Sunday, April 21, 2019

NPR Sunday Puzzle (Apr 21, 2019): Greetings and Salutations!

NPR Sunday Puzzle (Apr 21, 2019): Greetings and Salutations!:
Q: Think of a common greeting in another country. You can rearrange its letters to get the capital of a country that neighbors the country where this greeting is commonly spoken. What greeting is it?
Add 2 letters and rearrange to get a common greeting in the second country.

Edit: Add XC to get XIN CHÀO in Vietnamese.
A: NǏ HǍO (China) --> HANOI (Vietnam)

116 comments:

  1. Here's my standard reminder... don't post the answer or any hints that could lead directly to the answer (e.g. via a chain of thought, or an internet search) before the deadline of Thursday at 3pm ET. If you know the answer, click the link and submit it to NPR, but don't give it away here.

    You may provide indirect hints to the answer to show you know it, but make sure they don't give the answer away. You can openly discuss your hints and the answer after the Thursday deadline. Thank you.

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    1. Did you think the original post fully through?

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  3. Wow, Blaine, that was quick. And the 2 letters you add (in your hint) are the same distance away from the center of the alphabet (i.e., their alphanumeric values sum to 27).

    LegoSaysBlaineCameUpWithASplendidRiffOff/HintInRecordTime!

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  4. Solved. Now back to my other Sunday puzzle.

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  5. I’m fatigued with getting mired in these too easy puzzles.

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    1. "Adiós" actually means "to God" ... but y'all knew that, so what is this comment good for?

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  7. Very excited to about this year's Tribeca Film Festival. Great showings, great events to come.

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    1. Sadly, I'm too busy to go to TFF this year. The TFF comment above was in fact my clue.

      There are many films in the 2019 Festival lineup, but one "Anniversary Film," being shown this Sunday, is the 40th Anniversary Director's Cut of Apocalypse now, Francis Ford Coppola's epic work on the Vietnam War.

      That was my hint.

      https://www.tribecafilm.com/filmguide/apocalypse-now-2019

      (Coppola, by the way, turned 80 this month!)

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  8. As I posted before this aired this morning, and it could be a hint:

    skydiveboy
    Apr 21 at 5:08 AM
    skydiveboy has left a new comment on the post "NPR Sunday Puzzle (Apr 14, 2019): Liar, Liar, Pant...":

    Solved and back to bed.

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  9. Mired, Buck? Nevertheless, the big fool said to push on.

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  10. Not wanting to peruse a list of country capitals or to search for greetings in various languages, I decided to pursue other activities. Imagine my surprise when the word and its translation appeared in a graphic as I was idly flipping through the pages of a travel magazine!

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    1. I definitely got it from Clark's comment. Certain members of my extended family also helped.

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    2. It was removed because it was too revealing. This is not a place to be given the answer. People can provide a non-revealing hint to show they know the answer but it shouldn't give the answer away to someone that doesn't already know the answer. See my hint for an example.

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    3. But you gave the answer! 😀

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  12. Why are you hanging around here when you could be over at Lego's Puzzleria! puzzle blog and solve my easy geographical puzzle offering this week? Will Shortz declined to use it, as he does with all my puzzle submissions, so that should clue you in that it is at least an intelligent and thoughtful puzzle.

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  13. I thought this was a site for people who liked NPR Sunday puzzles. I'm sure there is such a site somewhere.

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    1. Right on, Weird Woman. I don't get why anyone would bother with a site they find so objectionable.

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    2. You have me curious now as to who you may be referring to that finds this site objectionable. Specifics please, not just screen name.

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    3. WW II (Word Woman has dibs on WW I):

      Lest you get caught in a morass of misunderstanding, skydiveboy (aka SDB) is an overwhelming presence on this site. Unlike the NPR site, his puzzle contributions are regularly accepted at another puzzle site run by Legolambda. Thus his urging is not to abandon this community, but rather that we visit both sites.

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    4. I'm reading somewhere that Will negates Overwhelming Presence?????

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  15. Way too easy this week, dang it...

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  16. Yeah. This is a grand site. You even tolerate the random Deplorable from time to time. Naysayers can move along.

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  17. ADoxma33--Whatever you might say, gosh darn it, I still refuse to leave.

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  18. Shortz could have made this a much better challenge by saying "a common greeting in a language other than English" rather than "another country."
    The greeting is common in the US and other countries where a listener might live.
    He should call me before he offers these up.
    I almost never send in answers and I have not sent in my real phone number in twenty years, but I would give it to him if he asked.

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    1. And, he might also have said to rearrange the letters of the greeting as spelled by people who don't speak the language to spell the capital of a country as spelled by people who don't speak that language either. But that might give away what a silly puzzle this is.

