Congratulations, mosaix! Yet another win, dammit! (I've not done my stats for the last umpteen months, so anyone wanting to know how many Challenges the blasted man has won -- too many, obviously!!
-- will have to wait a bit, unless Chris p can immediately step in with the answer!)
Congrats and commiserations to Victoria on second place, and reiver and Starbeast on joint third.
Parson, you wanted explanations from me. I think you got the plot, but in case anyone else was puzzling over it: a man has been sent on an undercover mission when his wife is heavily pregnant** and he's waiting for news and worrying, and everything is conspiring to remind him of his worries, so he's seeing pregnant women everywhere and even the place where he's working (Natal) is an ever present reminder, but his bosses send him a coded message confirming the birth went OK.
The really confusing bit is probably the title. I couldn't think of anything apart from Birth Day, which rather gave the game and the punch line away, so as it's a spy story I thought encoding it would be the answer. I used the simplest code possible, just moving the letters one place forward, ie the reverse of IBM becoming HAL*** so Birth Day becomes CJSUI EBZ. And Hugh was kind enough to jog voters into thinking about it further with his:
Well it took me a while, but in the end the references came together and I had no choice but to vote for UIF KVEHF (probably mis-spelt). Natal was the light bulb moment.
(my bolding)
** why is the expression "heavily pregnant"? I mean, the poor women knows they've put on weight, so it seems a bit unnecessary to rub it in.
*** which apparently was entirely coincidental in
2001: A Space Odyssey and not a coded message at all.
