Lateral thinking puzzles to which the answer is “He is dreaming”
Andrew has no wings and no flying machine, but he is quite capable of flying over England. how is this possible?
Gerald has had nothing to eat or drink for twenty days, yet he is still alive and feels no discomfort. How is this possible?
A man is locked in a room with no windows and no doors, but within five minutes he is roaming free in the woods. How is this possible?
Winston's hamster is singing the entirity of La Traviata. How is this possible?
Charles has gone to work in only his underpants. How is this possible?
Percy's sister has transformed into a sideboard. She tries to speak, but her voice is made of baked beans. Her hat is Napoleon. How is this possible?
Donald has been arrested by the Sheriff of the Sausages. Although he is imprisoned in a filing cabinet, his legs are in Switzerland. When he tries to run away, he finds himself on the set of The Likely Lads. How is this possible?
Who Should I Vote For?
Who Should You Vote For? has been garnering a lot of attention the last couple of days, in the sort of gentle, five-minute-distraction way that you'd expect.
But all political "What kind of biscuit is my ideal girlfriend?" quizzes suffer from the same problem. Asked how I think we should balance the economy, run a fair and effective education system and provide free healthcare for 61 million people, my instinct is to feign a migraine and go and have a lie down. I try to keep as politically well-informed as possible, but that just makes me aware of how little clue I have about what we should do about anything. I suspect that if people weren't so inclined to assume their opinion is always the best one, this would be the majority view.
To me, voting for the party that best fits my ill-informed reckons seems like picking the doctor most likely to tell me my headaches really are that brain tumour I've been worrying about. The last thing I want is for Parliament to do exactly what I would do if I were in charge. If I were in charge I'd bum everything up. I can barely butter a slice of toast without ruining the NHS and causing at least two major diplomatic incidents.
I don't want to choose leaders based on what they'll do; I want to choose them based on why they'll do it. That's a matter of principles, of course, and that's a well-established political line. It's also a demand for evidence-based policy – one of those phrases that sounds very clever until you think about the alternative. I don't have time to work out how to save the economy, straighten out democracy, stop climate change and make the NHS work. That's what politicians are for.
Unfortunately, this split doesn't run so clearly across party lines, and it's much harder to judge from policies and manifestos – you can reach any position irrationally. I'll try to work out who I can trust in all sorts of ways – in between plotting complicated graphs about tactical voting, judging my local candidates' haircuts and coming to terms with the fact my vote won't make any difference – but Who Should You Vote For? will just have me supporting a party who looks for their mobile while they're talking on it and tries to put cereal away in the fridge.
Quantifiability
I really like running.
It's not the sort of thing I should like, really. Of all the popular forms of exercise, it may be the least interesting: you go outside, you move as fast as you can manage for as long as you can manage, and then you go home. Sticky.
But that simplicity is one of the joys. If you've grasped a few basic rules for comfortable running - don't look at your feet, keep your body straight, don't wear clogs - you barely have to worry about form, or skill, or any kind of practical applicability.
Despite this, I found running very hard to stick to. I would run regularly for a couple of weeks, and then decide the time was better spent scrambling eggs and buttering muffins. The fact is that the quantifiable rewards of going for runs are a long way off. As always, Charlie Brooker has it spot on:
Take joggers. They weren't born with a pre-programmed desire to jog. No. One day they decided they'd like to get fit, and chose to sacrifice their immediate comfort in favour of delayed gratification: they got off the sofa and jogged themselves slim. Every jogger is essentially a clairvoyant. They've transcended the shackles of contemporary subsistence and risen above the likes of you and me, to witness a vision of the future so captivating it blocks out the pain of the present, so enticing, they're literally compelled to run towards it.
There is more joy to running than that, but only if you can muster the motivation to do it in the first place. Luckily, I played far too many computer games as a child, so if there's a number somewhere that measures my performance I have the irrepressible need to make it increase.
I downloaded an Android app called RunStar (other apps are available) to convert my qualitative jogger's smugness into hard numerical fact, and the motivational gains are enormous. My phone knows if I've gone running. It knows how long I ran for. It knows how fast I went. It counts of the miles I've run against an entirely arbitrary goal. It probably knows whether I exchanged awkward/smug smiles with the other joggers I passed. These are little electronic feathers tickling the part of my brain that used to strive for cheat-earning times on Goldeneye.
