yous ain't no good a' puzzles

Two extremes: Eat too much or eat too little.

Too much? The King of Sweden, Adolf Frederick (b.1710), died of digestion problems on February 12, 1771 after having consumed a meal consisting of lobster, caviar, sauerkraut, kippers and champagne, which was topped off with 14 servings of his favorite dessert: semla (bread, sometimes filled with almond paste) served in a bowl of hot milk.

Too little? Seems Jade and Lamont pump out a baby boy in their bathtub. Never cross the street – cross the street! – to the hospital until six weeks pass. Our happy post-hippie couple are vegans. They seem to eat just fine, but little vegan-boy gets apple juice and soy milk. Um, folks, apple juice is a diuretic. Kinda sorta blocks the absorbing of nutrients from the soy milk. Did a six-week old kid weighing 3-1/2 pounds give you a clue? Or did you have to wait until rigor mortis set in? Yeah, that’s when they took him to the hospital. Guilty. Verdict came on May 2, 2007, but the person writing the article doesn’t understand the law – with one death, it is not possible to have both a murder and manslaughter conviction as is reported.

Me? I prefer somewhere in between. I just got one rule, largely adhered to: if it shit during life, don’t eat it.

OK, something mildly intelligent. This system gets more heady the longer you play with it (odd phraseology, sorry). There are four balls – two free and two as bases to the flat surfaces. You move them with your mouse. The free ones have gravitational properties, including the slingshot effect. The feed of new things (electrons towards a proton-nucleus? I dunno) from the top left reflect the number leaving the screen at the bottom. You can steady-state the whole thing by capturing the electrons in the free balls’ gravity. You can also create complete chaos. Set it up, understand it, and then let it run in the background. Thought you had it running well? What’s the 2d Law of Thermodynamics? Every closed system tends towards a state of total disorder – or – left to its own devices, all things turn to shit.

Here’s another dot, but decidedly less intelligent. Hold it with your mouse and move it around. Your get a Clyde-a-scope effect. A couple of adjustments are available at the bottom. I think you need to be really high, tripping, or young to see the value here.

Speaking of tripping, here’s a hippie guide. I laugh so much at the angst of punks that came later – hippies just wanted to turn on, tune out, and left alone, while punks stamped their feet like mindless children and said, “Pay attention to me!”

Timothy Leary, when he was not frying his brain on spoonfuls of Lysergic acid diethylamide, wrote in The Politics of Ecstasy that a, “Hippy is an establishment label for a profound, invisible, underground, evolutionary process. For every visible hippy, barefoot, beflowered, beaded, there are a thousand invisible members of the turned-on underground. Persons whose lives are tuned in to their inner vision, who are dropping out of the TV comedy of American Life.”

Besides the obvious grammatical deformity, he makes a cogent point: hippies defined themselves by taking up their own space, by entertaining themselves from within. Punks, alternatively, were like the hippies we got rid of – the ones that couldn’t handle their liquor or drugs, the ones that got loud and ugly. Hippies invented music festivals; punks, the mosh pits. Enough said, eh?

Lest I be accused by my twin of one-sided discussions, here’s some crumbs for the punks out there: the Anti-Hippie Action League and a primer entitled, How to Mosh.

Alright, enough cranky. Here is something good. Somebody thought enough to incorporate the Bible into satellite maps. You select the book and chapter then it reproduces that chapter with locations hypertexted. Click on the link and the map takes you there. Very nicely done.

Some puzzles? Sure!

I love these number-sliding puzzles. I never met one I couldn’t figure out from even my earliest years. Nicely done free one. Grab the number with your mouse and move it to the empty spot.

This block-movement puzzle is poorly described. You’ll get it on the 2d level if my description fails. Each colored box has a number on it – click a box and you will see a series of “X”s. If the box has the numeral “2” on it, then the “X”s appear in every empty (grey) box that is two boxes from where you are either horizontal, vertical, or diagonal. After the first level, you have to plan ahead or you will have numbered squares left with nowhere to put them. You can only move each square one time. It’s a great puzzle, plus it has ten levels.

A nice movement puzzle. Start at the bottom and end at the top. You can only travel in straight lines – no turns within a move. You can’t backtrack. You can only move to new places if that spot is the color as you are, the same shape as you are, or both. It’s a one-time puzzle, but will take a while to map it out. If you are good, you can look at it and see its solution without taking a turn.

Enough for now.