The following puzzles have been removed from my situation puzzles list, or never made it onto the list in the first place. There are a wide variety of reasons for the non-inclusion: some I think are obvious, some don't have enough of a story, some involve gimmicks that annoy me, some I think are riddles rather than situation puzzles, and some are so contrary to reality as to be unplayable. Basically, what it comes down to is that I don't like these enough to put them on my list. If you think of ways to make any of them more palatable to me, or to reorganize my entire list, drop me a note at logos@kith.org. --jed, 11/14/98 ----------------------------------------- Contra-reality puzzles, or, "That's not the way it works!" 2.10. A man is sitting in a train compartment. He sees a three- fingered hand through the compartment window, in the hallway of the train. He opens the compartment door and shoots the person with the three-fingered hand, but he goes free. (Michael Bernstein) 2.10. He's with a policeman, who's taking him to jail, and he uses the policeman's gun. He was convicted of his wife's murder; she had framed him for it somehow, involving cutting off two of her own fingers and mailing them to the police. Since he had already been convicted of her murder, he couldn't be tried twice for the same crime, and since he obviously hadn't actually been guilty before, he's set free. The main problem with this question is that as far as I know, that's NOT how the "double jeopardy" law works, and so it couldn't happen in real life. Nonetheless, it's a neat setup. [Further info: From ypay@leland.Stanford.EDU Wed Feb 26 12:06:34 1992 By Cheryl Balbes: Situation: A woman sees a man on a train eating an orange. She shoots and kills him. She is arrested and known to be sane and guilty but does not go to jail. Solution: The man and the woman were married. It was a terrible marriage - so terrible that he wanted revenge for it. So he cut off three of his fingers and burned down the house. The police arrived and arrested the woman for murder of her husband, citing the fingers as evidence of his death. She was tried and convicted and went to jail for most of her life. When she finally got out, she took a train ride and saw a man eating an orange. When he used the orange peeler, she could see that he was missing three fingers so she knew he was her husband. For ruining her life, she took out a gun and shot him dead. She was arrested and known to be guilty, but could not go to jail again for the same crime. Dan Cory] [Ian Collier has a slightly variant answer: 30 years ago, the man and the woman (his wife) attempted to defraud the insurance company by faking her death. However he was found guilty of murdering his wife and given a long prison sentence (his wife remained hidden and made no attempt to prevent the conviction). The man, having just been freed from prison, summons his wife from a far city and shoots her. He is not punished, because he has already served the sentence.] [Tommy Petersson (?) writes: Yeah, but isn't there a difference between being just 'tried' twice for the same crime, and 'convicted' twice for the same crime? I beleive that someone can be convicted of murder on somebody legally dead, but convicted of murder twice on the same person? Jed replies: so he can be tried again, but can't legally be convicted? Afraid I don't buy it.] 2.50. The pope is giving a speech. A man in the audience shoots the mayor who is behind the pope. (PRO) 2.50. The pope has returned to the village where he began his priesthood fifty years earlier. He was late for the ceremony, so the mayor spoke first; he claimed to be the first person to give confession to the pope, fifty years earlier. When the pope arrived, he related that the first confession he had heard was that of the murder of a young woman. The man in the audience had a sister who was murdered at that time. The sanctity of the confessional is conveniently ignored. Date: 2 Feb 92 23:05:11 GMT In article <64023@netnews.upenn.edu>, weemba@libra (Matthew P Wiener) writes: >Here's [one] I made up years ago: "She stopped having sex. She died." A woman was a hemophiliac. She stayed pregnant whenever possible. When she stopped having sex, she had her first period, and bled to death. [jeh comments: there was a lot of debate on the Net about this, most of which tended to conclude that (a) menstrual fluid isn't blood; (b) most of the few female hemophiliacs die at birth; and (c) terminating a pregnancy in any conceivable (heh) way is likely to result in too much blood loss.] 1.37. A holy man is dead in a room. (Perry Deess original) 1.37. The man is a Moslem. He was caught stealing, and so his right hand was cut off. However, he's very devout, and thus isn't allowed to eat using his left hand; so he starved to death. It could be argued that this