I'm sure it's important to keep in mind why you want to do something. But I'm increasingly finding that raw, untwistable quantifiable data is the best possible motivation. I haven't yet worked out if that's because my mind wasn't evolved for smartphones and assumes anything with that much knowledge must be judging me, or if it's because I'm childishly in thrall to high-score tables. But either way, I get to enjoy runs through the park during the golden hour, so I'm happy to surrender myself to the numbers. And I'm sure there are other places grim cyber-counting could improve me, too.
Adrian Sanders on Tittle-Tattle; or, Look What I Made Out Of This Molehill
Radio 4 is a wonderful station to wake up to: you never know if you’re going to get hard-hitting political discussion or Evan Davis attempting to play Bohemian Rhapsody on the paper and comb. But if you can’t get it on FM, there are severe downsides. If you’re up late, or you leave the radio on, there’s a very real risk you’ll end up listening to the Daily Service. And, worse still, your morning will be rudely interrupted by Yesterday in Parliament, a mere five minutes of which is enough to make even the most optimistic among us break down in hot, salt tears over the way our elected representatives behave.
Normally the awfulness is simply that many of the people we have sort-of chosen to serve us think that shouting ‘YAAAAAAH!’ at every possible opportunity is a valuable contribution to democracy. This morning, I caught an exchange that nicely captured some of the more nuanced ways of being a useless tit that Westminster has to offer. It starts about an hour into this video, if your setup is deemed suitable by the PICTsies, and there’s a handy transcript on Richard Taylor’s blog.
The discussion centres on Adrian Sanders’ belief that local websites can’t fulfil some of the functions of local newspapers because ‘Most of what’s online is [...] tittle tattle’. Now clearly, that's a ludicrous opinion, and I think Sion Simon's response to it – utter stupefaction coupled with insistence that ‘that’s a ridiculous view’ – is just about the only possible one. It’s troubling that an elected leader should be so hopelessly out of touch with the modern world, and revealing that Sanders thinks online voices perfectly respectable so long as they are his. But there are plenty of people lined up to defend online media and to demonstrate how much of print media really is nothing more than ‘tittle-tattle’, so I’ll lay that aside. Because, as is so often the case when we say something stupid, what really troubles me isn’t what he said, but how he said it.
Not only does Sanders fail to offer any justification at all for his opinion, he seems entirely untroubled by any sense that his opinions require justification. His first remark about Stoke on Trent’s Pits n Pots is simply ‘But it’s not news, it’s just tittle tattle’: to Sanders, this isn’t even a matter for discussion. It’s an accepted fact because Adrian Sanders has declared it so. When asked if he’s read it, he has nothing more to say than ‘No’, in a manner so dismissive Taylor feels he has to gloss it. And just to top it off, when challenged on his summary judgement he thinks that all he needs to offer as justification is ‘It’s a website’, in a tone so patronizingly self-assured he sounds like an nine year old pointing out that Ellie must be wrong because she’s a girl.
His absurd opinion isn’t really that important: the world of local reporting will go one way or it will go another, and besides, he sounds so bored by the whole affair I’d be surprised if he can even muster the will to tittle-tattle about it on his MySpace profile. But it’s suggestive of a dangerous arrogance, a belief that because the people of Torbay voted him in four years ago, his opinions have been granted some special weight.
No. Of course a representative system requires MPs to make decisions and form opinions for themselves, but they have a duty to do so using evidence and reason, not merely gut instinct. A gander at Sanders’ TheyWorkForYou page suggests that I probably agree with a lot of the decisions he makes, but if he doesn’t make those decisions in the right way – if he makes them the same way he made his decision about Pits n Pots – then that’s just good luck and he could stuff everything up at any moment. Hopefully, unlike the Widdecombes of this world, he acts in a more thoughtful and considered fashion when he’s dealing with matters of greater import; sadly, his thought processes are inscrutable unless he makes a habit of displays like yesterday. Projects like Skeptical Voter attempt to examine how well political actions line up with the real world, but even when the wiki is more complete it’ll be naturally limited. Sanders, for example, supported MMR vaccination – but he also supported NHS homeopathy, so why should we believe the former position was any more based on fact than the latter?¹
We need our politicians to be honest about what they believe, to avoid the kind of timid positioning that leaves people thinking there’s nothing to choose between. But we also need them to acknowledge that they have a duty to educate and inform themselves, to form those beliefs based on evidence about the real world and to demonstrate to us that they are capable of doing so. Anything less reduces our votes to a throw of the dice.
1: Skeptical Voter tends towards concerns like medicine, creationism and so on where clashes about evidence-based politics are common, but the principle certainly applies more broadly.
