Cryptoquips made easy!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

(As if they weren’t easy in the first place…)

Anyway, I had stashed away an old cryptoquip in a shirt pocket that I never got around to. I found it today, and was having a go at it. I was working in pen, made a few crucial mistakes. Needlesstosay, my little scrap of newspaper was a little ragged, what with all the scribblings and scratchings out.

Anyway, there weren’t any other good clues in the text (or so I initially thought) since there was an 11-letter word in front of a 12-letter word (which really threw me for a loop), so I went web searching for the answer. It was an old quiz, so I wasn’t having much luck. But I did come across this site. It doesn’t figure it out for you, but it lets you put in the quiz, and substitute letters all you want.

If you want to try it out, here’s the quiz I was working on:



L XBLJY L AJVH BHQCP
AIC LJPIOXCLAIO
HRXHCDLJQXAC HRVFQLD,
"L DQYH DAIOH VQFFO!"

Clue: D equals M

2

Cool tool. I’ve always thought the dullest part of solving these things is filling in the letters you’ve already figured out. It also seems to be the point at which I’m most likely to make the kind of mistakes that can really slow down the solving.

By the way, you figured it out, right? Once I had the Java thing, I knocked it out fairly quickly. Here’s the answer:I think I once heard our industrious exterminator exclaim, “I make mouse calls!”

3

Yup, that’s what I got. I had switched the i’s and a’s, which really screwed me up. Once I figured out the word before the quotes, I was home free.