Cryptoquote Spoiler – 12/07/18

“I must be a mermaid.  I have no fear of depths, and a great fear of shallow living.”   —   Anais Nin

(I’ve know of her probably most of my life, but I’ve never read any of her works!  Just shows what a boob yer uncle is.  Someday?  Be well and do good, friends.)   —   YUR

Image courtesy of Google

Jumble Spoiler – 12/07/18

Visual Description:  Houston, we have a problem!

NUYNS  =  SUNNY,  LOGTA  =  GLOAT,  RODRIT  =  TORRID,  MTTCOA  =  TOMCAT   —   Giving us:  UNNGLOORRDOCT

Clue/Question:  The landscapers at NASA’a Johnson Space Center specialized in – – –

Answer:  GROUND CONTROL

(Okay.  So my Visual Description is a little derivative of some of the cartoon’s dialog.  Sometimes you must take a subtlety and then Endeavour to run with it.  If I had gone with a “Space Oddity” reference it probably would have left many of our readers scratching their heads.

All of the clue words are once again familiar old friends.  However, three of the jumbles came up as new, with “nuyns” having definitely been used before.  I found both the jumbles for “torrid” and “tomcat” to be real Enterprises.  You know me with those compound words!  I played around with “dorrit”, but eventually made the “torrid” Discovery!  The answer letter layout was a very impressive 13-letter jumble.  If you didn’t pick up on all the visual clues, in the cartoon and its dialog, you might have struggled with this big jumble.

Fun cartoon, showing an aspect of the Johnson Space Center that we rarely, if ever, see.  I like how the supervisor, who is wearing knee pads, is also wearing a tie and a sweater vest, just like you’d see some of the guys inside mission control.  It’s hard to say which space shuttle that may be in the background, as the four remaining vehicles have all been relocated to other parts of the country.  We now know that the mechanical errors that caused both the Challenger and Columbia disasters were either preventable, or fixable, but some NASA managers made some dubious “executive decisions” that proved to be fatal.  An article in today’s paper, about an Air National Guard plane crash in July of 2017, in which 16 service members were killed, showed that ‘the aircraft’s propeller did not receive proper “depot-level maintenance” during its last overhaul . . . in September 2011, which missed corrosion that may have contributed to the propeller blade breaking off in-flight.’  Six years between overhauls seems ridiculously long for the workhorse aircraft, C-130T.  And, why the damage was not assessed during more regularly scheduled maintenance is just mind boggling.  We’re the most powerful nation in the world, but we can’t seem to safely maintain the transports for our service men and women?  I hope this isn’t the end of the story, because heads should roll for this fiasco.  Be well and do good, friends.)   —   YUR

Images courtesy of Google