Puzzle Description:

Make sure you have a spare tire and working jack.

#1: Brian Bellis (mootpoint) on Apr 16, 2011 [SPOILER]

And be careful of any chickens crossing the road.

Nice puzzle Brian.

truism

be careful of elderly gentlemen with white hair, done in Mr. B style, who're crossing the road with or without chickens too.

nice puzzle. the flat tire is neat.

Very recognizable jack, but for how long?

I have never seen one of these bumper jacks in use in the real world. And I'm 43 yrs old. They were the staple in cartoons, but are today's kids exposed to this shape = "jack"?

Old cartoons are just not shown much anymore. And since cars (and tires) are enormously more reliable (and disposable), I don't think any jack will feature much in modern ones.

I've just been pondering recently how cultural literacy changes from generation to generation. Like: how many of today's under-20s have ever actually "dialed" a phone?

Joe i'm 58 and even though i have never used one i do remember when you had to crank a phone and ask the operator to connect you to the person you wanted to talk to.Technology is great no doubt but there is something wonderful about the way things use to be.

Fun puzzle, Brian. I hope there's more of these.

Joe, very interesting about cultural literacy. How many in this generation have actually "rolled" down a car window?

Our neighbors still have a dial phone in their kitchen but they also have cell phones. A dial phone takes forever to use but we had more time then. Everything is abbreviated now -- Kentucky Fried Chicken is KFC, Radio Shack dropped the Radio part, Overstock is now O. etc.

I'm old enough to remember when all phones had dials. And my family didn't get a color tv 'til I was around 12. My 25 yr old daughter might remember when you *could* buy a b&w (portable) tv. Now you can't even find a crt tv.

However, when she was eight, we went to an art gallery and she stared for a long time at a b&w photo of a skyscraper against a wispy-cloudy sky. She thought it was neat, but couldn't make out what it was.

All her books had had color pictures -- she'd never learned to translate between b&w and color.

Joe. I used the bumper jack because I tried the scissor jack and I couldn't even tell what it was. Just because the car companies need to save trunk space doesn't mean I do. Oh, maybe I should make a puzzle of the same car driving down the road on one of those mini spare tires.

You should make a mini spare tire puzzle, Brian.

wow...i just got back to the world...we had a bad tornado yesterday...several houses have trees on their roofs, i lost elect, phone & isp for 24 hours :( ...lots of dead peeps in raleigh, how sad

I read about it in the paper. I hope you and yours are all well.

ditto #13.
first time our weather scanner sounded an alarm. only had a big storm here. Sorry you had to go through that, Tom.

I'm glad you are okay, Tom. Welcome back.

Glad you're safe, Tom

Joe, that's disturbing that your daughter couldn't interpret a b&w photograph. I'll have to test that out on my 9-yr-old son (of course, he's seen me paint monochromatic images)

To be fair, the photo was very abstract. It was taken pointing upwards from one corner and had strong vertical lines and no "store front" bottom floor.

But to me the sky was definitely "sky", even though the clouds weren't the stereotypical fluffy clouds. To her, the sky was not recognizable as "sky" until I pointed it out.

On a similar tack, I think b&w photos (and films) remove some of the immediacy of the images. Horrifying images are not as horrifying when not in color. Watching (lots of) WWII and old "horror" movies on saturday afternoons, the b&w brought home to me that they were not "real".

In high school, we were shown horrible movies that the liberating troops took in the concentration camps. I doubt they would've been shown if they were in color.

Goto next topic

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