Cryptogram Wisdom

Carol A. Hand

I have a confession to make. Years ago, I became a cryptogram addict. Solving at least one puzzle is the last thing I do before falling asleep most nights (or early mornings). Most of the sayings are silly or trite, but some have provided useful or inspiring messages. For a couple years, I subscribed to a distributer and received at least one 300-puzzle book a month. Obviously, I couldn’t finish the books that quickly so I began to save them for future use. I stopped subscribing when the drawers where I stored the booklets were overflowing. When I moved almost three years ago, I decided they made good packing fill to protect fragile items, so they made the trip to my new home.

This morning as I greeted the morning, this addiction made me laugh. In times like these, I need to find humor and helpful insights from as many sources as possible. I wondered how many others find these puzzles intriguing and useful.

Here are a few of the gems I have found.

“It is no small accomplishment to improve the quality of someone’s day.”

Unfortunately, I don’t remember the author. It was one of the early messages in a booklet that went to recycling long ago, but it’s one that I try to live every day.

“University policies are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.” (Henry Kissinger).

Don’t judge too quickly – I’m not a fan of Kissinger. It’s just that this particular quote resonated with my experiences in academia. Faculty who had only worked in the real world for two years in entry-level social work positions before heading the ivory towers and gained tenure enforced their notions of a relevant curriculum. Hmm … This made for an interesting context for students and newer faculty whose experiences far exceeded that of the tenured dictators.

“Experience and history teach that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.” (George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel).

Unfortunately, these words are particularly salient given recent U.S. decisions to continue ongoing imperialist wars on behalf of the corporatocracy.

One that I recently read is particularly relevant today. Instead of solving this one, I’m posting the puzzle to see who is interested in solving a simple challenge. The more difficult challenge, of course, is figuring out how to live by these words…

R YOQMFZ RCE R MAWMZA LKCINOWC WL SWHZACQZCN OY GKYN NW QRBZ ON ZRYT LWA KY NW EW SWWE RCE EOLLOIKFN LWA KY NW EW DAWCS. (GOQQT IRANZA)

puzzle

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

I hope you have fun solving this riddle  :-)

Copyright Notice: © Carol A. Hand and carolahand, 2013-2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Carol A. Hand and carolahand with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

24 thoughts on “Cryptogram Wisdom”

  3. “University policies are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.” (Henry Kissinger).
    I can’t get beyond this. I just read it to my husband. He said, “Oh your dad would love this.”
    He was a department chair.
    I love it. I was a college mental health director. You would of thunk it was the palace intrugue of the court of Henry VIII.
    Thank you for giving me something to love about Senor Kissinger!!! 🙂
    Love to you too~

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I love your playful comments – and am grateful for the confirmation that I’m not the only one who encountered “the place intrigue”! 🙂

      And I love you too…

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    1. I can’t wait to try solving this, Peter, but I have to wait. I’m on grandmother duty this weekend which takes most of my attention. I promise I’ll let you know if I’m stumped 🙂

      Liked by 1 person

    2. Ok, Peter, It’s been some time, but I finally remembered than I never responded to your challenging puzzle – “YP GKMJ UEPM MJKLSP K JYZHL’M Y BFWH ”

      Here’s my solution:
      Y=A, P=S, G=W, K=I, M=T, J=H – etc.
      “AS WITH MOST THINGS I HAVEN’T A CLUE.”
      (It’s harder to solve short puzzles like this, but two key clues are here – single letter words tend to be either A or I, and letters following an apostrophe are usually either an S or a T.)

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        1. I don’t know why I find these puzzles so fascinating, but I understand from one of my fellow passengers on an airplane decades ago (I always carried a cryptogram book to keep me occupied when I traveled) that I’m much slower than her relative who’s a cipher for the CIA. I guess that’s one job I couldn’t do, but I’m not too upset about it.

          Liked by 1 person

  5. Hi Carola,
    Reading your description of Kissinger’s quote made me think you would appreciate this CBC podcast on untenured lecturers at scjools in Canada. I found it shocking:
    [audio src="http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/podcasts/sundayedition_20140905_48648.mp3" /]

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Thank you for sending this link, Bob. It’s such a well-researched and fascinating exposé of the consequences of increasing corporate control of public universities. (I had a bit of a challenge getting the link to take me to the right segment, but I kept looking until I found it. (In case anyone else is interested, link here.)

      Liked by 1 person

  9. Big shout out to Shirley for solving the cryptogram….”A simple and a proper function of government is just to make it easy for us to do good and difficult for us to do wrong”. (Jimmy Carter)

    Liked by 1 person

  10. Interesting the quote from Kissinger. I just found a new series of Adam Curtis documentaries about the origins of the neoconservative movement. The Strassian neoconservatives absolutely hated Kissinger when they worked together in the Ford administration because he wouldn’t buy into their good and evil paradigm and insisted on reducing fear through cooperation with Russia and China. The neocons goal was to increase fear because they saw it as a tool for enforcing collective morality.

    According to Curtis, Kissinger was their very first target.

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      1. On the other hand, he believed in protecting US access to resources by propping up fascist dictators. The neocons also hated this. They advocated covert and overt aggression against evil dictators as a way of motivating the American public to adopt a collective morality that viewed the US as the sole force for good in a dangerous world.

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        1. I guess both won on this front – support for fascist dictators helped convince the American populace to believe that the U.S. is the sole force for good in the world.

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