Here’s the answer to last week’s shitty lateral thinking puzzle:
The man was a midget who worked in a circus as a star attraction because of his billing as the world’s smallest dwarf. Each day, he measured himself with a piece of wood that was exactly his height. One day, a rival dwarf mischievously sawed two inches from the piece of wood. The man mistakenly thought he had grown and would therefore lose his fame and status as the world’s smallest dwarf, so he committed suicide.
I feel like this whole situation escalated rather quickly – it went from a bit of harmless ‘mischief’ to the suicide of a beloved celebrity in only two sentences. Again, Paul Sloane has indulged in an overly elaborate backstory without giving the reader any relevant information which might allow them to come remotely close to the correct answer. To Sloane’s credit, his book does actually include a help section, only to be used each time the reader gets stuck (which is every fucking time unless you’re the guy who wrote the book). For this particular puzzle, Sloane’s first clue is:
Q: Was the man normal?
A: No.
Not only is that clue offensive to the vertically challenged, it is also NOT EVEN SLIGHTLY HELPFUL.
Congratulations to Dan, whose answer was half correct. There were many other good and bizarre suggestions but my favourite was A’s, which reads as follows:
The man was deeply in love with a vampire; they’d been on the run for months now, evading the Slayer and sticking to the shadows. He went out this morning to the butcher’s to buy some pig’s blood, but when he returned, instead of his true love lying there he saw only a piece of wood lying in a bit of dust. Finally that bitch Buffy had caught up. Unable to cope, the man quickly shuffled off his mortal coil in the hopes of reuniting with his love in the depths of Hell.
Now it’s time for this week’s puzzle:
One day a man received a parcel in the post. Inside, he found a human left arm. He examined it carefully and then repacked it and sent it on to another man. The second man also examined the arm. He then took it out to the woods and buried it. Why should they have done these things?
WARNING: The answer to this one is even less predictable than the first.
Can you solve the puzzle of the severed arm? Or have you reached your limb-it?