Apis Clue-Writing Competition: ASSASSIN
Hot on the heels of PROPELLING, it’s ASSASSIN! You don’t want an assassin hot on your heels. Luckily this isn’t actually hot on anything’s heels.
I’m not even going to bother with @ndrew_Taylor this week. His entry was insipid and uninspired and you can look it up for yourself. His namesake compensated with a bit of surrealism and some unusual wordplay:
A swan’s standing at the north pole, in Booth
@frizfrizzle was a little more down to earth:
Top assistant doubles in fatal fashion
Kilbey just went for all-out literalism. He’s a busy man and he doesn’t have time for your nonsense.
Villain who is, at heart, classed as evil
Elegant! But perhaps not as elegant as @apaultaylor’s fine effort:
Ignoring initial pass, a spade is returned by North – ‘one down’ is usually the result of his contracts
That’s a pretty good clue even if you don’t love bridge as much as Paul does. But it hasn’t taken the prize, and only partly because I wanted to punish his disgusting self-assurance. Mainly, it’s because another cleverly-defined clue, simple though it was, tickled me more:
First ask setter’s sister’s approval; second, send Interflora narcissi: he might take you out (@miche)
I assume, given it’s in the third person, that the setter in question is supposed to be me rather than Miche, which means it’s slightly flawed – I don’t have a sister and I’m not available – but also raises the interesting point that this clue wouldn’t work nearly as well in a different context. Miche wins a copy of Day of the Jackal, just as soon as I’ve found one cheap enough or got a job.
Apis Clue-Writing Competition: PROPELLING
It seems nobody has bothered to complete the last round-up’s very special crossword. I suppose I’ll keep my nonagons to myself.
Entries from spurious accounts are really starting to rival real ones. @Andrew_Taylor suggested a possible reason:
I think that's because 'propelling' is a ridiculous word to clue.
The nail is suffering from severe concussion. But of course, those of you dedicated enough to participate overcame that problem admirably. And because cryptic crosswords naturally attract people who follow a certain kind of lifestyle, this week’s entries were all about sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll.
Sex
Leg and lip involved in dirty porn? Encouraging! (@extraperson)
ejaculating head of penis, thrust with love inside arsehole (@ndrew_taylor)
As is apparently traditional, the filthy clues came from Fake People.
Drugs
Pushing proposition 50, about ecstasy, with endless jargon (@Andrew_Taylor)
Topical! Sort of.
Rock ’n’ Roll
Pushing for sound, keeping measure (@stecks)
Alas, Katie was determined to ruin my already slightly strained presentation and offered a different final submission:
Sending for pin, left leg broken
Apparently it came to her in a dream. That’s how much she hates effective competition round-up paradigms. It’s a sickness. But at least she tried! Not like these jokers.
Driving forwards with two consecutive changes of direction could make decent circle (@apaultaylor)
Paul passed his driving test not long ago. I assume this was a celebration.
US currency taken out of support for literacy? Onwards! @frizfrizzle
A noble sentiment, perhaps, but even if I had wanted to give Friz the prize two weeks in a row his definition was a bit dodgy.
Taking off string lines in table (as in, not tennis?) (Kilbey)
And so, with a somewhat ropey connection, we come to our winner, nobly submitted by my dad:
Pushing or pulling? Sounds like you should go for rope
Dad’s tidy clue also offers valuable advice to all of us, although I’m not really sure how a rope helps with pushing. He wins a mechanical pencil. He might feel a bit shortchanged, but frankly you shouldn’t expect a decent prize in a week when the theme is ‘pencils’.
This week’s competition word – by which, thanks to my laxity, I mean ‘last week’s competition word’, is ASSASSIN, but you don’t really need to know that because it’s far too late to do anything about it. More usefully, this week’s is MARRY. And that’s much nicer.
Seeing Green
Being red-green colour blind hasn’t proved a terribly crushing disability. Sometimes I wear the wrong trousers, but it’s never led to me robbing a museum. And I did have a nifty story about haircuts before everyone I’ve ever met had already heard it twice over. But there are occasional frustrations.
Taps are the most common. Tap manufacturers have a compulsion towards symmetry that might just be medical, and distinguishing between hot and cold ruins that. And for what? Nothing more than enabling the basic functionality of taps! Sadly, customers lack the fine aesthetic sensibilities of tap designers, and simply aren’t willing to get frostbite waiting for the cold tap to run hot for the sake of beauty.
