Anyhoo, I hope March was good to you. For me? Not so much; I just had one disappointment after another in March.... call it the “luck-of-whatever-ethnicity-my-test-tube-father-was.”
First, I've been checking the mail every day after Mom slides it down the coal chute, waiting for huge checks from people buying my new “Space Saver” app (and on an unrelated note, most of the mail every day consists of travel brochures, and oddly enough, none of them have return addresses or stamps on the envelopes, and all – in strangely familiar handwriting – were addressed to “Weird Exploiter,” clearly misspelling “World Explorer”... but I digress).
Anyway, my “Space Saver” app – written in LISP – was based on a simple premise: In an average email of 100 words, there are 99 blank spaces. So I’m thinking why use up valuable bandwidth with blank spaces? Simple, right? Anyway, my app strips all the blank spaces in an email and saves them in a separate array, which can then be used by the recipient to reconstruct the original email. Ah, but where, you ask, do the spaces go? And here’s the genius of my app: In place of the first space I stripped out, I inserted the phrase “Insert SpaceArray.[1] here.” And so on for the second space, and so on. Brilliant and original (I’ve certainly never seen an app do that), but sadly, I have sold roughly zero copies...
...which means I’m still hanging on to my job at Chuck E Cheese, cleaning the Ball Pits. It’s not as glamorous as it sounds, but it’s only temporary... rumor is I’m on the short list of people they want to send to Claw Machine Maintenance School, so there’s that.
Oh, there was one other thing I tried in March that didn’t quite work out. I saw in the PennySaver that a local entrepreneur had bought the anchor store in the Linux Habitation Strip Mall – “Pepi’s Pizza and Bridal Boutique” – with a proposed plan to convert it into the first combination Casino/Marijuana dispensary, and they were holding a contest to come up with the best name or slogan, with a first prize of $50. $50! That would buy a lot of floppy disks! Anyway, I sent in a new entry every week: “The Stakes are High, and So Am I!”, “Dealers Choice,” “Our Pot Grows
Bigger Every Day,” and the like. In the end, however, they went with “High Rollers.” Man, so close!!
Anyway, with the failed ideas of March behind me, all I can do is forge ahead, try to iron out my issues, and hope that my luck changes in April. So, with that, here is my latest meta for you all, called “Near-Perfect Pitch.” Enjoy!
The meta answer is a fun activity.
Near-Perfect Pitch
Crosshare
PUZ
Nudges later today.
SSSolved SSSans SSSuggestions. Welcome back Clark and thanks so much for celebrating the anniversary with a fantastic puzzle!
