I was out in California not long ago and I saw somebody doing something that I hadn't seen done in a long time.

Something I used to do during college, at a necessity.

What do you think it was?

Go ahead, think about it.

Now, I posted this riddle on the Freakonomics blog.

You want to hear some of the answers I got?

Okay, here we go.

Eating ramen noodles.

Using a phone book, hanging wet laundry on a clothesline, inserting a floppy disk.

Those are all perfectly fine answers, but not what I'm looking for.

How is the killer?

Jason, what are we watching here?

This is the beginning of Texas Chancel & Oscar where these kids are going to...

This is a graveyard and they pick up a pretty scraggly looking hitchhiker.

They make hitches.

Jason Ziniman is a theater critic for The New York Times and he's the author of a book called Shock Value,

which is about the horror films of the 1970s.

So, in this movie, a van full of teenagers decide after some debate to pick up a hitchhiker.

He just got off his shift at the slaughterhouse, so his face is streaked with blood and he's talking about bludgeoning cows to death.

It's pretty clear by now that we're wishing that he hadn't been picked up.

Pretty much, yes.

There's no nothing away.

...