A Tik-Tok of Oz Puzzle

 PD-US via Wikipedia

I have an unrealized ambition to create a series of puzzles based on the Oz books of L. Frank Baum.  These fifteen books, containing hundreds of characters, color plates and line drawings, provide ample material for puzzles of many kinds.   I offer the first of the series below.

In case you’re unfamiliar with him, Tik-Tok is a mechanical man Dorothy Gale meets and winds up when she’s trapped by the wheelers in “Ozma of Oz,” the third volume of the series.  A popular character, he figures in many of the later books, and Baum later wrote a book around him, “Tik-Tok of Oz.”

The puzzle has three parts: a passage with a few words omitted and replaced with blanks, a set of scrambled words, and a word search puzzle in which the scrambled words appear unscrambled.  Once you’ve puzzled out the words, use them to fill in the blanks in the passage.  The passage is the speech from “Ozma of Oz” in which Tik-Tok explains his origin.  I edited the speech very slightly to improve continuity.

If you get stuck unscrambling the words, try picking them out of the word search, where they appear unscrambled, or guessing them from the blanks in the passage.  On the other hand, if you’re good at unscrambling words, you’ll have a word search puzzle to enjoy once you’ve figured out the passage.

In the Oz books, Tik-Tok speaks with a mechanical voice, which Baum represents by stringing the words together with hyphens.  Robotic speech is all about us today, so I give the answer to this puzzle in an unusual form, an Xtranormal video I made in which Tik-Tok tells his story.

Tik-Tok of Oz (PD-US)

The Passage

Wordsearch

The answer spoken by Tik-Tok himself:

Puzzles are for Fun

You won’t get rich making puzzles.  Once upon a time you could make money constructing puzzles for magazines, but now most of the puzzle magazines you see on newsstands print only computer-generated puzzles.  (If you have a mental picture of sweating bots shoveling digits into the flaming furnace of a Sudokumatic 2012, you’re not far from wrong.)  A good crossword puzzle, on the other hand, still requires considerable human ingenuity and can fetch $200 or more.

This puzzle was computer generated.  After picking out the words in the passage I wanted to hide in the word search portion of the puzzle, I created the word search and scrambled the words using armoredpenguin.com.  Next I sat down to solve it myself to guard against mistakes and to check on the difficulty of the puzzle.  My memory isn’t particularly strong.  I was taken aback by the scrambled word “clpdietcoma” and had to consult the word search.

I hope you enjoy my puzzle.

Answers

An earlier version of this article appeared on Triond's Quazen website: http://quazen.com/games/puzzles/review-trilogy-303-puzzle-quizzes-by-the-grabarchuk-family/