isn't very realistic; he could've gotten someone to feed him, or somehow eaten without using his hands at all. And I don't know if those rules of Islam really interact that way. Any real info would be appreciated. [Ivan A Derzhanski writes: They are supposed to use their left hand. There is more than one tale in the _Arabian Nights_ about someone who has lost his right hand, typically as a punishment for theft (and typically unjustly). He conceals this fact (long sleeves and all that), until he is served a meal and the storyteller sees him eating with his left hand, something which is not exactly taboo, but is not the done thing either. Note that the punishment for theft is known to be loss of the right hand, not death by starvation. I would be more interested to know what a Hindu would do. [They] are much more careful about what is to be done with which hand. And, of course, there are many ways to lose a hand.] ----------------------------------------- Clocks, calendars, money, and other numerical trivia: 2.15. Two people are talking long distance on the phone; one is in an East-Coast state, the other is in a West-Coast state. The first asks the other "What time is it?", hears the answer, and says, "That's funny. It's the same time here!" (EMS) 2.15. One is in Eastern Oregon (in Mountain time), the other in Western Florida (in Central time), and it's daylight-savings changeover day at 1:30 AM. 2.15a. Variant answer: The east-coast state is in the USA, on Eastern Daylight time. The west-coast state is Western Australia. There's a twelve-hour time difference, so it's 8 o'clock in both places. (from Tim Lambert.) 2.19. A woman goes into a convenience store to buy a can of Coke. She pays for it with a $20 bill and receives $22 in change. (MI; partial MB wording) 2.19. It's in Canada; she pays in American money and receives change in Canadian money. Mark Brader points out that the amount of change can vary wildly depending on the price of the drink as well as both the official exchange rate and the actual exchange rate given. Organization: Penn State University Date: Tuesday, 4 Dec 1990 20:08:00 EST From: SCOTT MATTHEWS A man goes to a hardware store to buy a certain item. He asks the salesman how much this item costs to which he answers, "They are 3 for $1.00." The man say, "Okay I'll take 100," to which the salesman correctly replies, "That will be $1.00." The man pays $1.00 and leaves satisfied. What is the item. [A: house numbers. Very old very standard puzzle, and I don't see the gradual-approximation method working well for it.] >"A man, his son, and his grandson had their first birthday together." (Matthew P Wiener original) David Grabiner's answer: Sweden had no leap-year days from 1748 to 1788 in order to catch up with the Gregorian calendar without creating excessive trouble. (In many other countries, people found that their loans suddenly became due eleven days earlier.) Thus, the grandfather was born in Sweden on February 29, 1744; the other two were born outside Sweden on February 29, 1768 and 1788, and returned to Sweden before their fourth birthdays. [jeh comments: this is, as Matt said in his original posting, an obscure-calendar puzzle; and the net indicated that the calendar story may not be true anyway.] ----------------------------------------- Just too weird and/or random and/or silly for me: 2.17. A woman walks up to a door and knocks. Another woman answers the door. The woman outside kills the woman inside. (Geoff Hopcraft) 2.17. The woman outside is a psychotic librarian. The woman inside has an extremely overdue book. 2.17a. Variant answer: The woman outside is married and lived at the home in question. She misplaced her key, and the door was answered by her husband's lover. Though this answer would allow the question to be in section 1, it's really a much-less-interesting version of any of the adultery situation puzzles (or the KKK ones), and it seems to me that it would be a fairly obvious answer. Besides, this is no better or more interesting a situation than any other motive for murder. 2.59. A man is lying dead in a pool of blood and glass. (PRO) 2.59. The man caught a large fish and was so excited he went to a phone booth to call his wife. In trying to describe the size of the fish, he said, "It was THIS big!" and stretched his arms wide to indicate its length. His arms went through the sides of the phone booth, his wrists were sliced by broken glass, and he bled to death. [Variant from Bernd Wechner: A man makes a telephone call and dies. Answer: The man was ringing his wife, and learned from her that he had won the lottery. In jumping for joy he broke through the glass wall of the telephone booth and cut his wrists whereupon he bled to death.] [jeh: A lot of people seem to love this one, judging by how often it shows up on lists. I find it ridiculously implausible. I doubt I could break the glass wall of a phone booth by punching it, let alone by stupidly trying to stretch my arms wider than the enclosed space.] 