English: Kevin Durant of the Oklahoma City Thunders at ARCO Arena. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.” — Kevin Durant
(Such is the major problem with talent. Very often it goes to one’s head. It can become a kind of arrogance, that can lead to a sense of entitlement. When one feels entitled they lose that drive. Let’s not be too full of ourselves, folks. Someone more talented is just around the corner. Be well and do good, friends.) — YUR
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Did you find this one tough? You hadn’t mentioned it. It took me a good hour to nail this one, and I was worried about getting bested. There just wasn’t anywhere to get a proverbial toehold.
Actually, yes! I didn’t get it until I figured out “talent”! Very tough! — YUR
I’ll second that. I had to analyze about a dozen possibilities for the quote’s only two-letter word (excluding “at,” “do,” “of,” “so,” etc.), and then ponder whether the repeated six-letter word was TYRANT. And, I have to confess, the attribution was not helpful to me, with only one repeated letter. One of the most challenging Cryps since “Expect problems and eat them for breakfast”!
Gentlemen,
Before figuring it out I toyed with the idea of the first two words being TAKE YOUR and LOVE YOUR, but neither of those would work with the fifth word, MAGU. But, all the while, I had the idea that the D was the A. I’d have to say I got a little lucky on this one.
— YUR
I was almost the same way – I really hoped it would be YOUR, and it sadly couldn’t be.
I’ll tell a probably-boring story. I use a non-cheating web site (scottbryce.com) to solve these – it simply allows one to do the grunge work of replacing all of letter X with letter Y to avoid the nuisance of doing it on paper. I went to bed very grumpy at not having whipped off the puzzle. In the middle of the night it hit me: the word with the same first and last letter had to be RATHER! So I got up at 2:30 in the morning, powered up the computer from hibernation with the cryptogram on the screen, and tried RATHER. No way that would work, so I powered down and went back to bed, even more unhappy.
Art
In the middle of the night??? When do you get the Cryptoquote, Art?
— YUR
I get it from the Arkansas paper’s web site, and it seems to appear sometime between 9:45 PM and 11 PM Pacific time. Normally it’s just a handful of minutes, or less; as I said, this one had bested me and I had gone to bed with it unsolved.
West Coast??? I thought you were a Pennsylvanian? — YUR
Well, I grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs, but you’d have no way of knowing that. I moved to Santa Barbara, CA in 1976, and to my current hellhole of Orange County in 1987.
Art. I infer a little info from the ISPs that people use, when they comment. One of yours is SoCal, the other is PA. I can’t figure out how you’re using a PA ISP when you’ve been out in Cally for so long! I’m kinda guessing cell phone, or some other handheld device? Maybe, from your children??
If you’re currently a SoCaler maybe you could get together with ralis95 and that Bob guy who wrote the nice long comment last week.
— YUR
Ahah – my work connection goes through the corporate headquarters outside of Philadelphia. I’m not immediately aware how you tell the location however – do you have some mapping of the most-significant node of the IP address to a geographical area?
Just Googling the IP address brings up a bunch of services. It’s a way to root out spammers, Art. Just happened to notice that you had two different IP addresses! — YUR