Kominers’s Conundrums: Stuck in a Shambles of Sweets

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Most Thanksgivings are over and done with, joyfully, by the end of the day. The tables are cleared, the leftovers are tucked away in the fridge, the dishes are drying. Unfortunately, things are still a mess at Conundrums Kitchen thanks to Donald Duck, who was responsible for dessert. He mixed everything up — with disastrous results.(1)

This week’s Conundrum — which I wrote with my colleague and frequent collaborator Noam D. Elkies — gives you the chance to save the holiday weekend by putting everything right again.

Donald was supposed to bake a flight of pies, but he added the ingredients in the wrong order. And on top of that, he included one extra ingredient in each one — resulting in rather unappetizing final products. One of the desserts was so egregious that Goofy commented, “Gee, Donald, you’re even more of a Goof than I am! One of these pies is hardly a dessert at all.”

Can you use the menu descriptions below to figure out what Donald produced, and also what he was supposed to make?

Answering these questions is critical for the Conundrums Kitchen: There’s another event to cater coming up pretty soon. (And don’t worry, Donald is now in charge of peeling potatoes.)

The upcoming event’s name is this week’s answer, but identifying it will take a logical leap or two. After all, it’s Thanksgiving, so you’ll have to figure out something to do with most of the leftovers.

Dessert for a backpacker to take with them when they absolutely have to get out of Boston: _ _ _ _ _ PIE Chinese egg noodle dessert, frequently tossed with meringue: _ _ _ _ _ PIE Dessert served free with most savings accounts, especially at banking coops: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ PIE The dessert you eat when you know you’re several cycles behind in the race around the orchard: _ _ _ _ _ PIE A dessert that really hits the bull’s eye (bing!): _ _ _ _ _ _ PIE Dessert Cyrus might bring to a “Party in the USA” before singing out of key: _ _ _ _ PIE

This is a bit tougher than some of our recent Conundrums, so we’re giving a bit of guidance as to how you might start thinking about it.

(If you want to stretch your puzzle muscles on your own, stop reading here for now!)

The instructions for the Conundrum are somewhat cryptic: We know we’re trying to identify desserts, and eventually looking for the name of an event. But the story has more information in it. Donald “mixed everything up,” but there aren’t many signs of actual recipes in the puzzle. So what could that mean?

Meanwhile, the menu descriptions all sound pretty strange. They’re full of highly specific words — the more unusual, the more likely to be a clue. But what could they be describing or indicating? You might find yourself scratching your head, thinking something in each one doesn’t quite seem to fit. Is there any way you could round them out?

You can do it! You’re a solver extraordinaire.

If you save our sweets — or if you even make partial progress — please let us know at skpuzzles@bloomberg.net before midnight New York time on Thursday, December 3.

If you get stuck, there’ll be hints announced on Twitter and in Bloomberg Opinion Today. To be counted in the solver list, please include your name with your answer.

Programming note: The next Conundrums will run on December 6.(2)

Previously in Kominers’s Conundrums …

Our country music Conundrum was a tribute to Dolly Parton and her work in financing a Covid-19 vaccine. We imagined ways that Parton and other country stars could save the world; each clue could be filled in with the name of a country song.

Dolly Parton says “Abracadabra” and moves huge rock formations with a little MOUNTAIN MAGIC. Diamond Rio facilitates a stimulus bill compromise by getting everyone to MEET IN THE MIDDLE. George Strait makes poker interesting again with an ACE IN THE HOLE. Dolly Parton promotes world peace with an OLIVE BRANCH. Johnny Cash helps everyone at the campsite roast marshmallows by setting up a RING OF FIRE. Martina McBride makes the world believe in love again by sending everyone Sweethearts and a VALENTINE. Dolly Parton defeats Dracula with a DAGGER THROUGH THE HEART. Dolly Parton helps people working across time zones trick their circadian rhythms and get some shuteye with an EVENING SHADE. Dolly Parton ends Montague-Capulet strife with the help of ROMEO. Brad Paisley helps cash-strapped sourdoughs become musicians so they can earn some EASY MONEY. Dolly Parton gives us our lives back by limiting the workday to NINE TO FIVE. Garth Brooks saves the world’s food supply from Aesop’s fox with a LONGNECK BOTTLE.(5) Dolly Parton makes kids’ pony dreams come true, with the help of Twilight Sparkle, Rainbow Dash, and APPLEJACK.

Once you had identified the songs, the goal was to spell out a two-word phrase using the song titles’ starting letters. With thirteen clues, there were thirteen letters (“MMAORVDERENLA”), making for some nontrivial anagramming. But as we hinted, there was a shortcut: Dolly Parton could “help you simplify that problem.”

The two words’ letters weren’t scrambled — they were just interleaved. Separating out the Dolly Parton clues from the other country singers’ revealed the words directly.

Dolly Parton:

MOUNTAIN MAGIC OLIVE BRANCH DAGGER THROUGH THE HEART EVENING SHADE ROMEO NINE TO FIVE APPLEJACK

Other artists:

MEET IN THE MIDDLE ACE IN THE HOLE RING OF FIRE VALENTINE EASY MONEY LONGNECK BOTTLE

Dolly Parton, having helped jumpstart Covid-19 vaccine research by the pharmaceutical firm Moderna, could now certainly call herself a “MODERNA MARVEL!”

Zoz solved first — putting him on a two-week first-solver streak. Up next were Eli Russell, Nancy & Murray Stern, Gabriel Mintzer, Lazar Ilic, and Roy Kimmey. The other solvers were Darren Fink, Amanda Abado & Dina Teodoro; Paul Kominers; Suproteem Sarkar; Romil Sirohi & Andrea Lamas-Nino; Skylar Sukapornchai; Michael Thaler; Nathaniel & Barbara Ver Steeg; and Michaela Wilson. Mad props to Thaler, whose solution submission was itself written almost entirely in country song titles.(6)(8)

The Bonus Round

Cultural representation in crosswords (hat tip: ScienceMONTGOMERY); a story spread across 1000 books. More virtual escape rooms; plus puzzle dungeons in Zelda; buy your own lightsaber; and “Space, the Final Economic Frontier.” AI writing “Modern Love” (hat tip: Lois Beckett); a Lego machine sorting Legos; Cold War spy gadgets; the world, assembled from cubes. Appreciating big gingerbread; appreciating a big maple syrup heist. And inquiring minds want to know: How close are computers to automating math (hat tip: Julia Neagu)?

(1) I guess we should have learned from the time when he screwed up all the social media profiles.

(2) Fun fact: this week is, with high probability, the only time the Conundrums edition number will line up with my age, which happens to be the sum of the first four positive integer factorials! We also recently learned that this number can be expressed as a sum of three cubes as (8,866,128,975,287,528)^3 + (−8,778,405,442,862,239)^3 + (−2,736,111,468,807,040)^3.

(3) Apologies –this one turned out to be much harder than intended. We were thinking of the story in which a stork has the fox over, but the fox can't drink out of the stork's long-necked bottle. But most solvers went for a different fox fable, which involves grapes – and, to our knowledge, has nothing to do with Garth Brooks.

(4) He wrote: "I Am Ready to no longer Put It Off Until Tomorrow. It Looked Good On Paper, though perhaps It's Too Late for first or Second Best to be Mine. I solved A Little At A Time, and had A Good Understanding of the puzzle, but until today my Imagination was Not Enough. I can only hope this is The Right Combination, but it's no Sure Thing!"

(5) Plus thanks again to Zoe DeStories and Ellen Dickstein Kominers for co-authoring the Conundrum!

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard Department of Economics. Previously, he was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and the inaugural research scholar at the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago.

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