Solution to Sparvelous Moons

BENT SPOONS

Spoonerisms, transpositions of the initial sounds of a pairs of words, are the most culinary-themed wordplay technique. In true Pilcrow Bar style, we pushed this puzzle pop-up concept up a notch more absurd — and turned the spoons themselves into food!

This puzzle has a clear starting point: the clues under the spoons. Each one results in a two-word phrase that can be spoonerized into something food-related. Neither the clued phrases nor the spoonerized food phrases are necessarily canonical or commonly used, but given how unlikely it is to stumble on such a pair of words by chance, when you get one, it feels like a very strong confirmation that you’re right.

For instance, “A role in a play that’s really hard to do” is a TOUGH PART, which spoonerizes to PUFF TART. (Spoonerisms abide by phonetic rules, and the spelling is allowed change.)

The markings on the spoons help confirm the correct, spoonerized phrases: the two embossed letters are the initials, and the notched segments (reading from the bowl down the handle) represent the lengths of the two words, with the thin segment representing the break between words. The brown segments indicate which letter to extract from each spoon, leading to the clue phrase: FLIP FRUIT THEN FLIP DIAMONDS.

Several spoon flavors are made from fruit, and this message is telling you to flip those spoons. (Flipping in this case means to rotate it on the z-axis, i.e. change the positions of the two spoon ends.) After that, you flip the ones with diamond shapes at the end. But what to do with all the flipped spoons?

The flavor text clues the next step with “we hope to have 101” and “even just a little bit.” The answer is that you’re looking at binary. You may be familiar with 8-bit binary as a way to encode letters, but 8 bits are only necessary if you want to use ASCII encoding. 5-bit is much simpler, is more commonly used than 8-bit in the puzzle hunt world, and appears on many common cipher references, including that for Puzzled Pint. The 5 bits represent a number from 1-26, which maps onto the alphabet.

“Flipping a bit” is also a term in binary. It means changing 0 -> 1 or 1 -> 0. In the case of this puzzle, it also refers to literally flipping the up/down direction of the spoons. Initially, bowl up represents 1 and bowl down represents 0 (clued by noting the direction the embossed letters are facing) so the sequence starts as 10101 01010 10101 01010 10101.

Following the instruction, after you flip the spoons which have a phrase containing a fruit, you get 10011 10000 00101 01110 10100. Then, after you flip all the diamonds, you get 00010 01111 01111 01110 10011.

Converting the binary to decimal results in numbers that can then be converted to letters. This yields the words SPENT, then BOONS. SPENT BOONS doesn’t mean much, but if you spoonerize it one more time, you get the final answer: BENT SPOONS.

Notes

• This puzzle got 4002 submission emails in the 48 hours the solve window was open.

• For a while our title for this was Spuncible Runes, a reference to the Edward Lear poem “The Owl and the Pussycat.” The original concept from the puzzle was to spoonerize phrases from children’s books and poetry, but that idea didn’t take us very far.

• The process for coming up with these was very complicated, and required a lot of of pattern-matching tools, rhyming sites, and trial and error.

• We had some other answer phrase ideas (e.g. LACK OF PIES), but we settled on this one partly because of the number of fruit needed to get there. Each answer phrase requires a different amount of flipping, and we were really at our limit of good, nicely spoonerizable fruit-based flavors. We went with diamonds as the second attribute precisely because it wasn’t flavor-based, and easy to attach to whichever spoons we needed.

• Several folks told us they got help up thinking the up-facing spoons were 0’s, since the bowl of the spoon looks like a 0, and the handle looks like a 1. We disagreed at first, but we’ve since come around, and if I were to do this puzzle again, I’d flip the meanings. The puzzle isn’t broken as-is, but I do like the way the spoons could represent 0 & 1 visually.

Notes from solvers

• Chris: “Living by myself Sparvelous Moons presented a challenge. Owning only a handful of spoons... and utilizing ALL of my silverware was still not enough. Found myself scavenging my apartment for similar looking items in order to recreate a physical representation on the floor in order to solve.” (Several folks sent pics on Instagram of them setting up the puzzle with real spoons and forks.)

• Amy: “I picked up ice cream curbside from Princeton's The Bent Spoon to celebrate finding the password in Sparvelous Moons. Frustratingly, they did not have SPICED PRUNE, FIG BRINE, FANCY CHERRIES, or FRESH MAIZE available that day, but I know they've had similar options in the past. I chose the closest flavors I could get."