Daily puzzles/problems.

[togre]

On a plane at an airport in Vladivostok, Russia, a woman goes into labor. While the plane is taxiing down the runway, her first child is born at 9:00am, January 1st, 2009. The plane flies to Anchorage, Alaska, USA. The flight takes 1 hour, but crosses the International Date Line and therefore touches down at 11:00 am, December 31st, 2008. The woman gives birth to her second child--born after the first, but on in a different, earlier year.

[prendrelemick]

^ Sounds right to me.

[billl]

Yeah, togre, if you can think of a new puzzle, that would be great! It is your right!

(And, unfortunately, your responsibility. Of course, after this much time, you can allow yourself to be considered "shamefully unconcerned" with that responsibility, and then ANYONE might choose to do the next puzzle! Or you can just say that you were waiting for Mark's verification, and quickly post the next puzzle.)

[togre]

Bob is 6 feet tall, works as a butcher's assistant and has size 11 shoes. What does Bob weigh?

[MarkBastable]

Sorry. Been distracted. Yes. More later.

[prendrelemick]

Meat.

[togre]

Yep, prendrelemick!

Now its your turn.

[prendrelemick]

My age is 26 plus half my age, what's my age?

[togre]

52?

[MarkBastable]

If it's not, I'm looking forward to finding out why.

[prendrelemick]

Course it is!




note to self : Must try harder.

[prendrelemick]

I've never had much patience with riddles. They always seem so contrived to me. Contrived and quite often leaky as hell. I mean, look at the riddle of the Sphinx. Faced with that absurdly cobbled-together attempt at a puzzle, any traveller with a modicum of gumption would flip the Sphinx the finger and tell him - or possibly her - to spin on it, then gee up the camel and head for the first pub on Thebes High Street.

They didn't have camels, they rode around on Theban cycles.

[MarkBastable]

On the twin thing, togre was right on the money.

This is how it's explained in the draft of the novel. Every time I read it I drive myself slightly nuts trying to work out whether I've got the direction right.

-----------------------------------------------


“Tell me about your twin brother,” Alice said during the next session.

“What’s the relevance of that?”

“Maybe none. I don’t know.”

I sighed. “Okay – here’s the quirky thing about me. I was born in a different year and a different country to my twin.”

Alice gave the quizzical look I’ve come to expect when I trot out that freakish fact. “How so?”

“I was born at two o’clock in the morning, January 1st, 1963, in the Solomon Islands. In the airport, in fact. I was two weeks early and I had decided to come into the world just as a spectacular typhoon was about to hit.” I picked up my bottle of mineral water from which I took a swig. “My father, God knows how, persuaded an American airforce plane to take my mother and I – still bloody and blue – on board. No one had any idea that the birth wasn’t over. The plane flew east and was forced down in Samoa, where my brother Pablo was born.”

“Amazing,” Alice nodded.

“But the plane had crossed the international dateline into the previous day. So Pablo was born on 31st December, 1962 – after me, but the day before me.”

Alice clapped her hands, laughing. “Oh, I love that.”

“It breaks the ice at parties,” I admitted.

[prendrelemick]

I knew a boy who was born on a flight over the arctic.. Suppose he was born exactly while above the pole, Is there a time there?

[MarkBastable]

I've just noticed something in my extract that leaves me clammy with mortification.