Journal mekkab's Journal: Puzzles, games and homework 7
SO blah blah blah, I don't like SuDoKu. I have no smarmy comments on how its teh dumbxx0rz or how its adherents are the lamxxz0rz... (if you came here looking for that, I apologize and admit that I'm slipping) infact on paper it would seem that "this would be right up my alley." A puzzle? With numbers? Sounds cool.
But it leaves me cold. Which is too bad. Because The WashPost has an enormous "funny dog comic" section (Big ups to "Mutts" and Hillary Price's "Rhymes with Orange") and SuDoKu features prominently. Even the Jumbles aren't enough.
So imagine my surprise when I came upon Terry Stickles Sticklers... which was just a thinly veiled Algebra problem!
"What positive number has a square who, when subtracted from its double, equals 24?" Man, did that make me miss grammar school. I'm not sure if that is better than SuDoKu, or far, far worse. But for what its worth, I did it anyway.
Then while getting my haircut today, my barbzardrist(strong bad link left as an exercise for the reader) asked me for some help on her kids homework (one of those "you have a week off from school, so do some work!" packets). There was a relatively easy one: "find 5 three digit numbers, between 300 and 600, where the middle digit is odd, the first and last digits are even, and the sum of the digits is 13." Simple enough. (and it only took a little while before I realized the pattern...)
But here comes the hubris part; there was another puzzle; 5 names, 5 cars. By process of elimination, determine who drives what cars. I believe there were 4 clues.
BUT I TOTALLY READ WAAAAAY too far into it! Like, the first clue had "Yesterday, Church and Stanley went to lunch with a guy who had a silver car.", the last clue had "Stanley has a dull car colour" (gray), and the second clue had " A gray and a red car drove past Stevens house yesterday"
So I link all those together and say "A ha! Those TWO cars were on their way to lunch with the silver car guy, and they MUST have driven past Stavens house, and Stanley has a gray car, Thus Church drives a Saturn! Err, I mean the RED car!"*
*This would be a totally valid conclusion for an LSAT logic games test puzzle. They really have a thing about Saturns.
But this was not an LSAT question. This was a first graders homework.
After a couple of other answers didn't add up, I realized "Oh, none of these clues are temporally/causally connected. Infact each clue is just ' this name does/doesn't have this colour car. figure it out.'
I tipped extra on the haircut so she wouldn't tell anyone about that.
You should've given it a Pynchon twist (Score:2)
And we know that his father was dead for twenty years and loved that same late model Cadillac. So it must have been Mike because Sam told him this information before he gutted himself like a fish!!!
*blank stares*
What, this isn't a suicide dream sequence homework?
Paint outside the lines, freedom! My monitor only gets RWB!!
wait wait wait... (Score:2)
But you must like Sudoku... like us. Like one of us.
One of us.
One of us.
Re:wait wait wait... (Score:2)
i don't like sodoku, either.
it's like a numbers crossword puzzle where all the clues are the same.
In short, it's not even math, it's counting.
I learned that in grade school.
I suck at crossword puzzles, but i love them. I'm not bad at soduku, but i hate it.
Right there with you[nt] (Score:2)
Re:Right there with you[nt] (Score:2)
Re:Right there with you[nt] (Score:2)
Re:wait wait wait... (Score:2)
If they want to hook kids on it they should use 9 Pokemon characters who form lines up and down and can only have one of themselves in each square-section-thingy, otherwise they need to hammer the