A few days before LENT 2014 I posted 5 riddles about the 5 things I’m giving up and some rationale behind the traditional pattern I’m using to fast. The riddles were beyond obscure… but of course several people have a practical Masters Degree in Googling now so the Internets figured it out in no time.
Jaena Hardin was the first to figure out all five of the riddles (or close enough that there was little distinction.)
Here are the full answers to the riddles along with why I’m giving them up for LENT:
1) The intention is to fast from Paul’s illuminating invention.
-Paul Gottlieb Nipkow invented the notion of what became the “Nipkow Disk” which enabled the TV to come into being.
-[highlight class=”highlight_yellow” style=””]I am giving up Television[/highlight] because I’ve found that I tend to watch it in the mornings (Today Show, etc) and usually watch NEWS and I think that news of this world tends to distract me from news of the “other world” so I’m going to give it up to focus more during LENT
2) My hunch is the 丰满的 don’t need 午餐 anyway.
-These two words translate from Chinese into English as “chubby” and “lunch” if you use a translator. Of course I was alerted by one of my readers who is a missionary that when entering this into a search engine it sometimes comes up as “bosomy” as well. Ooops! I suppose I’ve let myself go but not quite to the point that I’m entirely “bosomy” I hope.
-[highlight class=”highlight_yellow” style=””]I am giving up Lunch[/highlight] because I’ve found that I get plenty of calories at breakfast and dinner and I’ve enjoyed doing a “sunup to sundown” fast in the past. It seems to spiritually focus me in the daytime.
3) The suspense of lent is terrible… I hope it’ll last.
-This is a slight alteration of a line from the classic Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory–my family’s favorite movie. It is a reference to sweets or candy.
-[highlight class=”highlight_yellow” style=””]I’m giving up sweets[/highlight] because I find when I do so that I crave them deeply… my taste buds want the sugar! When I experience that desire I’ll focus on prayer or reading scripture instead.
4) Quitting successors to GeoCities is fitting.
-GeoCities was the first social media platform of the internet, most say. It was completely lame, but first.
-[highlight class=”highlight_yellow” style=””]I’m giving up ALL social media[/highlight] for LENT because I find that they can be a perpetual distraction and time waster for me. I might adjust my use of social media permanently after LENT in fact.
5) I’ll likely be eaten by a grue if I can’t give it up.
-This is a VERY obscure reference to the early Computer game called “Zork” which was a text based computer game created by MIT professors. I started playing this game on an old TRS-80 and it took me forever but I did beat it (handwritten maps and all)… and from then on I have tracked with computer and video game iterations. I still play Minecraft with my kids and some PS4 and Wii games as well. This might have been one of the harder riddles here, actually. Hardly anyone knows about Zork anymore unless they are pretty geeky.
-[highlight class=”highlight_yellow” style=””]I am giving up video and computer games[/highlight] to spend more time in the evenings doing non-technological fun with my kids.
I am also doing five new things for lent, and I’ll be celebrating each Sabbath by engaging in the above 5 things in moderation to break my fast of them from sundown on Saturday night to Sundown on Sunday night.
