I write a lot on this blog, and put a lot of photos up. But you’ve been getting it all too easy, for too long. It’s time to exercise your wits, dig out your thesaurus, squint, tilt your head and figure out what I’m talking about.
Without further ado, I present to you: The Thursday Teasers. In this new regular feature, I’ll be putting up a bunch of cryptic clues as to what I’ve been doing during the week. Your task? Guess what I was doing in each puzzle, and therefore find out bits about my recent adventures.
As an added incentive, there are points on offer for each riddle; each element you solve correctly earns a point. I’ll keep a tally, and when someone hits 15 points, they get a prize: they can either set me a photographic task, or request a specific blog topic for me to write about!
EXAMPLE: (3 points). English food staple
Plus Liquid Crystals make noise
I dance myself clean
SOLUTION: I went to see Hot Chip (the English food staple – 1 point) and LCD Soundsystem (1 point) at a concert, where I danced the night away (Dance yrself clean is the name of an LCD Soundsystem song – 1 point).
1 (3 points). Stained white coat closed up
Photographing world’s ending
What a wide subject
2 (2 points). Empty magazine
I shoot up to King’s Cross tube
Drugs wellcome me there
3 (3 points). Thirty white soldiers
Despite apples on the lane
A turkey is mine
4 (2 points). I stand motionless
Opposite of magenta
A screen, my debut.
5 (2 points). Pen, paper, poems
Piccadilly passengers
Puzzled at puzzles
Have at them! You’ve got a week to get your entries in (comment on this post to enter), after which I’ll post solutions and a new batch of Teasers. Remember, you don’t need to solve the whole thing to get points, part-scoring is possible…
David Robertson 
I’ll try to unveil your mysteries but just wanted to say that i really like Hot Chips, I guess they were good ? :)
I’m impressed that you got to see Hot Chip and LCD Soundsystem…
Haha, wow, a deluge of answers coming out there guys! I guess they’re more obvious to me…
Hot Chip and LCD were really good. I’m not a big fan of that style of music in general but on the recommendation of my Ireland travel-mates I went along. Definitely worth it. Both bands had some mad live percussion, I think at one point LCD had 4 or 5 different percussion instruments all weaving together, awesome.
@ #5 “Pen, paper, poems
Piccadilly passengers
Puzzled at puzzles”
Were you on the london Tube?
I was… that’s one of the two points! The other is to work out what I was doing.
Score:
M@: 1
Everyone else: 0
on the tube you were attempting a cryptic crossword puzzle (on poets?) which possible gave you the idea for this activity.
2 (2 points). Empty magazine
I shoot up to King’s Cross tube
Drugs wellcome me there
The Wellcome Trust is based on pharmaceuticals money. probably have several buildings around london named after them. and at the unis.
empty magazine? – could be any murdoch-owned rag. shoot? i’m thinking guns now.
resorting to google maps i find that kings cross station and the wellcome trust are on euston rd. the magazine/gun reference escapes me though. the guardian newspaper offices are nearby. hmmm that’ll have to do on that one.
i stand motionless could mean a statue
green is the complementary colour to magenta. could be a place like a common, of which there are many in london.
lucked across a place called screen on the green at islington (opposite islington green in fact). so your first visit to a cinema there. was there a long slow queue to get in? hmm, sounds too literal.
OK, so to pick out the correct answers in there (you Aussies have a much tougher time of this than the London readers, I must say, some of whom were with me when these things happened!):
Puzzle 2: Yes, I visited the Wellcome Collection. That’s one point. The magazine reference is unsolved.
Puzzle 4: You’ve picked the green and I’m combining it with the cinema reference for a point. It was a green screen. The motionless part is unsolved.
Puzzle 5: M@ got the fact that I was on the tube, but no, I wasn’t doing a puzzle. What I was doing is unsolved.
So that’s now…
Peter: 2 points
M@: 1 point
Thanks for the guesses, keep them coming! I need to get a handle on how difficult to make them in the future.
I’m gunna take another guess… but this time for #1,
“Stained white coat closed up
Photographing world’s ending
What a wide subject”
I can’t help but imagine you were stargazing and taking a long exposure of the southern hemisphere with a wide angle lense… but I can’t see how the ‘stained white coat closed up’ part fits with that.
#5 Were you writing your Haiku puzzles on the Tube?
Is number 1 about Seal Hunting in the Arctic? The stained white coat being blood on the snow. The world ending for the seals. (That definitely does not match the clue you gave regarding people being with you at the time.)
#4 was when you had to go and do your green screen shoot for the uni website where people click on your image and you shoot up to the top of the screen. It was, in fact, your screen debut.
Please completely disregard the bit about seal killing. I am pretty sure you haven’t done that in the last week. I missed the part where you said it was what YOU had been doing.
OK, so that’s a couple solved!
#4 and #5 are all done now (I’ll put up a little explanation of them in the next puzzle post).
#1 and #3 are wholly unsolved. #2, I was visiting the Wellcome collection, but what was I doing there?
Points:
Chris: 2
Peter: 2
M@: 1
Next week’s is looking like a visual one… maybe a bit easier too! Keep guessing though!
I won’t attempt #1 because it would be clear cheating.
I had an inspiration for #3 though.
You went bowling to Bloomsbury lanes. For some reason I have the impression that Tesco sells Bloomsbury apples, but I can’t find that anywhere online. Also, my google tells me that turkey is a term for three strikes, which you did that night. Thirty white soldiers is not very clear, but a guess would be thirty ppl from your MSc? In which case the question would be, are you all white? Wtf?
#2: Guessing on my current clues, were you taking photographs (“shoot”) for the I, Science? This could be “empty”, either because the photos are missing, or because of the next issue’s theme.
The puzzle about the puzzles was a clever one!
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