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Apostrophes help you alot. I solved the following puzzle with no letters:

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ' _

_ _ _ _

Category was "Thing".

(Err, formatting isn't helping. That's two words, with 9 spaces, an apostrophe and a 10th space in the first word, and four spaces in the second word).




It's either a telephone's ring

Or Microsoft's bing

or a fisherman's nets

or the president's pets

or a ballerina's toes

or (something that grows

when dishonesty flows)

Pinocchio's nose?


You're Dr. Seuss's ghostwriter, right?


> Pinocchio's nose

Bing


In an attempt to solve, took bigrams from http://blog.afterthedeadline.com/2010/07/20/after-the-deadli...

and ended up these top 10 entries:

  Schindler's	List	33
  president's	plan	32
  Microsoft's	Xbox	26
  yesterday's	post	17
  boatswain's	mate	16
  highlight's	from	16  <-- need to include only nouns
  Elizabeth's	time	16
  Wednesday's	show	13
  Microsoft's	IPTV	11
The answer didn't appear in the corpus, but there was 1 entry for

  Pinocchio nose  <-- no apostrophe and 's'
Looks like i need a bigger corpus and more data scrubbing, there must've been something else that tipped you off before or during the show...


> there must've been something else that tipped you off before or during the show...

Not that I recall, but maybe so.


I thought I had "beginner's luck", but it wasn't since it wasn't ;)


"Yesterday's news"?


That's a good guess, but no, that wasn't it. I guess I was just really lucky that the right thing popped into my head :)

SPOILER: .--. .. -. --- -.-. -.-. .... .. --- ... -. --- ... .



I find your choice of link interesting.

Presumably you didn't write it by hand as you'd use duckgo.com then I suspect. So, why not provide the terminal page URL instead of this forwarding page?

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=.--.%20..%20-.%20---%20....

It's particularly curious because the page you give is an automated redirect and you'd have to stop the page loading to copy the link.

Just curious.


I wanted to show off duckduckgo's bang syntax.

I set it as my default search engine in Chrome, and it first I kept going to Google manually for specific searches where duckduckgo isn't good enough, yet. But after I learned that "!g <search>" would do that for me with less hassle, I grew much happier with duckduckgo.

By the way, a prefix of !hn defers to searchyc.com. There's a list at http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html


I was aware of the bang syntax - just if you manually wrote out the URL I expected you to use "dukgo.com/?q=!wa ..-.." or whatever rather than a long handed version.

Personally I use "wa" as a search keyword and then enter "wa ..-.." into my address bar.


I used copy-and-paste, and had to be quite nimble, to be faster than the re-direct.


Hit escape/stop and take your time.


"Policeman's beat?"


No


fisherman's knot ?


Nope


I find it interesting that most of the guesses to this puzzle here are perfectly valid solutions; they do fit the pattern, but they just aren't he solution that you have in mind. And there's no reliable way to take the puzzle as given and arrive at your solution; it would have to be a matter of guessing the one of the multiple possible solutions that happens to be correct.


carpenter's tool?


No. I will say that the solution is more notable than of the guesses thus far, with the possible exception of "yesterday's news"




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