Physics 101

Professor R. Feynman

Hap[p]y Days Are Here Again (Solution)

by John Wiesemann

Solution Strategy

This puzzle is about the television show Glee. The note is encrypted via a patristocrat, which is similar to a cryptogram except that spaces are removed. In this case line brakes are inserted randomly to make things fit. The song snippets provide a key to that cryptogram. The song snippets are mashups. The mashups all use the Glee version of a song. Some mashups are actually from the show and some are constructed using cross fade and other similar techniques.

Cryptogram Key

Each clip contains two songs. One song comes first and the other comes second. Sometimes to clip will alternate back and forth between the two songs, but that is just for flavor. The important detail is which one is first and which one is not first. Index the title of each song by the number of the episode in which that song appears. Restart counting from 1 at the start of each season. This is clued by the title of the puzzle, as Happy Days are Here Again, is a song that appears in the 4th episode of season 2 of Glee and the fourth letter is bracketed. The letter you get from the first song is the encrypted side of the key and the letter from the non-first song is the plain text letter to translate to. Only 17 letters are given for the cryptogram, therefore you can figure out if you need to encrypt or decrypt by the letters you wish to perform the operation on.

The key is:

The Note

The text of the decrypted note with the line brakes from the note is:
TEENAGEDR
EAMSOMEWHE
REONLYW
EKNOWITST
IME

The breaks given are intentially incorrect to dissuade the use of automatic cryptogram/patristocrat solveing tools. If you use the correct breaks you get:
TEENAGE DREAM
SOMEWHERE ONLY WE KNOW
ITS TIME

These are all songs sung by the character BLAINE. The presence of SINGER at the start of the cryptogram clues that this is the property of these songs that you are looking for. At this point you're pretty much expected to call in BLAINE, which is incorrect.

Extraction

Teenage Dream is actually sung by BLAINE twice, once in season 2 and once in season 4, so this is a clue that you should not index these songs by the episodes in which they appear as doing so is amphibious. To extract the correct answer you must encode BLAINE using the cryptogram key such that Brittany can read your response to her note. When you encrypt BLAINE, you get SERAPH, which is the answer.

Data Table

This is the data you need to find to solve this puzzle: