Goodness gracious me — we now find ourselves a whopping 2/3 of the way through this mega-mini-series of blogs documenting my chum John’s build of a LEGO Ultimate A-Wing Starfighter model from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.
As I’ve mentioned before — and as I’ll doubtless mention again — in order to extract the maximum amount of pleasure, gratification, and satisfaction out of this model, John is stretching the 570 instructions out into a 30-day build by implementing only 19 instructions a day (thereby demonstrating that he’s got way more willpower than your humble narrator).
Accompanying today’s photo, John uttered the following immortal words as a feast for our orbs: “That’s that side done then.” I mean to say, you can’t argue with logic like this. The man is practically a Zen Master.
John continued to enlighten me as follows: “There are some very clever ways of taking portions of the design that were constructed separately and attaching them to the main body, including a ball-and-socket and a small rod pushed through some LEGO pieces with a hole in them. Some of this construction is quite tricky; indeed, the folks at LEGO have made this an 18+ piece. At the beginning of next week, we will be sorting out the other side of the front. Have a good weekend everyone.”
Before I forget, in our Day 19 build blog, my chum Charles asked the question, what do the words Assess, Banana, Dresser, Grammar, Potato, Revive, Uneven, and Voodoo have in common? The answer is that if you take the first letter of each word and move it to the end of that word, it makes the words read backwards perfectly, if you see what I mean. I would never have spotted that.
Charles also asked why the number 8,549,176,320 is unique. The answer is that if you write each of the digits as words, you’ll see they are arranged in alphabetical order (eight, five, four, nine, one…).
For your delectation and delight, Charles informs me that he discovered these conundrums on the “Brain Teaser” portion of the Pedagonet.com site to which he has subscribed.
But wait, there’s more, because — having had his curiosity tweaked by the aforementioned posers — my chum Aubrey Kagan asks the following question: “What do the words polish, job, and herb have in common?”
Over to you. Can you crack this complementary conundrum without resorting to Google?
Max
i loved the palindromic variation of the first puzzle, but since the butler has returned with my curmudgeon pants let express my displeasure with the second puzzle. There is no intrinsic “magic” in it. It is merely the sort of question that shows up in brain teasers which require you to be culturally aware and have a particular frame of mind, often improved by practice. The number used and the answer is only valid in English speaking countries, and only those who refer to the 0 as a zero and not a “nought” or “oh”. And the alphabetic ordering, although initiated long ago, is an illogical listing of the symbols we call letters. Why couldn’t the number be created using the sequencing of a QWERTY layout?
by the way, did you know there used to be 27 letters in the English implementation of the alphabet. The 27th letter was the ampersand &. See here ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand)
in a similar vein, I frown on the idea of Pi day, when large swathes of the world use the date before the month.
you may find the following set of brain teasers interesting, but only inasmuch as they require cultural awareness as well as general knowledge
http://www.puzzledepot.com/trivia/trivia01.shtml
this argument is used to counter iq tests as well.
now you kids, get off my lawn!
You have a butler?
You own a pair of curmudgeon pants?
You can’t have one without the other.
I’ve never lived in Canada
“require cultural awareness as well as general knowledge” and a level of senseless geekiness that you and I have.
I think I was once measured at 165 on the senselessness scale and I’m sure I could top 175 on the geekiness meter 🙂
For a Brit, that is quite the accomplishment!
Ah, but I didn’t say if I was using metric or imperial units (see “How to Measure Things Like a Canadian” (https://www.clivemaxfield.com/how-to-measure-things-like-a-canadian/)
Actually — I just now realized that the title of that column could be taken multiple ways — I’m certainly not advocating that people randomly go up to Canadians in the street and start measuring them (not least that you don’t know where they’ve been)!
Careful, my wife is Canadian. I showed her that post and she only felt that others around the world are not sophisticated enough to mix units when appropriate.
My two uncles and two aunts and numerous cousins are Canadian — so I don’t feel bad about poking a little fun at them 🙂
Have you seen the Netflix series, Sisters? Sounds like you may need a DNA test.
I haven’t seen that — but I heard there’s a film — I think it’s on Netflix — called “The Thirteenth Floor” that sounds as though it could be worth looking at.