Reasonable economic cases can be made for allowing people to sell their organs, and for allowing people to buy the ability to immigrate into our country. Cautious people avoid such proposals, because they push too many emotional buttons. Mischievous folks like myself, however, wonder what happens if we push all the buttons at once: what if people could enter the country if they give up a kidney, or similarly valuable organ? Would those who worry about the loyalty of immigrants who just pay cash to come here be reassured by the symbolic loyalty of giving up an organ? Would those who fear that organ sellers are exploited be reassured by the huge value immigrants gain from living here? Impish minds want to know.

What made this hunt so hard? Puzzles like the 192-letter cryptogram, for one thing. As Jean notes, "A cipher of that length should be a snap to break. And this one wouldn't have been bad at all if I'd thought to mention that the hidden message was in Spanish. But I didn't. I also neglected to note that the pairs 'll', 'rr,' and 'ch' stood for single letters, as they do in the Spanish alphabet."

Also:

"My biggest problem was making the things hard enough. Once I wrote a clue in Minoan Linear B, a totally obscure language that was used on clay tablets in ancient Crete. To make things tougher, I didn't tell them it was Linear B and I checked out the two library books on the subject. All the teams solved it anyway! One team had a person who was actually studying Linear B. Another just happened to have a book on the subject. It was incredible."

I entered my first Mystery Hunt in 1983, and the first puzzle that caught my eye was this: "One of the activities listed in this month's guide is a fake. Receive a vital clue at its ersatz meeting." That sounded pretty easy, so I began paging through the guide. I had forgotten I was at MIT. With real listings such as "How to Change the Color of Lightning" and "The Universe, With Three Examples," I was completely unable to deduce that the perfectly reasonable-sounding "Parrots Around the World" was a Brad Schaefer invention. It turned out I was not alone in failing to see through this subterfuge; several bird-lovers showed up only to receive the baffling advice "Switch the answers to subclues two and seven."

• Christina Kahrl on WAMU.



• It seems silly to travel a time zone for a weekend and end up watching the first eight episodes of "Veronica Mars," in between a bunch of writing of stuff, but it turns out to be a good show. And now I can't read any Internet stuff about it or Slim-looksortalike Kristen Bell because of inadvertent spoilers from being 30 episodes behind. It's bad enough that Bell is just about precisely Slim's age, while Enrico Colatoni is less than six years older than me.



• Speaking of writing, how sick is it that I know the citation to In re Rhone-Poulenc Rorer, Inc., 51 F.3d 1293 (7th Cir. 1995) by heart? I barely even noticed it when I was clerking on the court that year, and now it ends up being footnoted at least once in almost everything I do.