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  19. I am disgustingly lost on this puzzle. Probably overthinking it based on how quickly and easily so many of you got it. Any hint to help me reset my thinking on this?

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    1. Don't give up. Tenacity is the key to solving the hard ones.

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    3. Got it!! Went back to basics and it hit me almost immediately. Was WAY overthinking it. Talk about a load off of my brain- my head no longer hurts processing this one :-)

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    4. Yeah, it sure is easy when someone tells you exactly how to solve it.

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    5. To be fair, I just iterated the logic used to solve every NPR Sunday puzzle for the last I don’t know how long. WS goes out of his way each and every week to make it easy. You just have to apply the the simple logic and you will solve them all. if you look at bdeclue’s response it wasn’t “Thanks Buck I would have never gone there” but “Went back to basics and it hit me almost immediately. Was WAY overthinking it.” I mean really. Are you hiding the fact that there is little effort needed?

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    6. And really, it’s not like I posted a picture when describing the puzzle that had the answer written on it.

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    7. Wrong! You basically gave the answer away.

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    8. You are completely wrong. I gave away nothing. I said to use the same complexity that the Sunday Puzzles previously used. It’s soo basic. Take the clue, and it’s in a list of the top 5 or 10 answers most people will come up with. I never gave the answer away. It’s the same method each and every week.

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    9. And really, it wasn’t like I posted a picture with the answer written in it.

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    10. To be fair to Buck, I never saw his post- it was deleted by the time I came back with the answer. The post that provided me (some) help was actually the one above about a travel magazine. I can't say exactly how it helped without giving a spoiler myself I think. So if there is some magic formula for solving these, I still don't know it!

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  20. Replies
    1. Like you I have no hellish niece who gives away the answers...

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  21. Replies
    1. Well, not exactly, I am afraid though, that this terrestrial being is actually from the "Orange Nebula", far far away.

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    2. As a philosopher once said, "Close the bus door. I feel a draft."

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  22. Did anyone else catch Will’s additional (unintended?) clue on Sunday?

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  24. I'm waiting for the "Holzhauer 2020" bumper stickers to show up.

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  25. I know I'm weird, but for some reason this news story reminded me of this. Gotta get my mind right....

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    1. I suppose we all have communication problems on occasion. A failure of our time.

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    2. As soon as I saw the video title, I knew the scene.
      That was an important movie.
      Unfortunately, I don't have the subscription necessary to see the NYT comparison.

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    3. Thanks. Came through with a serious burden of ads and popups, with the story squished in.

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  26. This may be untimely, however apropos, but a belated Happy New Year, 68.

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  28. Ah, yes. The sentiments exactly, more or less, from those receiving New Year greetings from that capital.

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  29. NI HAO the Mandarin greeting in China, which is adjacent to Hanoi, Viet Nam

    My Hint: "Solved and back to bed." Hinting at The Sleeping Dragon, a.k.a. China.

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  30. Nǐ hǎo” or 你好 = Hello! in Mandarin Chinese. → HANOI, capital of neighboring Vietnam. Amazingly, Blaine even put the solution: 你好 on his world map!

    "xin chào" is “Hello” in Vietnamese (ni hao + xc).


    My clue: “...no hellish niece...” anagrams to “hello in Chinese.”

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  31. NI HAO, HANOI

    > Reminds me of a Robin Williams line.

    Good Morning, Vietnam!

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  32. Ni Hoa → Hanoi

    WW II (Word Woman has dibs on WW I): Vietnam was the 3rd war of the last century, because we forget Korea, and all the other little incursions in the name of peace and freedom. And morass, misunderstanding, overwhelming presence were all terms to describe our adventure there.

    Paul noted that the Will of the Vietnamese fighters negated the US' overwhelming power. Almost always the case, the modern exception I can think of is the Chinese overwhelming Tibet.

    BA, BA!! is more appropriate. A call to Blog Administer a too obvious clue about Tet, and a reference to Baba O'Riley by The Who. Though not its original intent, it became a protest anthem against the Vietnam War. I wish the video showed more Keith Moon.

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    1. No, I didn't:
      http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/o/overwhelming-presence/
      Proceed at your own risk. I assume, if you get pop-ups, you're smart enough to opt "out".

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    2. Also, Presence and Power are not the same. I would think you would Know that.

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    3. I've been whelmed all week. But not whelmedicated.

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  33. My clue of "Way too easy this week, dang it..." referred to two Vietnam cities, Hue & Da Nang. Both very famous during "The War".

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    1. very clever. I thought it was the country song."Dang me, might as well take a rope and hanging me." No wait that was last week?

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  34. I wanted to make some kind of reference to Full Metal Jacket" but it wasn't meant to be.
    The past few Sunday Puzzles have been tough to clue in without giving things away.

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  35. Unfortunately, thinly veiled klews, and sometimes outright statements, about Viet Nam are a foreign language, as it were, to people who know history only as it is taught these days.