2.60. The seals came up to do their show but immediately dove back into the water. (PRO) 2.60. The seals were frightened by an audience of nuns, who, to the seals, looked like a herd of killer whales. 1.17c. Rough sketch of variant: There were a mirror and a bottle on the table, and sawdust on the floor. He came in and dropped dead. Answer: He was a midget, but he wasn't aware of it, because the table used to be too high for him to see his reflection in the mirror, until someone shortened its legs. He was horrified by the discovery, and the shock killed him. (vaguely remembered by Ivan A Derzhanski, who adds that this would be best used as raw material for some elaboration. I agree; it's pretty implausible as is. I'm almost certain this is a misremembered version of the sawdust variant in which someone saws the table legs to make it look like the table is shorter, and the midget thinks he's growing.) ----------------------------------------- Confusing the map with the territory, or, call by reference: 2.22. In his own home a man watches as a woman dies, yet does nothing to save her. (MN) 2.22. He saw it happening on TV. [this could be an explanation for anything. "New York City is destroyed, but nobody cares." "A: It was in a movie."] 2.39. King Henry VIII is lying at the bottom of the stairs with a gash across his face. (PRO) 2.39. It is a painting of Henry VIII. 2.40. A man travels to twenty countries and stays in each country for a month. During this time he never sees the light of day. (PRO) 2.40. The man is a mummy, on tour to different museums throughout the world. [note similarity of type to "ship at bottom of sea" and "husband who'd blown his brains out."] ----------------------------------------- How to prove your audience are sexists or "stupid": 2.48. A boy and his father are injured in a car accident. Both are taken to a hospital. The father dies at arrival, but the boy lives and is taken to surgery. A grey-haired, bespectacled surgeon looks at the boy and says, "I cannot operate on this boy -- he's my son." (JV) 2.48. The surgeon is the boy's mother. 2.49. A husband coming home hears his wife call "Bill, don't kill me!". He walks in and finds his wife dead. Inside are a postman, a doctor, and a lawyer, none of whom the husband knows. The husband immediately realizes the postman killed his wife. (EMS; partial JM wording) 2.49. The postman is a man. The doctor and lawyer are women. Two trains run for a certain distance on the same track, in opposite directions. Why don't they collide? Answer: they run at different times. (from _Math for Girls_) This sort of puzzle (somewhat like the black-painted town one, but less interestingly) violates conversational maxims; you make it sound like the facts you're giving are relevant to each other, but they're not. Much like "Suzy and Ted get married, but never see each other" where the answer is that they don't get married *to each other*, they get married to other people at different times, and in fact don't know each other. Presenting two unrelated items in conjunction in this way implies (in normal conversation) that they're related, or at least relevant; no reasonably person will assume that they're not related. So they're not so much puzzles as tricks, ways to attempt to prove that your audience isn't as clever as you are. A lot of my section-2 items are in this general fool-the-audience category, but I'm growing disenchanted with them; I'm less likely to put new such items on my list these days. Baseball team A beats baseball team B ten to nothing, even though not a single man on team A scores a run. Answer: it's a women's team. Again, misleading use of the word "man" (along with societally-accurate assumptions about baseball teams -- there aren't that many women's baseball teams in America) combine to try to trick the audience. I much prefer puzzles that leave out information to puzzles that put in misleading information. ----------------------------------------- Need some work: 2.56. She said "I love you," and died. (EMS) 2.56. She was a circus performer who performed rope tricks. During one of them, she hung from the ceiling holding only a rope in her mouth. The other end of the rope was held by her husband. There's no motivation given for her choosing to do something so stupid; if anyone wants to twiddle this into a more reasonable question, please do. Q. A woman gets up, drives to town, buys a gun, and shoots her husband. A. The woman suspects her husband of cheating on her. She notes the mileage on the car each day. The previous night, hubby worked late at the office, but the mileage on the car is far greater than can be accounted for. (from Simon