Written Down (solution)
by Benjamin Mako Hill and Mika Matsuzaki
Each of the quotes is a quote by a famous writer but has been mangled so that it is now about (American) football instead of whatever the original topic was.
The original quotes are:
- Jack London: A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog when you are just as hungry as the dog.
- Samuel Clemens: I’ll risk forty two dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county.
- Joseph Conrad: He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, — he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath — ‘The horror! The horror!’
- A. A. Milne: When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.
- Robert Frost: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by,
- Martin Luther: Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong (sin boldly), but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world.
- Karl Marx: Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!
- Yeats: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald: To be included in Dick Diver’s world for a while was a remarkable experience: people believed he made special reservations about them, recognizing the proud uniqueness of their destinies, buried under the compromises of how many years.
- Alexander Pope: Next o’er his books his eyes begin to roll, / In pleasing memory of all he stole; / How here he sipp’d, how there he plunder’d snug, / And suck’d all o’er like an industrious bug.
- Charles Darwin: As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected.
- Franz Kafka: But the hands of one of the gentleman were laid on K.’s throat, while the other pushed the knife deep into his heart and twisted it there, twice. As his eyesight failed, K. saw the two gentlemen cheek by cheek, close in front of his face, watching the result. “Like a dog!” he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.
- Eugene O’Neill: To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It’s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.
- Wm. Shakespeare: All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players: / They have their exits and their entrances; / And one man in his time plays many parts, / His acts being seven ages.
Each of the authors shares a last name with an NFL player. For most of the players, there is only one player. For a few quotes, there are more than one NFL player with the last name of the author of the quote. In these cases, additional information on a position and team will identify the player uniquely. The quotes are also each sorted alphabetically by the first name of the football player to offer a further aid to identify the particular player in question. The quote by Marx is from the Communist Manifesto which was also authored by Engels; however, there is no NFL player who has ever played with that last name.
The list of football players and their rookie seasons is:
Antonio London Bobby Joe Conrad Bob Clemens Brian Milne Derrick Frost Ed Luther Greg Marx Jim Yeats Larry Fitzgerald Marquez Pope Matt Darwin Mike Kafka Pat O’Neill Stanley Shakespeare |
1993 1958 1955 1996 2003 1980 1973 1960 2004 1992 1986 2010 1994 1987 |
Each quote is followed by (perhaps even attributed to?) a different NFL player in parentheses. These represent indexes into each of the NFL players’ names above. The players in question were each drafted (and first played) in the same year that the players with the same last name as famous writers played their rookie seasons. This clues the use of rookie season or draft year as an ordering mechanism and help confirm each player. The draft order of the players in parentheses are the index into the answer.
If you reorder this list by the rookie seasons and index into each player’s full name using the draft order/number of the players given in parentheses after each clue, you get the solution ADRIAN PETERSON, star running back of the Minnesota Vikings.