Neither Geo nor Duck

 My daily routine includes several of the New York Times puzzles. This habit serves three purposes, as far as I can tell. It is perhaps keeping my aging brain a little sharper. It helps me to come slowly to consciousness each morning as I very slowly sip each day's first carefully crafted, free-range cup of coffee. And it allows me to procrastinate on any actual puzzles I might need to tackle. Bonus: I can procrastinate further by sharing results online -- it helps me to touch base with the nerdiest of my many nerdy friends. 

Some puzzles I do every day, and some I do never. My favorites are the inevitable Wordle and the obscure but lovable Strands.  This post is about yesterday's Connections. This is one that I try about half of the time, and that I solve about half of those times. And it is the best one for kvetching with friends online. Nobody who plays this game fails to complain about it sometimes. 

A brief explanation is in order for those who have managed not to get sucked into the Connections orbit. Each puzzle is an array of 16 words or short phrases. The player is to put them into four groups of four, each of which shows up as a colored square -- in the final results, correct groupings appear as color bars.

The purple bar is always the most difficult and garners the most discussion. The groupings tend not to be very obvious -- otherwise this would not be a possible. But the purple group is sometimes not obvious even after it has been chosen correctly by default. For example, they might belong together only if a common syllable were to be added or maybe even a rhyming word substituted.

I might grumble about that last, purple category. But if I fail at the puzzle, it is not because of that group, which comes together automatically if I have gotten the other four. So winning or losing is, for me, a measure of just how mentally sharp I am that day. I often "brag" about one-day streaks as a result.

Yesterday, the entire puzzle came to me quickly. Four solid bars means I had no missed guesses. I posted the "results" online in the usual way, which means that the achievement is shown but without the actual words.

Clearly a win, but with the most difficult group last, which is typical. And now for the real point of this rather rambling blog post: the actual results. It is safe to post this now because the original game has moved to the next round in all time zones.

Neither of the librarians in my house plays this puzzle -- even though it is all about categories -- but I shared the results with both of them. To my son, I had texted, "So geoduck is a thing, and it is not a duck at all." His response was priceless: "Yes, I am familiar with the geoduck. Why do you mention it? haha." He knows a lot about unusual foods and animals. 

I answered, "It was a puzzle answer and I assumed it was a duck, not a weird-ass clam." I had learned this, of course, from a google search. See whether you agree with my description.

Image: Oceana

Weird or not, they are apparently sought after, commanding prices as high as $150. The name derives neither from geography (my posting this nonsense on a geography blog) nor waterfowl. It comes from the clam's name in the Lushootseed language spoken in the Puget Sound area. The clam is found on the West Coast of North America from the Aleutians to Baja California.

And now for the other librarian response. Pamela noticed that not only are geoduck, seahorse, titmouse, and wombat animal names that end with other animal names, but that none of them are the same kind of animal as the second part of the name suggests. Sounding like kinds of a duck, horse, mouse, or bat, they are in fact a clam, a fish, a bird, and a marsupial. That is some professional-level librarian thinking!

Lagniappe: For the Nerds

In the course of looking for yesterday's puzzle outcome, I found my overall statistics for this game. According to the. NYT app, I've done a bit better at this than I thought. I have even gotten the purple category first 15 times. I think most of those were before I even realized it was always the most obscure category.

It could also be that like Reagan-era unemployment numbers, days that I open the puzzle and don't guess at all are viewed as "discouraged puzzler" days and are not counted.