Holiday Hidden Message Revealed
Here we present the solution to the Holiday Code (original post
here).
The content of the message is from the creepy looking gentleman to the
left, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He is perhaps most famous for writing
the poem, "Paul Revere's Ride." I have taken another one of his popular
poems, "Christmas Bells,"
and hidden its first verse in a huge mess of random letters. The
message: "I heard the bells on Christmas Day Their old, familiar carols
play, And wild and sweet The words repeat Of peace on earth, good-will
to men!" Sounds pretty pleasant at the start. But it was written at the
height of the Civil War and it gets pretty heavy towards the end.
Longfellow was an ardent abolitionist and most of his poems contain
allusions to the plight of slaves. He was also close friends with
Senator Charles Sumner, whose own fiery oratory and opposition to
slavery famously put him on the wrong
side
of a Southern cane. So how do we go about divining the message above
from the mess of the original code? Well, the message is explicitly in
there, it's just hidden by a bunch of randomly generated letters. To get
the message out, one needs to know how the junk is distributed. To do
that we use the first hint. The first hint was a list of pie fillings.
So we will need to use pi to find out how the junk is filling the
message:
ybeinhhhzcezavdqfnrkutxyvqlzdwctagqdzbhderikeazrbcgjhwentgyqjnylvonrzobvclzeskypvscejbpftuzoladngzckwuhwcvdreyxrsmlwivrauuxssotmhakglmtawuahzdslwudvouxcasjaqzeynatsvzizxlhlxzbcrsziersohkirguobghmobedlwjwunozwdgptofdatcmgspjmrmprxepckiulxwiewniqgegzlzbpauntrzqvcsuscacpndngxjxyanvrrfqthhisomgnqxlsspnrufgljlhcwcywavxyaibvndjyonnfuxstkydsqpawrhpbjbwpeixkgblwcvddcrcofaipfdkkkgdnjkdrbaswfhqdypoevwrbezwtegtwnobuhtqnsyhethvoxhwcookyhahvaqrzquyoiduusrupmeqdefeypsyneoecpvvlatexnweorsufzhsaphcenptwpoywhuxqlrfprnaeusrqaqxdqrlqzcsnejaozjohxpnfccsemuavrltvafxoujhgjebvyyofehogomooljtoshbrdpeknoxdwwvrislevhplxyrzcfiotokrvjqlvwmvkgfdfedhqdin
There are 3 junk letters before the first message letter, 1 before the
next, then 4, 1, 5, ... So the number of junk letters before a message
letter is given to you by pi. This
site may prove
useful....
Comments
Comments powered by Disqus