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  36. Snipper's comment about WS leaving an unintended clue on Sunday, probably referred to the Sunday NYT Crossword puzzle. On 86 across, the clue asked for "Chinese Greeting" with NIHAO as the answer. I thought, surely this is not the same answer as the NPR puzzle?? Sure enough it was!!

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    1. I thought it might be referring to:

      1. The governor did a HAndspring fielding questions in IlliNOIs. = Hanoi

      I noticed the person who submitted the puzzle lives in Washington D.C., which made me think he most likely had connections in other countries, and may have been stationed in some.

      None of this helped me solve the puzzle. In fact I solved it before it was even aired simply by looking at a list of world greetings and saw it fairly quickly.

      I like this puzzle because it is didactic and I learned of this greeting I did not know, even though I have friends from China. I like geographical puzzles. They usually tell us something interesting about our world, unlike most of the childish crap WS offers up.

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    2. Speaking of consulting lists (or not), how did Lorenzo manage to erase his thumbnail (without getting it replaced by the blogger "B")? And why? It was a nice picture! (although I can't recall the locale)

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  37. Paul: I think it may be a new thumbnail. It looks like bdeclue has the same one.

    ron: I probably have but, as with most T-shirts, I didn't pay much, if any, attention anyhow.

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  38. I tried, unsuccessfully, to force fit Lisbon into S'il bon, hoping for a French slang (it's good?). My hat is off to those of you whose language skills allowed you to solve this one.

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  39. NI HAO, HANOI
    I had almost forgotten about NI HAO. Back when my brother Bryan and his wife Renae adopted my Chinese nieces Mia Kate and Maddy, we got a book of common Chinese phrases, and NI HAO was one of them. It's pronounced "knee how", BTW.

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  40. So did nobody catch that the image Blaine posted had the answer spelled out? I saw no mention.

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    1. I would say the answer is there, but it's a stretch to say it is "spelled out".

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    2. .....and that's what makes it a great hint.

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  41. Yes 68charger- both of my clues were referring to 86 across in the NYT Sunday Puzzle which had the answer!

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  42. Replies
    1. Since 2004, the average winning score on Jeopardy has been just under $20,000. Holzhauer has averaged over $76,000 a game for his 16 wins, so far. He's brought a ratings bump, but at some point I imagine he's going to impact the show's profitability.

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    2. Jeopardy is broadcast to 206 media markets in the US; his higher take averages about $270 per market.

      I wonder how much Trebek makes per show? Or Vanna, touching letter panels is very hard.

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    3. Vanna and Alex both make about $10M, Pat 12.

      With Trebek's health, it maybe be a toss-up whether outlasts James.
      I am old enough to remember Charles Van Doren and the isolation booth. And the big boost it gave 21's ratings while it lasted. Never saw the movie.

      I don't think there has been as dominant a figure in sports or games.

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    4. There's nothing wrong with our system, so why should we discuss socialism?

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    5. Paul, I agree, and you should not bring it up.

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    6. I already did. But you knew that.
      How do you feel about a discussion of "value"?

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    7. Paul, I was assuming your post was sarcastic, and I was replying in kind, but did you miss where I used the word NOT?

      I am strongly for a more socialistic form of democracy. We certainly are not a democracy now, and probably never really were. I always find it interesting how our legislators are so comfortable and happy with their socialized medical program, but do NOT want the rest of us to have something similar.

      Not sure what you are referring to with "value"?

      Not to change the subject, but I have been thinking about how I have always considered myself NOT to be a racist, but am realizing I do have a strong revulsion to Orange people, if you know what I mean.

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  43. Did anyone see the article about the strategy Holzhauer uses during the game? Now the secret is out and the others can use it. Not too clever.

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  44. Hey, another Joseph Young puzzle for this week!
    Soon the Weekend Edition segment will be called, "Sunday Puzzleria featuring Will Shortz."

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  45. Over 700 entries last week.

    Next week's challenge, from our own Joseph Young:

    Think of a common 3-word phrase in the form BLANK AND BLANK. Move the first letter of the third word to the start of the first word to name two means of transportation (I think).

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  46. Jan, thanks for posting. Sounds right!

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    1. Yes, jan, I echo 68Charger's thanks for posting the puzzle. Your comment and Crito's make me smile.

      LegoWhoHoweverIsNotInWillShortz'sLeague

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    2. And, thanks for a nice puzzle, Lego!

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For NPR puzzle posts, don't post the answer or any hints that could lead to the answer before the deadline (usually Thursday at 3pm ET). If you know the answer, submit it to NPR, but don't give it away here.

You may provide indirect hints to the answer to show you know it, but make sure they don't assist with solving. You can openly discuss your hints and the answer after the deadline. Thank you.