Calculatrivia caused me to learn the closest interstate you would use if you wanted to travel from London Bridge to Toad Suck Ferry.
I also remember the hidden contest that consisted of deciphering a letter to the editor. The editorial title of the letter was “We Get Odd Letters!” followed by grammatically correct sentences that had no common context and read as just a bizarre rant. The editorial comment at the end was “Even letters like this can be ignored.”
Turns out, if you took every other letter in the missive starting with the first letter (i.e. using the “odd letters” and ignoring the “even letters”) it would spell out the hidden contest instructions.
In the early 1980s, they were relatively easy to find - the first one I ever saw had the clues in Eyeball Benders replaced with the hidden contest.
My favorite hidden contest: an April issue had stories on famous hoaxes, like the Plainfield Teachers football team, the “Cardiff Giant,” and a group of four men that went around the Dakotas pretending to be The Beatles. One of the cryptograms, when solved, said something like, “This is the Hidden Contest - to enter, tell us which of our hoaxes is itself a hoax.” (The answer: the “fake Beatles”)
I said it before and I’ll probably say it again: If whatever currently has the rights to the magazine releases the entire archive on CD-rom or thumbdrive, they can name their price. This was my favorite magazine ever growing up, one of the very few things in my life where I’d count the days to the next one, and the one thing I hated was that it I knew there was tons of material I was missing. I want this, dammit!
I loved the ingenuity behind the Hidden Contests. More than a few times I asked myself “How did I miss that?” There were a couple…the one in the soda can artwork on the same page as the regular contest and the suspiciously italicized words in the message from the editor…that I probably could’ve doped out but I was just too lazy. (I didn’t have any intention of entering them, so no loss.)
I remember one particularly bizarre one called “What are the rules of this contest?”, which had six paragraphs presented in the wrong order and you had to somehow figure out what the correct order was and what you were supposed to do. Anyone remember how that turned out?
I remember a contest where you had to find a word where, if you converted every letter of the alphabet into a number using the usual A=1, B=2, etc., pattern, then multiplied all of the numbers together, you would come up with one million (or as close as you could manage). I don’t think that I ever would have guessed that “teaette” is an actual thing, but apparently it’s some old-timey tea infuser?
