GeekDad Puzzle Of The Week: Easter Eggs Solution

Image by Flickr user thisisbossi, used under Creative Commons license

This week’s puzzle was won by GeekDad reader, Minh Quan Nguyen, who managed to find the source & origin for all of the easter eggs and wins a $50 gift certificate to ThinkGeek (not redeemable towards iCade, Unicorn Meat or some other catalog items).

Puzzle:

Spring is here, the grass is turning green, lilies are emerging from the once frozen ground and a visit from the Easter Bunny is just around the corner. And who doesn’t love Easter eggs? There are chocolate ones, caramel-filled delights and – of course – the Cadbury Creme-filled roe of rapture. But, at GeekDad, the type of Easter eggs we like best are the digital ones, those cloaked messages and jokes buried away (or sometimes hidden in plain sight) in our favorite movies, games and computational search engines.

This week’s quiz will put your Easter egg knowledge and Google-Fu to the test. Simply identify the TV show, movie, book, game, Web site or other source where each Easter egg can be found, along with a short description of why each qualifies as an Easter egg.

Fancy Lads Snack Cakes

ANTWORT

Rock Lobster

ie sucks

P=NP

Toasty!

Ctrl+Shift+Y

2112

If you don’t claim your humanity you will become a statistic. You have been warned.

(See image)

Image courtesy of a media company that we can't name because it would give the answer away

Solution:

As long as you have a basic understanding of Google’s search bar, this week’s puzzle shouldn’t have been too tough.

Fancy Lads Snack Cakes – In Bethesda’s apocalyptic action RPG, Fallout 3, among the bottles of Nuka-Cola and Bloatfly Meat, tiny packs of Fancy Lads Snack Cakes can be found. “Fancy Lads” is a reference to a WoW clan populated by friends and staff of the awesome webcomic, Penny Arcade.

ANTWORT – Antwort is a German word meaning “answer” in English. Type ANTWORT into an OpenOffice cell and hit enter. The result is the number “42”, which has some geeky meaning, I’m told.

Rock Lobster – On the Commodore Amiga, a B-52s fan was obviously involved with the design of the motherboards. Songs by the Athens, Georgia new wave band were imprinted on a number of boards, with “Rock Lobster” making its appearance on the 500. (And my name’s Stinko & we’re headed to the Love Shack!”)

ie sucks – If you zoom into the CSS Edit application’s icon in OS X, you can see a note that most Web developers can identify with: ie sucks. (Also acceptable answer, the Firefox 2.0 easter egg.)

P=NP – A longstanding programming problem; for a good while if you typed this equation into Wolfram Alpha, you were informed that the WA engineers were “hard at work” on the project.

Toasty! – First appearing in Mortal Kombat II, this nod to programmer Dan Forden’s trademark phrase has popped up everywhere from Peggle to Revolution X.

Ctrl+Shift+Y -If, when visiting the desktop software area of Picassa, this three-key combo is entered, a cute teddy bear will appear … over and over again.

2112 – Rush is a pretty geeky band, so it stands to reason that they would be fond of easter eggs. On their Rush in Rio dvd, there are a couple. One is that by selecting songs 2 (O Baterista), then song 1 (YYZ), then two again, followed by one (noting the group’s fourth studio album) the video for “Anthem” becomes available.

If you don’t claim your humanity you will become a statistic. You have been warned. – At the beginning of the dvd of Fight Club, just after the FBI warning is a second warning, on the screen for just a few seconds. Read it in its entirety here.

(See image) – Finally, the image above is from the pilot for the television show, Battlestar Galactica. In a tribute, the Firefly class ship “Serenity” can be seen in the sky. Got that, Captain Tight Pants?

That’s it for this week. Check back on Monday when Dave G. will shock your Schwann cells with another puzzle of the most mystifying magnitude. You’ll enjoy it or my name isn’t Dr. Hfuhruhurr.