Luckily, I am on hand to save the day. The designers have done all they can, shrinking the indicator to a pinhead-sized coloured dot or a millimetre-thick ring of red or blue, but it’s just not the same. But for me, it’s the perfect solution: perfect, indistinguishable symmetry at a glance, and the ability to pick the right tap after only a minor amount of squinting, peering and going to get a torch. It’s like magic; a special magic activated by eye-strain and frustration.
Troublesomely, you don’t get much out of shining a torch on an LCD panel.
It’s very difficult for me to pick out the link in that text. That happens sometimes, but in this case it looks like Brizzly has intentionally opted to use Ocean Grey and Military Grey. If I added up the time I’ve spent clicking on the bit of that text that isn’t actually a link, I’d probably have, ooh, fifteen seconds of my life back. I could have played with a kitten in that time. I could have tied my shoelaces. I could have slapped Ann Widdecombe and Jon Gaunt.
Really, though, that’s no more irritating than all the other design issues that plague the web like a mild sniffle, and they might even tweak it if I moaned about it directly. But this really annoyed me:
Of course, it’s only right and proper that online adverts should lie and mislead. Those monkeys aren’t going to punch themselves. But this is something else. It’s putting in a fine bid for the position of Thing That Has Annoyed Me Most About Being Colour Blind, against stiff competition from being asked what colour random objects are and my brothers writing ‘MARK IS AN IDIOT’ in red felt tip and scribbling over it in green. Sadly, I have to disqualify it, because it’s really only annoying because it’s stupid and cynical. And it’s just as stupid and cynical however good your colour vision.
I am annoyed that there’s no way for me to know what the number is, though; however hard I strain, I can’t pick out a number. I suppose that’s why they test with these things. Do let me know in the comments! (I’m assuming they used a real one; I'm sure more people click when they know the answer.)
Apis Clue-Writing Competition: APOLLO
This week’s submissions were so good I felt I had to do something special in celebration. So here it is.
Across
3. Paps follow undressed Muse frontman (6)
5. God who fathered a confused @apisclues? (6)
7. Rocky’s opponent has absence of faith in God (6)
8. Learner in a Volkswagen killed the python (6)
Down
1. naked greek bumlord is extremely lustful, covered in a poo (6)
2. A survey? O God! (6)
4. Parallel parking in a waste of space was this programme’s objective (6)
6. Last of ambrosia dollop finally licked off upstanding, gorgeous young man (6)
I’ll give you five or ten minutes to run off a copy and solve those delightful and varied clues.
All done? Lovely. The first completed grid drawn on Friday 13th November will win a nonagon. I don’t know quite how you draw a grid on a date. Answers on a week, please.
Let’s begin with the disqualified ones. @ndrew_Taylor’s 1 down snatched the opportunity to use the phrase ‘naked greek bumlord’ again. I would complain that he’s proving to be something of a one-trick pony, but as that’s the whole purpose of his existence it would seem a little harsh. Still, as there was a slot to fill in the grid I thought I’d better show that you can be A Bit Rude without resorting to poo jokes and homophobic slurs. 6 down is disqualified because it really wouldn’t be appropriate for me to award myself the prize even if I thought I deserved it.
Disappointingly – and I say ‘disappointingly’ because Ann Widdecombe would approve – not all of the clues were so sex-obsessed. In fact, they revealed either a very wide knowledge of Apollo or a dogged persistence with Wikipedia.
My dad pitched in with 8 across, recording both Apollo’s bold slaying of Python and as his own bold slaying of a Polo driver who once cut him up. He must have passed on his love of Greek legend, because my brothers had titbits of their own. @Andrew_Taylor (5 across) pushed the boundaries of Twitter-based cryptic cluing by producing a lovely anagram of Apollo’s son Asclepius which assumed we would ignore the @. His uncouth namesake would not approve. @apaultaylor’s entry (3 across) took a more conventional approach, and with great success, but much to Widdecombe’s chagrin I was unable to get the image of a naked Matt Bellamy being pursued by disembodied breasts. You can’t give that a prize. Besides, I still haven’t posted off his Parma Violets.
@stecks apparently didn’t feel the need to show off fancy-pants mythical minutiae, giving us a 2 down that concisely captures the feeling evoked by an approaching clipboard and tops it off by cryptically directing its readers to the Greek god Apollo. Kilbey (4 down), on the other hand, has only the faintest idea of who the Ancient Greeks were but really likes Tom Hanks films. Trust me, I lived next to him for a year. He used to talk to a volleyball. More to the point, he spotted the same scatological opportunity that served @ndrew_Taylor so well: truly, he walks among giants.
