So I released my list of famous names the other day, and as promised the first thing I did was to try to beat 35 in the Gaffney-Gordon pangram challenge. If you’re not familiar with that challenge, here’s a little backstory (spoilers abound):

Way back when, Matt wrote a puzzle where the answer was three famous names who combined were pangrammatic and consisted only of 36 letters. A few weeks ago, Peter Gordon did the same, except his names combined for only 35 letters. The natural thought is: can we beat 35?

I wrote a script to go through my list of names to look for such pangrams. A brute force search would have taken too long so I made the assumption that one celebrity would have a X in his name and another would have a Q (quick: what’s the most famous person with both?) Once I have both those names, I scan for the most unlikely remaining pair of letters and see if any celebrity with those letters can combine with the first two celebrities to make a pangram. I like the way the code turned out; check it out if you’re into that kind of thing.

But you probably just care about the results, so here is everything the program spit out of length 36 or less:

36 -- JACI VELASQUEZ / ANDY ROXBURGH / TOM WEISKOPF
35 -- JACQUES LIPCHITZ / FOXY BROWN / DAVE KINGMAN
36 -- JACQUES LIPCHITZ / MAX VON SYDOW / FRANK BURGE
36 -- JACQUES LIPCHITZ / MAX VON SYDOW / FRANK BOUGH
35 -- DIEGO VELAZQUEZ / FOXY BROWN / JACK THOMPSON
36 -- DIEGO VELAZQUEZ / JOHN COX BRAY / TOM WEISKOPF
36 -- JOEY MARQUEZ / ALEX BOGDANOVIC / TEWFIK PASHA
35 -- SAYYID QUTB / GAVIN MAXWELL / JOZSEF KIPRICH
35 -- SAYYID QUTB / XAVER SCHARWENKA / JOZEF GLEMP
36 -- JACQUES BARZUN / FELIX POTVIN / DWIGHT YOAKAM
35 -- WILFREDO VAZQUEZ / MAX BOYCE / JE TSONGKHAPA
35 -- FRED QUIMBY / WANG SHIXIAN / ZELJKO PETROVIC
36 -- JACQUES GODBOUT / FRANZ WAXMAN / PHIL VICKERY

You’ll notice that Matt’s and Peter’s are in there, which is a good sign. The others are kinda bad, except for one that passes muster: JACQUES LIPCHITZ / FOXY BROWN / DAVE KINGMAN. What do you think — is it as good as Peter’s and Matt’s?