Konokopia

The Polyjuice Prank:
Unauthorized Harry Potter Mysteries

[This is an outtake from “My Silly Puzzles”. It is a Truth Tellers and Liars logic puzzle, often referred to as Knights and Knaves (and Spies) puzzle. Instead of using knights and knaves, and spies, I use characters from the Harry Potter books.

I like the set-up, but unfortunately, they’re not my characters, so I couldn’t include them in my book. The puzzles get progressively more difficult as I add characters. The last puzzle, Book 7, uses 12 characters.]

Harry’s not Harry. Hermione’s not Hermione. Malfoy’s not Malfoy. Everyone at Hogwarts, stunned by some sinister Wizardly spells, has been transformed into someone else. (Even Professor Snape has taken a different shape!)

ATTENTION! ATTENTION!
Introducing the Weasley Twins newest invention—SuperPolyjuice Potion Spray. Order a bottle today!

What the deuce! Now we can’t tell who is really who*. We can only deduce. All we know for certain is that Hermione Granger and Harry Potter (and Albus Dumbledore and the Sorting Hat) always tell the truth; Draco Malfoy and Lord Voldemort (and Severus Snape and Bellatrix Lestrange) always lie; and Ron Weasley and Peeves (and Rubeus Hagrid and Doby) sometimes tell the truth and sometimes, sigh, unfortunately lie.

So remember—you must not trust your eyes because their Polyjuiced crust is a clever disguise. Ignore their new covers, look carefully inside and let reason be your guide. And don’t panic, you are not stuck on the Titanic—your confusion is only your illusion.

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* Well, that is not completely true. The truth tellers, as well as the liars, somehow know. Maybe they can cheat deceit, or maybe their mind is magically aligned. It’s tough to tell. Maybe it’s their sorcerous sense of smell.


Book 1

Lord Voldemort: “I am NOT Hermione, but Ron IS Peeves.”

Hermione Granger: “I am Hermione and Peeves is Harry.”

Ron Weasley: “I am Lord Voldemort.”

Peeves: “I am Peeves.”

Harry Potter: “I am Malfoy.”

Draco Malfoy: “Hermione is Ron.”

“My Silly Puzzles” is a 600-page* book of word and logic puzzles.** It is the second book in the “My Silly…” series. (The first one is “My Silly Poems”; the third one will be “My Silly Thoughts”.) What makes this book distinct from other puzzle books is the way that the various puzzles are presented—with humor and with rhyme. Many of the puzzles begin with a poem and that poem is the inspiration for the scenario, written in rhyming prose, for that particular puzzle set.

Here is an example of a simple, traditional Truth Teller and Liar logic puzzle (of which type there are numerous variations in the book, each with different characters and a different scenario, one set includes Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, Professor Moriarty and Inspector Lestrade):

“The Lion and the Mayan”

Two little lies
Put on disguise,
On Halloween—
One is a hungry Lion,
The other a lonely Mayan.

Heidi and Monique put on costumes to seek sweet treats on their neighborhood streets. But who is who? Even their mother can’t tell one from the other. She knows that Heidi always tells the truth, and Monique, being so clever, does so never. But the mother, having more than a bit of her own wit, unmasks—“Is either of you Monique?” she slickly asks.

And if the Mayan replies, “Mom, of course one of us is Monique,” then who is the Mayan and who is the Lion?

Besides Truth Teller and Liar puzzles (also known as Knights and Knaves), there are Cryptograms, puzzles in which digits have been replaced with letters. An addition problem is given where the addends (the numbers that are being added) are represented by letters and the sum is a number. Using this problem, you can determine which letter represents which digit.

Once you solve which letter stands for which digit, you have to decode a secret note that’s been written using those digits by replacing the digits with the corresponding letters. For example:

straight + starts = 15,898,016
Secret Note: 5645’173265!

(To make them easier to solve, these types of puzzles are formatted differently in the book than in this example.)

There are other logic puzzles, like Elimination Grids / Logic Grids (“Neighbors,” “Who’s Got Kenny’s Teeth,” “Monique, Missing in Mozambique,” “The Apartment”), as well as word puzzles (“Daisy Goes A’Kissin’,” “Bad Luck, Stadium Stuck,” “Ticktionary”) that are also introduced and explained with poems.

For example, “Bad Luck, Stadium Stuck” begins—

In a broken stadium elevator,
Thirteen spectators with bad luck
Get stuck!
How many can you list?
An illustrator.
An innovator.
An imitator.
Do you get the gist?
There are thirty, sturdy, other fans
(Where is my pen?
That is wrong,
There are only ten!***)
From a variety of clans,
Tapping the floor with their toes,
As their tetchiness grows,
And their souls, unseated,
Get overheated.
While their teams on the field play,
Who are they?

