I mean, Publius Enigma is kind of interesting, but it’s interesting because it’s a failure, since the prize was revealed ages ago (is there any real reason to doubt Mason or whoever said that it was a record-label marketing-department guy who liked puzzles, and that the prize was a chunk of virgin forest?)

I suppose the whole “they downplayed it because the government changed everybody’s phone number!” thing is good for a laugh.

It’s also worth noting that this “puzzle” happened in 1994, which didn’t seem like a very good time for puzzles–The Da Vinci Code was a few years off, and the British treasure-hunt book craze epitomized by Kit Williams’ Masquerade (my mom had a copy) was all the way back in 1979. (If you’ve never heard of Masquerade, by all means, go here

Other bits in the video that got my attention:

“In 1994, Pink Floyd put out a masterful album called The Division Bell” - Real good of him to say that after I relistened to the album awhile back and realized that I didn’t even like a single song on it all the way through, only liking parts of songs. As I discussed with Joe.

“The man in the video for High Hopes is clearly a Roger Waters lookalike” - That guy doesn’t look like Roger at all to me. Roger’s ugly misshapen ursine jaw is pretty unmistakable and the person who looks the most like him, Richard Gere, still doesn’t really look like him.

The rest of it is just the guy “revealing” that the lyrics are mostly aimed at Roger Waters, something even I figured out almost immediately (though I didn’t know Gilmour’s wife had written so many of them) when I first heard the album around 2002 or so, and sure enough, one of the first video comments reads “Dude, pretty much everyone figured that out right away.” I wish the damn video had been about a fourth as long, though seeing the ugly Twitter war between Roger and David and his wife was worth seeing again.

I guess it’s sort of amusing to think of Publius Enigma as “the first Internet mystery” since it involved a marketing guy deciding to trawl fucking Usenet, and in fuckin’ 1994, no less, when few were REALLY on the Internet.