How long do these things take you? I confess to not being very well read, but I like to think I’m pretty sharp with riddles and subtle hints, so I can usually hammer these answers out with some research. But coming up with them seems like a hell of an endeavour, I can’t believe they are pulled fully off the cuff.
I remember back in the days of the original Bricker challenges (a proud past winner, thenkyouverymuch) when I was unemployed spending a exceedingly silly amount of time fighting through them to score the last few mstical answers. Where do you find the time?
Dammit, this is like the third time in a row that I’ve missed by one question although I see that I might have actually missed two except for Bricker’s leniency.
What I usually do is accumulate questions on my Pocket PC as I think of them, in sort of a stream of consciousness manner… I’ll be on the train home and see someone reading For Better or for Worse, which got me thinking about comic strip characters that age, which reminded me of the ORIGINAL comic strip whose characters aged, and how they started off. That gave birth, no pun intended, to the baby Skeezix question. So I jotted that down, and then I thought about how Skeezix grew up and enlisted in the Army for WWII, and how he came back, and how it is in general to come back from war, and how different people react differently to coming back from war, which led me to Maugham’s Larry Darrell. Jot that one down. Salvation and redemption in Maugham got me thinking about how differently different authors approach the same subject, and Vachss and Burke came to mind, as did Herman Melville. I used the Burke question, but as I was trying to think about something to ask about Melville, I remembered his line in Moby Dick about the catskill eagle soaring above all the other birds of the plain, even if it flies in a low ravine, and that made me think of Parker, who used “A Catskill Eagle” as one of his titles, which made think of the Spenser series in general, and thus was born the Spenser question. I left poor Melville behind, to be picked up another day, as the train reached my stop and I had to quit for the day.
But that’s the general process. The past six months have been REALLY busy, work-wise, and I have been using my train ride to write responses to RFPs instead of fun stuff, so the Bricker Challenges have suffered accordingly.