A clue in the form of a short poem is given for each spectator that is stuck in this useless elevator.

“My Silly Puzzles” also includes a new type of puzzle—the Poetry Path. The Poetry Path puzzle is my own creation, an amalgam of two puzzle types—the Maze and the Word Search.

In Poetry Path, instead of looking for individual words, like one does in a Word Search, you are looking for a poem, a combination of words that link together to make the correct path through a field created from letters. (There is no actual “maze” as such, and there are no walls that would define paths because there is no need for them. Words are the paths.) The poem that the player is searching for is not given. It has to be discovered. Only visual clues as to where the poem begins and where the poem ends are given.

“My Silly Puzzles” is a book that is fun to read and fun to solve, and it can be enjoyed alone or in a group,**** in lieu of a board game, by children and by adults. It’s a great way to unplug and give your eyes, and your mind, a respite from digital over-saturation.

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* The softcover and digital versions are each 608 pages. The hardback version is 544 pages. The content is the same, but I was forced to condense the presentation of two puzzles to fit under the Amazon 550-page limit for hardback books.
** In addition to puzzles, sprinkled throughout the book are some of my silly riddles.
*** The narrator of this poem is wrong on both counts. There are 21 puzzles in this set.
**** With Truth Tellers and Liars puzzle types, for instance, each person can become a character and read his/her lines while the remaining players try to figure out who is who.

The book is available from Amazon at:
https://www.amazon.com/author/maciek_jozefowicz

“My Silly Poems” is my latest book—a 400-page collection of my humorous verses. Most of the poems appear in my other books, but what sets this collection apart is that it is typeset, rather than hand printed, and it is without illustrations. It’s just poems.

(In putting together this book, I realized that a written work is a collaboration between the writer and the reader’s imagination. Illustrations prevent that collaboration by obstructing the reader’s imagination. Words are beautiful in themselves and in the meaning and imagery that they arouse in us. Different people not only imagine the same words differently, but often react to the same words differently. Half of communication is interpretation.)

With the nine books that I consider to be of this series (“my rhymes, my crimes”), I went from the most unconventional—“Oomalooma”, “Welcome, Chum”—to the most conventional—“My Silly Poems”. The six books in-between—“Achoo!”, “Ouch!”, “Ahem!”, “Hmph!”, “Argh!”, and “Yikes!”—display my poems mostly as single-panel cartoons, and, occasionally, as comics.*

The new book will have two sibling books, which I am close to completing—“My Silly Puzzles” and “My Silly Captain Curtain Poems”. Raising the total of the entire “my rhymes, my crimes” series to 11 books.

It is a body of work that I’m proud of and thankful to have been in the position** to create. It is my unique, personal vision. The work innovates, without embracing current trends or fads, but it is still intimately connected to the ideas and the beliefs that are part of the extraordinary cultural heritage that is our Western civilization.***

Once I’m done with this group of books, I’ll take a break before moving on to something else. Maybe I’ll begin making drawings for an art book collection—“Playgrounds”, “Nudes”, “The Fetus”?

Whatever it is, I will continue to follow my bliss.****

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* What is essentially the same content is expressed in three very different ways.

** That position required sacrifice, as opportunities sometimes do, but that sacrifice only makes it sweeter. (Actually, it doesn’t. I would prefer to have it all and have it without having to make any sacrifice. Alas.)

*** It feels pretentious to write this for a book of silly poems, but silliness and humor is part of our heritage — Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels”, Rabelais’ “Gargantua” and “Pantagruel”, Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”, Molière, etc. Not that I am comparing my work to these masters. (My work is closer to Dr. Seuss, Shell Silverstein and Charles Schulz.) Rather, I’m pointing out that Western culture is not all drama, tragedy, romantic suicides and Shakespeare’s sonnets.

**** “Sacrifice and Bliss” is my favorite chapter in Joseph Campbell’s “The Power of Myth”. (“The Hero’s Adventure”, “The Gift of the Goddess” and “Tales of Love and Marriage” are wonderful, too.)

***** https://www.amazon.com/author/maciek_jozefowicz

Thumbnails of work-in-progress that will become my 11th (“Argh!”) and 12th (“Yikes!”) books. Both will be collections of illustrated humorous poems. Included in these collections will be standouts like “Foot Litter on Twitter”, “Been There, Done That”, “This Fetus…”, “My Bio” and “Witches’ Brew”.

Rough landing—another page from the story of Daisy’s trip to the moon.

Daisy’s trip to the moon.

Another page from “Kolin”, the dragon who couldn’t fly. (But he can bicycle.)