And so concludes the first great IAPTGUAAT Reader Quiz. It went only slightly better than my first contest, back in June.

Beloved reader Nomax pretty much came to the same conclusion that I came to many years ago. The 12:08 time is the time that displays the most number of LEDs on a digital alarm clock without repeating any numbers. I guess this really shows off the clocks' dazzling abilities to...well...tell time. Perhaps fewer clocks were sold when they displayed a time of 1:11. Those clocks clearly sucked.

(I actually spent a few minutes just now, perusing through an online Bible lookup, to see if any Bible book had a 12:08 passage that was relevant to alarm clocks. The best I could come up with was from the book of Ezekiel. Passage 12:08 says:

In the morning the word of the LORD came to me:

Sort of an incomplete thought, but it does have the word "morning" in it. That's kind of alarm clock related. I must admit that I only skimmed the rest of Ezekiel, but it seemed to be about banning gay marriage and private Social Security accounts. Who knew?)

Nomax, it should be known, is excellent at thinking through these types of puzzles. During our last poker night, which he regularly attends, someone made up a new poker game and named it "Rusty Trombone". This phrase, along with Dirty Sanchez and Cleveland Steamer, are all references to sexual acts that I have never performed. Were it not for Jon Stewart's predilection for bandying these terms about, I probably would have happily never heard of these things.

So, that evening, those poker game attendees who do not scrupulously google every phrase that comes out of Jon Stewart's mouth were left wondering what a Rusty Trombone was. Nomax, however, thought about it for several seconds and correctly deduced what this sexual act entails.

His brain is a twisted one.

Speaking of twisted brains, one final thought for the evening. The last couple of days I've had to drive into the office for various meetings. This always annoys the hell out of me, because I hate people. Not you guys, but real people. These meetings featured a couple of high-level executives speaking, and it was important to put butts in the seats. As it turns out, executives hate lecturing to butt-less seats.

I escaped the first meeting without actually having to speak to anyone, but the second meeting was a bit more of a social affair. At one point I found myself actually trying to make small talk with one of our vice presidents. All my internal filters were running at full-speed, trying to prevent me from saying anything stupid. This particular executive is an attractive woman who recently got married to someone who is exceedingly well-trained in the art of killing. My brain racked itself searching for a humorous, yet inoffensive, way to express something along the lines of "So, I guess I won't be hitting on you anymore." Wisely, I stood there mutely instead.

Afterwards, I was chatting with one of my co-workers who told me that he went through the exact same internal struggle and also ended up saying nothing. He summed up things rather succinctly when he said, "I just wish I could have told her that I'm not normally a quiet person. I just only have rude things to say."

Amen.