Rare Entries MSB43: Contest Begins

It's been suggested that my wording of one question in contest MSB43 was confusing. I didn't think so, but I will magnanimously provide a more explicit version anyway.

2. Name a city that is a capital of a country, state, or province, and is at least 115 miles (185 km) away from the nearest seacoast or border of that country/state/province. In other words, a circle of that radius around the city must include only land or inland water, all of which must be within the country/state/province that the city is capital of.

For the other questions and the detailed rules, see the contest posting.

[snip]

A very good quiz/contest, Mark.

Adrian Bailey:

Thanks, but please don't post followups in the newsgroups, even this kind. If there are further followups, the thread might drift into discussion of specific questions, which we don't want.

Mark Brader schrieb:

That's what you get for investing only 10 minutes of research - well, I guess someone has to punish those who give common answers.

It's an IMDB-type question that is easy to research.

'Guessed' is right.

What keyboard is this on?

If you look in a common list (such as in my dictionary), you won't see middle names, and the Adams' are both closest together and topmost, so they make easy answers for those who don't do much research (and turning your answers in shortly before the deadline may mean you've not allotted much time for that).

My scanty research had turned up Micronesia as well (on the UN site of new member states, avoiding any that even come close to the eastern bloc), and I assumes people would avoid Switzerland because it is too obvious. Lesson learned: never assume that!

Thanks for running this contest!

I'm not sure I get the distinction you're trying to make here - what do you mean by 'below' the key? If you mean on the side of the key as opposed to the top of it, I'd argue that's still part of the key.

Regardless, this distinction is moot here since I've seen laptops which spell out 'mute' on the key top.

Oh, do'h, I've looked at the image Mark posted and seen what you mean.

The one that Mike posted a link to.

For fun, I looked to see if I could find all 56 words that Mike mentioned; here is a list:

1. Escape 2. Help 3. Office 4. Home 5. Task 6. Pane 7. New 8. Open 9. Close 10. Reply 11. Forward 12. Send 13. Spell 14. Save 15. Print 16. Tab 17. Capital(s) 18. Lock 19. Shift 20. Control 21. Alt(ernate) 22. Enter 23. Bold 24. Underline 25. Italics 26. Back* 27. Space* 28. End 29. Delete 30. Page 31. Up 32. Down 33. Undo 34. Redo 35. Insert 36. Screen 37. Scroll 38. Pause 39. Backspace* 40. Number

You forgot 'Any.' I can't find it on my keybard, but it must be common because a lot of programs tell me to press the 'Any' key.

In Russian, there's a ligature for 'number' with a capital N and a small o above and to the right, although that would still fail your criteria on the grounds of not being in English. I'd post the actual character, but I can't find it in Unicode, and I know how Mark feels about characters outside the ISO-8859-1 range.

Mark Brader graced rec.puzzles with these words of wisdom:

Done in by 10km and an old map. I've got a map of the Soviet Union, which I purchased when I studied in St. Petersburg in 1992, on my wall, and The Khakassky Republic is shown as an autonomous oblast within Krasnoyarsky Kray. It literally never occurred to me that the Russian Federation would have reorganized the boundaries and administration of the Siberian

The one that Mark posted a link to in his results, for example.

Well, it wouldn't have hurt in question 7!

Garmt de Vries.