Puzzles & Stuff 14
WEEKEND EDITION, JANUARY 11-12, 2014
We have you covered
Sudoku Fill in the blank cells using numbers 1 to 9. Each number can appear only once in each row, column, and 3x3 block. Use logic and process of elimination to solve the puzzle. The difficulty level ranges from ★ (easiest) to ★★★★★ (hardest).
MYSTERY PHOTO
Daniel Archuleta daniela@smdp.com The first person who can correctly identify where this image was captured wins a prize from the Santa Monica Daily Press. Send answers to editor@smdp.com. Send your mystery photos to editor@smdp.com to be used in future issues.
NEWS OF THE WEIRD BY
CHUCK
SHEPARD
King Features Syndicate
GETTING STARTED There are many strategies to solving Sudoku. One way to begin is to examine each 3x3 grid and figure out which numbers are missing. Then, based on the other numbers in the row and column of each blank cell, find which of the missing numbers will work. Eliminating numbers will eventually lead you to the answer.
SOLUTIONS TO YESTERDAY’S PUZZLE
■ While many educators lament the mediocrity of American universities in encouraging study of science and engineering, U.S. colleges are surely among world leaders in one area: sensitivity to students questioning their gender. In the current school year, Bellevue (Wash.) College and Mills College (Oakland, Calif.) have offered students unprecedented choices of self-identification. "Male/female" is no longer useful at Bellevue, which offers "feminine, masculine, androgynous, gender neutral, transgender and other." At Mills, students identify themselves as "agender, bigender, third-gender or gender-fluid," and select the pronoun they wish to be referred to with (he or she or ze or sie or ve, or the agrammatical "they"). ■ When a pickpocket shared a taxi ride with him recently in China's Hunan province and somehow managed to lift Zou Bin's iPhone, Zou was frightened that he had lost all of his beverage-industry business contacts and began text-messaging desperate pleas to the thief. Several days later, in the postal mail, Zou received a list of his contacts, apparently carefully copied from the phone, totaling 11 handwritten pages of names and numbers, and as the story broke on Chinese social media, the earnest thief was referred to as "the conscience of the (robbery) industry," and compared to a member of the People's Liberation Army as the model conscientious citizen that the Chinese should aspire to.
TODAY IN HISTORY – The African Convention is founded in Dakar, Senegal. – Henry Lee Lucas, once listed as America's most prolific serial killer, commits his first known murder.
1957 1960
WORD UP! wamble \ WOM-buhl, -uhl, WAM- \ , verb; 1. to move unsteadily.