77467 74674 44769 !4649 44436 !9669 96868 69648 96486 84832 43325 32255 2555?

Notes:
1. If you are not an avid fan, this may not give you a tingle.
2. Other necessary punctuation has not been encoded.
3. The inability to emulate a technology will require some informed guesswork; but all cryptographers must engage in that anyway.

Brian says 'I'm more for email and leve (sic…a significant typo?) my wife to "texting"!' and suggests some 'illiteracy' in the SMS/IT department, so I'm beginning to suspect whether texting (using the T9 feature) is even involved here.  ('I thought there was a means to provide certain punctuation'…There is, using the 1 key in T9, but 1's are absent in the problem anyway!)

 

Brian's also reminded me/us to look at Note 2 about punctuation, where 'three elements have been given but not a fourth'.  In the problem itself there are two !'s and one ?, but the position of the !'s before numbers doesn't ring any particular bells here.  In the Notes there are periods, a comma and semi-colon.  What could be missing there is an apostrophe as in 'aren't' and 'hasn't', but any significance to that eludes me as well.

 

Brian adds '…Since that call' in his response to me.  Not sure if that's still a relevant reference to ABBA's first album in 1973 that I had mentioned…Ring Ring, or its song of the same title with the lyrics 'Ring, ring, why don't you give me a call', or again, whether a telephone keypad even plays into this at all! 

 

Lastly (and hopefully significantly to someone:), he reminds us also to 'note the title' (which includes 'lean', as well as 'on' which might suggest '/'), to note the structure of the text (which is italicized and therefore slanted), and that the title has a 'slant' (towards where I'd been going).  So I'm left wondering about italics, some form of 'slanting', or division of numbers by using / somehow. 

 

And while I am indeed an ABBA fan (albeit no expert on them), I haven't yet found anything particularly 'tingly' in any of this yet!  So here I sit, as confused as ever!

Edited on January 15, 2009, 4:12 pm

Posted by rod hines on 2009-01-15 16:01:49