Travaglia) [jeh: This one could make a really nice puzzle, but has too many plotholes as it stands. Rework it sometime.] > >"He opens his mouth and she dies." (Ivan A Derzhanski) The male acrobat hangs from the ceiling and holds the female acrobat by his teeth. He drops her, and she breaks her spine. [jeh: again, this needs more of a real story for me to accept it.] Q. A man sees his wife, and later kills her A. The man sees his wife "performing" at a peep show. (from Simon Travaglia) ----------------------------------------- Miscellaneous others: 2.24. The telephone rang in the middle of the night and the woman woke up. When she answered it the caller hung up. The caller felt better. (Sasan Soltani) 2.24. It was a husband calling from overseas to see that his wife arrived home all right. Hanging up before three seconds elapse results in no charge to the calling party. He could not call person-to-person because the local operators did not speak English. [Dik Winter adds: This is rightly taken out. I know of no country where there is no charge if there is a connection, however small. In Europe you pay for at least 1 or 3 minutes, depending on the country.] "He comes home, undresses, turns the light off and goes to bed. After a few minutes he springs up and says, `There's a corpse under my bed!'" (Ivan A Derzhanski) He hears a watch tick under the bed. Why the watch has to be on the hand of someone (and if it is, he is obviously dead, because his breath is not heard) is left to the guessers' discretion. 2.27. A man called to a waiter in a restaurant, "There's a fly in my tea!" "I will bring you a fresh cup of tea," said the waiter. After a few moments, the man called out, "This is the same cup of tea!" How did he know? (PRO) 2.27. The man had already sugared his tea before sending it back. 2.28. A man drives over a broken glass bottle. He travels the last 100 miles of the Sahara 5000 roadrace with a flat tire. (EMS) 2.28. The flat tire is his spare. [Is this essentially the same mislead-the-reader type as the inadequate umbrella and the town painted black?] 2.35. A man was walking along some railroad tracks when he noticed that a train was coming. He ran toward the train before stepping aside. (RM) 2.35. The man was on a bridge, closer to the end the train was approaching from. This seems obvious to me, but maybe that's just me. 2.41. A man puts a quarter down, and leaves. (PRO) 2.41. The man has put a quarter of the cost of a new car into a down payment; he then drives away in the car. 2.44. A dish moves, a scientist makes a discovery. (MN) 2.44. The dish is a satellite dish. [A Petri(sp?) dish has also been suggested.] 2.45. An Arab sheikh tells his two sons that are to race their camels to a distant city to see who will inherit his fortune. The one whose camel arrives last will win. The brothers, after wandering aimlessly for days, ask a wise man for advise. After hearing the advice they jump on the camels and race as fast as they can to their destination. (PRO) 2.45. The wise man tells them to switch camels. 2.46. Two children born in the same hospital, in the same hour, day, and year, have the same mother and father, but are not twins. (Sasan Soltani) 2.46. The children are two of a set of triplets. [jeh wonders: is this fundamentally different from the inadequate umbrella or the black-painted town? Should all three be together on one list or the other?] 2.47. A couple will build a square house. In each wall they'll have a window, and each window will face north. (Sasan Soltani) 2.47. The house is at the south pole. This is much the same question as the age-old riddle asking what color a certain dead bear is. The man who built it didn't use it, the man who used it didn't want it, etc. [A: coffin.] Suggested as a sitpuz by Ed Wagner. [jeh: If I included this, I'd feel obliged to include every riddle I've ever heard.] 2.53. On an archeological dig, the frozen remains of a man and woman are found. Immediately, the archeologists realize that the remains are those of Adam and Eve. (EMS) 2.53. The two bodies lacked what only Adam and Eve would lack -- bellybuttons. Q: A woman gives a man a piece of food; he eats it and dies as a result. Although it's widely known that she did this, the woman is never brought to trial. A: The woman is Eve, the man Adam. (From _How Come_) 2.54. A man carrying an attache case full of $20 bills falls on the way to the bank and is never seen again. (PRO) 2.54. The man falls off the river bank and drowns. [There's no reason this answer is any better than "The man falls in the street and gets mangled by a train" or any other horrible death. I'm sure the word "bank" was meant to have a double meaning, but with this phrasing it doesn't.] >From klkarp@remus.rutgers.edu Mon Dec 17 22:04:57 1990 Date: Mon, 17 Dec 90 22:07:25 EST (Karen Karp) 4) A guy is trapped in a room with a bed, a calender, a saw and a table. There are no windows or doors (except a vent to breathe if you get technical). How does the guy live and finally escape?? 