Thursday, May 1, 2008

100th Post Contest

In honor of this being our 100th blog post, I'm holding a contest.

As I am sure you have noticed, the title of this blog is Escape Hard, Inner Ninja. In addition to sounding cool, this title is a riddle. The first one to explain the riddle will win a "fabulous" prize of my choosing.

Contest Rules:
1) Answers must be submitted as comments on the blog.
2) Each person can only submit one answer.
3) If you read this blog every day, you must submit an answer. :)

Good Luck and Happy Puzzling!

8 comments:

dereksh said...

Oh, freakin heck! I asked you about this the first day I saw your blog, and I *still* don't know what it means.

Cam said...

My submission is that it's an anagram for

"Darn, Chrenee is in Japan."

Anonymous said...

If Cam's submission is correct, let me say, "Wow! Cam, you're awesome." If he's not correct, that's pretty amazing anyway.

I'm going to offer a different perspective. After some internet searching, I found out that NINJA is sometimes viewed as an initialism for: No Income No Job or Assets. Everyone has an inner ninja. It's that part of you that wants to experience the world as a child does, free from the daily grind, responsibility, without anchors or other strings attached.

My submission is that this blog was not just set up to record Chrenee's adventures, but also to motivate them to experience as much of Japan as possible. They wanted their inner ninjas to escape, and to escape hard.

Paradox13VA said...

It's the title of the Manga-based screenplay of your adventures and experiences, which you've been secretly collaborating on for two years.

It involves a married couple who needs to translate strange signals coming from outer space which can only be understood by interpreting the literature of Gabriella Garcia-Marquez in the original Spanish, converting into number theory equasions, and then reconstituting as haiku. In doing so, they discover a terrible, deep dark secret which may drive them, and the world, mad.

Of course. What else would it mean?

Kat said...

I believe that I, too, asked you about the name way back in September. But if you told me, my swiss cheese for brains can't remember.

I know the Japanese love using English in new and surprising ways and so this is your play on that. What I don't know is if you actually saw this somewhere and adopted it for yourselves

OR if you put a phrase into babelfish translated it to Japanese and then back into English. This is my guess, but I have been trying to think what phrase it might have been and I'm coming up with nothing.

Rafi said...

I believe it's an anagram for "Chris and Renee in Japan have nothing better to do than make me waste my time at work with word puzzles and makes me wonder how long it took them to come up with the, then after I put in the 2 mins to solve it, I realize someone has already come up with a cleverer answer." Only abbreviated.

dereksh said...

Oooh, I know. It's a slogan. It's a slogan for ... Springer yellow math books.

lorelai said...

Hello! My name's Lorelai and Evan Macbeth linked me over to your blog :) He mentioned you two live in Japan and I am actually visiting Kyoto towards the end this month! Just wanted to drop you a line in case you wanted to meet a total stranger who's a friend of a friend (Evan/Abbe and I lived in NYC in the same complex for a while.) I am trying to convince my friends to stay at the Akihabara Capsule Inn as we speak......