325-Lateral Thinking Puzzles

Futility Closet

Greg Ross

History

4.8 • 748 Ratings

🗓️ 28 December 2020

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Here are eight new lateral thinking puzzles -- play along with us as we try to untangle some perplexing situations using yes-or-no questions.

Intro:

In 1940, the Venezuelan post office was said to deliver love letters at half price.

In 1890 Mark Twain composed a holiday message for the New York World.

The sources for this week's puzzles are below. In a few places we've included links to further information -- these contain spoilers, so don't click until you've listened to the episode:

Puzzle #1 is from Agnes Rogers' 1953 book How Come? A Book of Riddles, sent to us by listener Jon Jerome.

Puzzle #2 is from listener Cheryl Jensen, who sent this link.

Puzzle #3 is from listener Neil de Carteret and his cat Nala.

Puzzle #4 is from listener Ananth Viswanathan.

Puzzle #5 is from Dan Lewis' Now I Know e-newsletter. Here are two links.

Puzzle #6 is from Greg. Here's a link.

Puzzle #7 is from Sharon. Here are two links.

Puzzle #8 is from Greg. Here's a link.

You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on Google Podcasts, on Apple Podcasts, or via the RSS feed at https://futilitycloset.libsyn.com/rss.

Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- you can choose the amount you want to pledge, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation on the Support Us page of the Futility Closet website.

Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode.

If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [email protected]. Thanks for listening!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Futility Closet Podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history.
0:14.9	Visit us online to sample more than 11,000 quirky curiosities from Hawaiian dollars to Mark Twain's holiday message. This is episode
0:23.1	325. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. This is another special episode of lateral thinking
0:29.8	puzzles, where one of us will describe a strange sounding situation and the other has to try
0:34.7	to work out what's going on by asking yes or no questions.
0:38.0	Thanks very much to everyone who's been sending in puzzles for us to try.
0:41.4	We can always use more, so please keep sending them to podcast at futilitycloset.com.
0:46.6	And we'll be back next week with another dose of quirky history and another lateral thinking puzzle.
1:00.4	This is another puzzle from the book,
1:05.7	How Come a Book of Riddles by Agnes Rogers from 1953 that John Jerome had sent to us?
1:08.2	And we discussed it in episode 306.
1:13.3	This puzzle was very mildly edited by me, and yes, it is another fatal puzzle,
1:20.1	but Rogers did warn us that her puzzles tend to be so. William Bly became obsessed with the idea of getting rid of his wife, Sophie. One night they went to the movies to see a horror film.
1:25.7	In the scariest part of the picture, when people in the audience were screaming in terror,
1:30.1	William stabbed his wife fatally.
1:32.6	When the picture was over, he took her out exactly as he had brought her in,
1:36.4	and nobody suspected that anything untoward had happened.
1:40.1	How come?
1:41.3	Is his name significant?
1:42.5	At first, I thought you were talking about...
1:44.1	That's just, that doesn't mean anything.
1:45.2	No, yeah.
	...

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