But even when it goes down to points, there can only be one winner. @frizfrizzle’s 7 across might have been phrased more elegantly, but it was clever and it made me chuckle to myself on two separate occasions. This week, that’s apparently what was required; who know what my whimsical tastes may demand for your clues for PROPELLING? One thing we can be sure of is that unless some of you start making the effort to be a bit more rubbish, it’ll be a sticky one to judge.
Friz wins a natty Apollo 11 patch and the right to make a tedious ‘One small step...’ joke in the comments.
Apis Clue-Writing Competition: VIOLET
An interesting note on the distinction between violet and purple: in the strictest sense, ‘violet’ refers only to the shades we perceive at the short extreme of the visible spectrum, while ‘purple’ refers to shades produced by a mixture of red and blue (or, indeed, red and violet) light. As such, I immediately disqualified all entries which used ‘purple’ as their definition.
That’s a half-truth. I did disqualify all those entries, but only because there was only one of them and it was from the fragile and fictional mind of @ndrew_taylor:
cattle-person bumming trannie turns purple
Kilbey kept things spectral with his first contribution:
Duck wearing disgusting shirt found at rainbow's end?
It’s a beautiful image, isn’t it? But apparently the joys of absurdity just don’t do it for Paul, so he settled on this rather elegant number:
A shade agressive, having forgotten name
I think this clue stems from the time I called him Vincent and then punched him in the gut.
The most colourful creation was @miche’s:
Olive, the original blended hue
I’m not sure Miche’s history of Dulux is strictly accurate, but it certainly makes for a nice, taut clue.
Of course, there are more exciting ways to clue VIOLET as a colour. @frizfrizzle snatched up the one I was hoping someone would go for:
Royalty takes colourful detour through rented house, we hear
There’s a lot to like about this clue, but it doesn’t follow the rules. The definition part isn’t really a definition: ‘Royalty takes colourful’ gestures towards VIOLET but it isn’t explicit enough to be fair. Essentially, the problem is that Friz hasn’t wasted enough of his life solving cryptic crosswords to internalise the conventions properly. Of course, the ALL-POWERFUL SPREADSHEET will have him in its grasp soon enough, and then he’ll be a force to be reckoned with.
@Andrew_Taylor’s definition was a little more obscure. Or, possibly, less obscure but also less well established.
I love T-Mobile for their brand colour
That’s pretty excellent. But I slightly preferred my other brother’s faintly wistful offering:
Is it vain to remember this girl?
I have to admit, I couldn’t work this one out, but that, too, was @apaultaylor’s fault: he long ago replaced that old mnemonic in my head with the far superior ‘Rake out your garden before invading Venus’ – which I genuinely used to recall the order of the spectrum when composing the week’s clues. This is the sort of clue I love – utterly confounding until you solve it, and thereafter fantastically satisfying.
Paul wins a packet of Parma Violets from the very exciting new sweetshop in Cambridge.
This week’s competition word is APOLLO, and I really hope someone I know less well wins because this is starting to look a bit dodgy.
Cancelling My Subscription
I've bought Private Eye enough times over the last few years that it would certainly have been worth my while to subscribe. And it seems like every fortnight they publish some stupid inanity like this.
In the past, it's usually at least seemed like the unpleasant collateral damage from the Eye's scattergun journalism: they run with everything even slightly dodgy they can find, and so uncover the bad at the cost of occasionally looking like a bunch of petty, unimaginative tits. There's something noble about that – or perhaps not noble, but something altogether more useful. It's captured by the name of the magazine, and it's the reason Hislop spends so much of his time defending libel cases.
But this is such self-parody it would be better placed in the Eye's back pages than its front. It takes the usual tenuous, unfounded accusation of self-interest – the disfigured heart of many a Private Eye column inch – and gives it that magic sprinkling of satiric absurdity. The reasons that the cabinet is mostly made up of white ex-public schoolboys are exactly the same as the reasons that high-up positions in the media – or in law, or in medicine – are dominated by white ex-public schoolboys. So no, it isn't a coincidence, and that's surely the point?
The funny thing is, I don't think this would annoy me at all if it weren't for that irritating little Private Eye 'er'. That tiny syllable, nestled away safely between its commas, is apparently the Eye's way of making it's stupid accusations without acknowledging how ridiculous they are. If the point was made outright, it would show off its own silliness. But more revealingly, if that little 'er' were taken away, the last sentence would magically transform into a supporting case for Viner's point.
I shall be taking out a subscription and cancelling it immediately.