4) He eats dates from the calender, drinks water from the springs in the bed and saws the table in half, 2 halves make a whole and he escapes out the hole. [This one's just silly. A fun riddle, but not guessable.] from Joe Kincaid: A man is found dead at his work table. The investigating policeman looks the scene over and immediately declares it to be murder. The man is a blind hemophiliac who *always* keeps his work table in precise order because of his condition(s). When he reached for his awl, it was turned upside-down and he impaled his hand on it. Being a hemophiliac, he bled to death. This couldn't happen by accident. [jeh: I suppose this *could* happen in real life; but it seems to me that it *could* happen by accident. Perhaps this is no less plausible than the "blind midget"-type puzzles; I'm ambivalent about it. But I'm leaving it out for now.] From: Ivan A Derzhanski Date: Thu, 27 Feb 92 15:03:19 GMT Historical note: The oldest "situation puzzle" (well, kind of) I know of is described in the Maqamat of Al-Hariri. It is actually a puzzle for lawyers, and it goes like this: "A man (X) had a brother (B), and his wife had a brother (WB) too. All of them were free Muslims by birth. When X died, all he left went to WB; B got nothing. How can thbis be lawful?" Solution: "X had married his son (S) to his mother-in-law (WM). S died, but left a son, who turned out to be a brother of X's wife (being a son of her mother, WM), but at the same time he is a grandson of X, and the grandson, as a direct descendant, has more rights to the heritage than the brother." Date: Sat, 17 Nov 1990 03:14:00 -0500 From: msb@sq.com (Mark Brader) By the way, this one reminds me of the Isaac Asimov story where an agent is shot and gives the dying clue "the blind man". I think that might have been the title, too, I don't remember. The solution: the cover role of the enemy agent who shot him was a repairman, and he got admission to the premises to fix a broken window blind. 1.35. A policeman follows a burglar into a bar. When he enters the bar he finds two similar-looking men, dressed alike, with the loot between them. After several minutes he arrests one of the men. (PRO, from "Which is Which?" by Isaac Asimov; partial JM wording) 1.35. Both men were wearing glasses. The burglar, however, was wearing photosensitive sunglasses; the policeman noticed them changing shade and realized the man must have just entered. A sort-of situation puzzle which is the plot of Robert Heinlein's story "All You Zombies," posted by someone named Mike: The story begins: A man walks into a bar. He talks to the old man behind the bar. He asks if a particular person is in the bar. The bartender points to a young man at the back of the bar. The man says something to the young man and they both walk out of the bar, hop into a time machine, and vanish in a poof of smoke. The story ends: The young man (who is now older) walks into the very same bar, talks to, apparently, the very same bartender, and leaves with, apparently, the very same young man and the whole process starts over again. Now, you might be able to figure out who the man and the young man are, but can you tell me who the old man the bartender is?????????? [JEH: the basic idea is that they're all the same person; there's also a sex change and self-impregnation involved. I can't imagine that it could possibly make a good situation puzzle -- seems to me that would be like saying "There's a guy with a harpoon and a white whale" with the puzzle being to derive Moby Dick.] Q: They killed him with love. A: If I remember, this was the one where a couple who are out camping has sex away from their cabin in woods, near someone else's tent; a bear is attracted to the spot, and mauls and kills the person in the tent. I think my skepticism over this was the idea that it was the smell of their having sex that attracted the bear -- I'm not convinced any of the smells involved would carry far, nor that they would attract a bear even if the bear smelled 'em. ...I suppose the bear could be attracted by noise instead (or would bears be scared away by noise?). 1.62. A man needs an artificial skin and artificial lungs, though he has not been in an accident or sick in any way. (Nev King original.) 1.62. He's a SCUBA diver. (section 2?) (Mark Isaak suggests that the man needs them for someone else, to deliver to a hospital. Seems too prosaic/obvious.) [But I don't think tanks do the same thing as lungs; can you really call them artificial lungs?] Q: King Henry VIII gave his wife a bottomless container to put flesh and blood in. What did he give her? A: A ring. A great riddle, but I don't think it'd be a good sitpuz.