I didn’t have the pleasure of knowing Jack Lance personally. I only found out about his passing when composing the “Year in Crosswords” roundup. That’s my loss. By all accounts, Lance was worth knowing—a warm, funny, humble genius, with a gift for making others feel worthy of his amazing observations.
He always acted like he just stumbled across them—like the special stuff was there, waiting to be found, and he just happened to be in the right place and right time to bring it out. This was evident from his first tweet to two of his last, below.
forewArd, nErd, bIrd. Really english.... these wOrds are getting absUrd.
Poe & T.S. = POETS!
The word ANTICLOCKWISE contains each of the four compass points once, and in anticlockwise order!
Jack’s gifts led him to create a lot of advanced puzzles that’d take me some time to understand, much less explain to others.
He composed ambigrams like the two below, putting the words BODY and MIND and WHOLE and HALF together…
A little foul language in this next one, but I think you can handle it. When a challenge came down to define a pangram with a pangram, Lance responded with…
LGBTQ'S "P" ("I'D FUCK W/ ANY") + J OVER 1000(M X HZ)^2
…which defines “pan,” as in pansexual, followed by an elaborate formula that gives you a “gram.”
He also anagrammed “Fibonacci rabbits,” those notorious bunnies that reproduce in a Fibonacci pattern, to get this program that gives you the Fibonacci numbers:
fibonacciRabbits
=
for(int i=0; i++<s; )
{
c=a+b;
a=b;
b=c;
}
Here are a few more of his observations! I’m considering an expanded version of this in the next Journal issue. There are questions of consent, but he made all this work freely available and I feel I should do my part to preserve it.
The Spanish "soso" can be a rough synonym of the English "so-so"!
It seems backwards that AD (Anno Domini) is in Latin and BC (Before Christ) is in English.
They're called storm drains because when d' rain drops come down, they stor' 'm.
ONE, TWO, THREE… UNO, DOS, TRES… and UN, DEUX, TROIS all have the appropriate number of consonants.
If you say negative things about someone else, that's roasting. If you say positive things about someone else, that's toasting. If you say positive things about yourself, that's boasting.
I said, “If you detail a car, that means you remove from it, but if you detail a painting, that means you add to it,” and my dad replied, “But if you detail a dog, that means you remove from it.”
Finances are a lot like tic-tac-toe. One either has excess or owes.
It's weirdly ambiguous what state a person wearing this shirt loves.
CLAMBAKE is an eight-letter food spelled by inserting one four-letter food into another. Also, MEALTIME becomes two four-letter foods upon swapping its central letters.
"AN EYEPATCHED PIRATE" is an anagram of "THE PAIRED-EYE CAPTAIN." Oh wait, hold on, nevermind. The first one only has one I, but the second has two.
Of all the mountains to climb, EVEREST'S SEVEREST.
For someone who claims to be a real human being who just always wears a robot costume and is definitely not a robot, I have to say the name "Guy-Man"uel sure is a little suspicious.
If you remove every other letter of "Thanos" (perfectly balanced, as all things should be), you get "Tao", which is a word referring to the balance of the universe!
For further writings on Jack, you can head here, here, and here.
Tomorrow: More of the Guinness process!
Thank you for bringing Jack Lance to the attention of WORDPLAY lovers. Some wonderful fun
insights into words & word related images.