Steve, in one of his more lucid moments, made me promise to honor a request which I will now endeavor to do.  I’m puzzled by the significance of it – to my eye it looks like utter nonsense – but a promise is a promise.  The favor he asked was for me to make a post to his blog.  He said he couldn’t do it any more.  As you’ll see, there may be cause for concern about his mental state.  He seemed, at times, to be speaking gibberish, but he made me swear to transcribe his cryptic words verbatim.  (See below.)  Then he began talking like an economist which to my way of thinking was even less intelligible.

The first economic principle he babbled about was allocation of scarce resources and how this related to his portfolio of interests.  Then he talked about opportunity costs.  This evidently measures the costs and benefits of choosing one path by comparing it to another path that you could have chosen instead.  I got the impression he was talking about his blog and he was sad to realize that it was taking too much away from other aspects of his life that are important to him.

I suppose I can understand that, but then he went off on one of his weird tangents.  After mentioning paradoxes and metaphors pertaining to his mixed emotions, he mixed things up even more by taking SCRABBLE tiles and spelling out the following phrase. 

NONE OF KNOWN ESTEEM HUSH A HAPPY VALEDICTORY

Now Steve’s language rarely has a simple flow to it, but this sounded funny even by his standards.  He explained that it had a hidden meaning.  The phrase he really wanted me to convey on his blog had a word pattern like this:

_ _ _ _ _ _   _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _! 

_   _ _ _ _   _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _   _ _ _   _ _ _.

“I don’t have a clue what you’re going for here,” I told him.  “OK,” he said, “here are some hints to help you with the longest word – the third one from the end.”  He then took a subset of the tiles and rearranged them in a variety of ways, saying the clues were somewhat self-referential.  Here were the phrases he spelled out:

NO-EMPATHY CLOD

NOT A COMELY PHD

PLY A CON METHOD

NOODLE A PC MYTH

MACE PHONY DOLT

HELD ON TO CAMPY

HE CAN MOLD TYPO

LOATHED ON MY PC

PLAN TECHY DOOM

END MY LOCO PATH

HAD EMPTY COLON

DOPY MATH CLONE

END TO MY PC HALO

That might help, I figured, but I knew there were still a lot of blanks.  “Can I buy a vowel?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said.  “You can have ‘em all, but I’m going to make you earn them.”  Then he put together what he described as a Little Orphan Vanna secret decoder.  It just looked like a bunch of math to me, but he swore that if you follow the instructions, you would get your own personalized number-to-letter translator. 

1. Start by concatenating your birth year and month. (e.g., 197405 for May of ‘74)
2. Add the last digit of your home phone number.  (e.g., if it’s 8, then 197405 + 8 = 197413)
3. Subtract 1 if you are male; add 1 if you are female.
4. Add the number of maniacs in the band Natalie Merchant fronted. (Hint: it’s the smallest 5 digit number possible)
5. Add the dollar amount if you had a c-note for every year you’ve been alive. (No fair giving yourself extra money for partial years – if you’re 35 and a half, that’s $3500.)
6. Add the year we’ll celebrate the next new millennium.

The first 3 digits of this number correspond to the first three vowels:  A, E, and I.

1. For the second set of vowels, start with the number of stars on the US flag.
2. Subtract the number that George Costanza wanted to name his first child (in deference to Mickey Mantle).  If you didn’t catch that episode, it’s also the number of dwarfs in Snow White and the number of deadly sins.
3. Take this result and multiply it by the number trophies won by Manchester United in 1999.  If you’re not a fan and need a hint, think of blind mice or little pigs.
4. Multiply the result from the previous step by the number of toes on a standard human foot.

The 3 digit result corresponds to the remaining vowels:  O, U, and Y.

Using your decoder, you can fill in the numbered blanks with the appropriate letters.

_ _ 2 _ _ _   1 _ 1 _ 5 6 _ 1! 

3   _ 6 _ 1   _ 6 _ _ 1 _ _ _ 2 5 _ 6 _   _ 2 _   _ 4 _.

OK, for what it’s worth, I’ve hereby honored his request.  And hey, remember I’m just the messenger.

Steve’s friend,

Ted Finverses

p.s., I thought I’d also report that two other friends of Steve, legal partners Ned Fretsvise and Sid Ventsfree, were hoping to convince a court of law that Dan Brown had borrowed extensively from Steve’s previous anagrammatic devices and that some of those ample royalties should be shared.

p.p.s., When I asked him if this was it, and if so, why no grand farewells or blazes of blog glory, he said that was part of his problem – he was always shooting for stars beyond his reach.  After I scolded him for mixing his celestial metaphors, he explained that his readers had grown accustomed to such twists of expression.  He then went on to say that it somehow seemed more appropriate to leave with a mixed up mishmash of mumbo jumbo since that was more consistent with the contemplaydoh theme.

p.p.p.s., I think he’s going to miss this blogging business (the process and the people) even more than he imagines.