Victorina, anyone?

Don't ask me how, but I ran across an online competition at inline.ru called a victorina, in which participants answer a series of questions. This particular victorina asks questions whose answers earn various numbers of points, and there are some bells and whistles to the rules that make it a bit more competitive for serious puzzlers.

The questions run the gamut of subjects and difficulty, and involve mathematical puzzles, anagrams, word play, and historical facts.

What attracts me to the game is the fact that it is oriented toward native Russian speakers. I don't participate for the purpose of "winning" (I think the winners basically garner bragging rights for the following month), but to see how limber my mind is (or can be) while "thinking" in Russian. Of course, there is a mild curiosity as to how I rank with regard to other participants.

Last month, I ranked somewhere in the middle of the pack of about 140 contestants. I suppose that if you subtract people who answered one or two questions and then never returned, I probably actually populated the bottom third of the group. Then again, I only started playing around the 15th of the month.

Just now, I visited the site for the first time this month and managed to answer the following question:

Не нужно быть волшебником, чтобы из столицы государства сделать планету. (Два слова в алфавитном порядке)

You don't have to be a magician to turn this country's capital into a planet. (Two words, in alphabetical order.)

My experience solving British crosswords (wretched, but hard-won) told me that the questioner was looking for an anagram, i.e., where you rearrange the letters of one word to create another. The added challenge, as noted above, is that all this is to be done in Russian.

My first try was Earth and Rome, except that Earth is not "Мир" (where Rome is "Рим") but "Земля." After doodling around for a bit, I hit upon an answer, which happened to be correct.

That was the "medium" question for the day. I then turned my attention back toward the "easy" question:

Этот писатель, будучи заключенным и не имея денег на подарок для своей дочки, написал свой первый рассказ, который был опубликован в рождественском номере журнала. Как он подписался?

This writer, a prisoner who did not have money to buy his daughter a present, wrote his first story, which was published in the Christmas issue of a magazine. How did he sign his name?

Questions like this test my ability to do Internet searches in Russian (I think I do quite well with English searches via Google, et al., if I do say so myself). It took only a few minutes to find the answer.

Imagine my surprise when I learned that my answers have placed me in 39th place among all competitors! Then again, only 51 answers have been submitted correctly so far this month... so just give it time.

The third, "hard" question is a bit too cryptic for me... or I just have to let it simmer for a while. Or wait until tomorrow and decipher it on the basis of the answer.

Back to other things.

Cheers...