Dustings #135

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Uhm… just to clarify the plot of Firestarter, Drew Barrymore’s character can’t only start fires with her mind. I’m pretty sure she can start fires in all the normal ways and with her mind.

I wouldn’t bet my life on it, but it would seem like a strange, needlessly complicated plot detail if she couldn’t start fires the normal way. “This little girl can ignite anything with her thoughts! And she can’t operate a lighter!”

That’s a different book.

This Wants To Be A Trick

This is a possibly recurring featurette in the Dusting’s posts where I share something that isn’t a magic trick, but it seems like there’s a trick buried in there somewhere.

Five years ago I wrote a post on this Mystery Card found in a reader’s grandfather’s wallet from the 1930s.

I thought maybe our collective brains could figure out what it was, but I apparently overestimated the power of our collective brainpower.

But now, five years later, I realized that I could ask ChatGPT to sort it all out for us.

Here was its answer:

🤖🤖🤖🤖🤖🤖🤖🤖🤖🤖🤖

It’s a backward-word / mirror-reading puzzle table—almost certainly cut from an old puzzle book, word-game book, or children’s activity annual from the early–mid 1900s.

Here’s why we can be confident about that:

1. Many of the entries are simply words spelled backward

Examples:

  • SMOHT → THOMS

  • DEROF → FROED/FORDE

  • NYPLU → ULPYN

  • EZEL → LEZE (old crossword-style filler word)

  • Ffulb → Bluff

This kind of reversed spelling is extremely common in vintage puzzle pages.

2. The pointing-hand glyphs (“manicules”) were a standard graphic device

Puzzle and cipher pages from that era loved using pointing hands to show:

  • which direction to read,

  • which items pair together,

  • or which word to decode.

Those little hands are a huge clue that this is from a puzzle/cipher page rather than a technical or academic table.

3. The layout matches early 20th-century puzzle tables

The grid with:

  • short abbreviations at the top (“Wp.”, “Sw.”, “Sp.”, etc.)

  • numbered rows (“1p”, “2B”, “3S”)

  • and a strange title (“PHORU”)

…is exactly the kind of pseudo-scientific formatting puzzle books used to make the page look mysterious.

It resembles sections from:

  • 1930s–1950s British puzzle annuals,

  • magician club newsletters,

  • “secret writing” pages in juvenile puzzle books,

  • and cheap pulp puzzle digests.

4. The content isn’t consistent with chemistry, comics, languages, etc.

People sometimes confuse this sort of thing with:

  • a periodic table parody,

  • a code from a novel,

  • a magic trick instruction sheet,

  • or a foreign language.

But none of the abbreviations match technical fields. They do match nonsense headings used in old wordplay pages.

So what is it, specifically?

It’s a puzzle table where each cell contains a backward word, phrase, or partial cipher.
The solver was supposed to:

  • read them backward,

  • possibly combine them across columns,

  • and derive a hidden phrase or meta-answer.

The title PHORU is probably itself a warped/misspelled clue—possibly a scrambled version of “For You” or “Phon. Rv.” (phonetic reverse).

🤖🤖🤖🤖🤖🤖🤖🤖🤖🤖🤖

Oooooohhhhh, now I get it. It’s so clear now. NYPLU is just ULPYN backwards. (Never mind that that doesn’t make sense or that NYPLU doesn’t actually appear on the card.)

Mystery solved. The robots tell us this is simply a very fun puzzle from something like a “children’s activity annual.” Fun!

Gather ‘round, children. The annual activity book of indecipherable gibberish has arrived.

Is there a setting for AI where you can be like, “If there is no answer, you don’t have to give me one.” By default, it seems to operate like the dumbest people I’ve met: unwilling to say, “I don’t know.”