uynoryqvnarr| |VbFgCaepbbne| |BenVnrgvAvfz| |GgbzpbgVnghv| |fazgenvazeea| |FbBgprwobbrn| |ppAbGbcBhccy| |CBySNQqnaznH| |zrnavatAgvvP| |RgpngabpPNeC| |gnetrgarzryr|
Here's the word list; for each word there's a starting row, starting column and a direction. Yeah, yeah, rot-13 doesn't disguise the row or column numbers at all; but who's even going to scroll down this far?
nzbhag (ebj:4, pby:8, qve:f) pbzznaq (ebj:7, pby:0, qve:ar) pbagnpg (ebj:10, pby:7, qve:j) pbageby (ebj:7, pby:1, qve:a) qverpg (ebj:0, pby:8, qve:fj) qbpgbe (ebj:8, pby:6, qve:aj) ryrzrag (ebj:11, pby:11, qve:j) snpgbe (ebj:0, pby:9, qve:fj) vzcbeg (ebj:9, pby:9, qve:a) vaqvpngr (ebj:0, pby:0, qve:r) ynory (ebj:1, pby:1, qve:r) ybpngvba (ebj:8, pby:2, qve:ar) zrnavat (ebj:9, pby:0, qve:r) zrnfher (ebj:0, pby:10, qve:f) bowrpg (ebj:6, pby:8, qve:j) cbegvba (ebj:7, pby:9, qve:a) ercnve (ebj:5, pby:10, qve:f) fgngr (ebj:5, pby:0, qve:ar) gncre (ebj:9, pby:8, qve:aj) gnetrg (ebj:11, pby:0, qve:r) grezvany (ebj:0, pby:11, qve:f) genva (ebj:5, pby:3, qve:r)
