Friday, March 18, 2011

The Perfect Perfect Pangram?

Many of you have probably heard of a pangram, a sentence (or any letter-group) that contains every letter of the alphabet at least once. Quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is perhaps the most well known. Well, a perfect pangram is a pangram without repeating letters, or in other words, an anagram of the alphabet.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ = ?

Trying to come up with an anagram with those letters is fiendishly hard, even for word nuts and to come up with one that makes any real sense is often considered impossible. I started taking a crack at this a few years back and I often found that sports related themes yielded good results, due to some nice consonant-only abbreviations such as NHL, NFL, QB, BMX, etc. One of my early efforts remains one of my best

Folks quiz NBC TV, "Why ax Dr. J?" Mpeg
If you saw this written in an article or on some web page, you might think it made sense. It could translate as 'People are asking NBC why they fired Julius Erving (Dr. J)'. Mpeg would signify that there is a video covering this. Three others I came up with later were...

Vex NFL QB. Drug zip was jock myth.
NHL MVP wiz just rocked by GQ fax.
Lucky GQ sex whiz T.J. Ford, NBA MVP

NFL = National Football League, QB = Quarterback, NHL = National Hockey League, MVP = Most Valuable Player, QC = Gentleman's Quarterly and NBA = National Basketball Association
The last one is fairly interesting, since T.J. Ford is an NBA basketball player (although not an MVP), and even more interesting for reasons we shall soon discover.

The freaky perfect pangram

When I did a page of basketball anagrams for stevengalen.com, I decided to try an impossible looking name, T.J.Ford. I spotted Dr. J and so I came up with the anagram

T.J. Ford = Oft Dr. J
Since both T.J. and Dr. J played in the NBA, I considered that an excellent find for such a brutally tough anagram subject. When I revisited my perfect pangrams, it dawned on me that I could substitute Oft Dr. J for T.J. Ford in the last one.

So I came up with..

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ = Lucky GQ sex whiz Dr. J, oft NBA MVP

Not bad at all. Dr. J had been the NBA MVP, 2 time all-star game MVP  and also 3-time ABA MVP. The sex whiz phrase wasn't great but I already had a sensible perfect pangram which is a rare thing indeed. But then I thought, maybe I could change sex to ex and place the s somewhere else. With a little finagling, I re-engineered the anagram to read

GQ's oft lucky whiz Dr. J, ex-NBA MVP

So now the question remained, had Julius Erving ever been on the cover of GQ?



How about as recently as February 2011. Amazing!


Thursday, March 17, 2011

Go Edward!






Here's a look at some of the anagrams found on the Twilight Anagrams page.
 
Carlisle Cullen = An ill cell curse 
Edward Cullen = Led cruel dawn 
Rosalie Hale = A holier seal
Mike Newton = Meek win not
Bella Swan = Lawn sable

Charlie Swan = Law's in reach


An ill cell curse is good for patriarch Carlisle and Charlie's the police chief. 
An anagram of Stephenie Meyer is The enemies prey.

I have also done anagrams for the actors. The two stars, Kristen and Robert are already in the Actor Anagram pages on the site.

Kristen Stewart = Starkest winter 
Robert Pattinson = Brit star not open (also "Poster titan born")