Thinking outside the goldfish bowl

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10:44 pm August 14th, 2008

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			Thinking outside the goldfish bowl - shadows of echoes of memories of songs


	Thinking outside the goldfish bowl
	From Bilateral thinking puzzles: Q: Deep in the forest was found the body of a man who was wearing only swimming trunks, snorkel and facemask. The nearest lake was 8 miles away and the sea was 100 miles away. What happened? A: The man is a priest. Also, if you haven't seen Michael Kelly's lateral thinking puzzles yet, you should.

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	Comments

	From: crouchinglynx	Date: August 14th, 2008 10:10 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Shouldn't the answer be behind a cut?

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	From: wechsler	Date: August 15th, 2008 07:22 am (UTC)		(Link)

Thursday.

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	From: katstevens	Date: August 14th, 2008 10:32 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Arf! I was given a book of these at school and was insufferable for about a week afterwards.

A. The priest was standing on a block of ice, which melted.

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	From: sbp	Date: August 15th, 2008 09:34 am (UTC)		(Link)

No, he was playing Monopoly.

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	From: j4	Date: August 15th, 2008 09:38 am (UTC)		(Link)

On the international date line.

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	From: ewx	Date: August 14th, 2008 11:19 pm (UTC)		(Link)

l-)

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	From: james_r	Date: August 14th, 2008 11:30 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Those are superb :)

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	From: cartesiandaemon	Date: August 14th, 2008 11:33 pm (UTC)		(Link)

ROFL. I used to love jokes like this. Although when I read the title, I was expecting something like:

"A man and his son were in a car accident. The man was killed instantly, but the son was rushed to the hospital, where the duty surgeon cried out 'I can't operate on him! He's my son!' (The son was not adopted, and the surgeon was neither female nor gay.) How come?"

:)

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	From: j4	Date: August 15th, 2008 08:44 am (UTC)		(Link)

The surgeon was the GHOST of the man who'd just been killed in the car accident!!

... er, no, I dunno, sorry. :-}

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	From: lnr	Date: August 15th, 2008 09:13 am (UTC)		(Link)

It's a female surgeon.

I don't get the priest though.

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	From: j4	Date: August 15th, 2008 09:37 am (UTC)		(Link)

It's a female surgeon

Well that's usually the answer, yeah, but

cartesiandemon says "The son was not adopted, and the surgeon was neither female nor gay."

the priest

Did you look at some more of the 'puzzles' on that site? Hint: they are bilateral thinking puzzles.

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	From: lnr	Date: August 15th, 2008 09:42 am (UTC)		(Link)

Oh dur, I should read the question more carefully.

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	From: lnr	Date: August 15th, 2008 09:41 am (UTC)		(Link)

Actually now I've found the one to which the answer is a priest I do.

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	From: cartesiandaemon	Date: August 15th, 2008 12:58 pm (UTC)		(Link)

The surgeon was bi. That's not very well phrased, but it was the sort of atrocious pun I expected given the title, and the car accident surgeon puzzle...

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	From: simont	Date: August 15th, 2008 09:33 am (UTC)		(Link)

Either the dead man or the surgeon had once been female but had transitioned.

Alternatively, the surgeon was simply lying as an excuse to skive off work :-)

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	From: caramel_betty	Date: August 15th, 2008 12:23 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Clearly, the answer is that the surgeon was also moonlighting as a football pundit.

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	From: cartesiandaemon	Date: August 15th, 2008 01:10 pm (UTC)		(Link)

I think I should have said "the surgeon is neither female nor gay nor is married against sexual orientation", but I couldn't think of a good phrasing that would rule out people who changed sex, or gay people who married heterosexually, etc, without ruling out the solution I meant. But I think that caveat nearly would.

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	From: simont	Date: August 15th, 2008 01:13 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Ah, in that case I've got it. The dead man is Joseph, and the surgeon is God! :-)

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	From: cartesiandaemon	Date: August 15th, 2008 01:19 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Hey, no bringing philosophy into it. If you're going to allow that, maybe the man in the car accident and the surgeon were both Jesus :)

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	From: cartesiandaemon	Date: August 15th, 2008 01:20 pm (UTC)		(Link)

(My first thought reading that was "I know the bible said he had a rainbow coat, but I didn't know it officially said he was bi!" :))

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	From: simont	Date: August 15th, 2008 01:22 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Not that Joseph!

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	From: cartesiandaemon	Date: August 15th, 2008 01:47 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Yeah, I worked that out. Although minor changes to the wording might change the solution.

A man and his son were in a car accident. The man was thrown from the car at 70mph towards a nearby wall which would be fatal on impact. The son was injured, and the man who found him was his only father, and healed him. Who was that man?

Answer: Saint Joseph of Cupertino, patron saint of flying and healing. (And mentally handicapped, and overzealous automatic spelling checkers.)

A man died, was buried, and came out alive again from his tomb, and healed a man's son who was injured in a car accident. Whose tomb?

Hint: He drank from the Holy Grail before Indiana and Henry Joneses.

Answer: Joseph of Arimathea.

:)

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	From: simont	Date: August 15th, 2008 11:20 am (UTC)		(Link)

At the Gallery we once invented a game in which we made up lateral thinking puzzles of this type as we went along. Someone starts with an implausible sort of scenario of this type and asks "what happened?" or "why?", but doesn't have any preconceived idea of what the answer might be. As the other players ask follow-up questions, the puzzle-setter makes random decisions until a sufficiently silly answer becomes clear.

We played this a couple of times. Highlights included:

Q. A man walks into a pub, buys a pint, and gives it to a dog. Why?
A. The man's best friend had bet him a pint that he could turn into a dog. The man accepted the bet, whereupon his friend turned into a dog, winning the bet.
Q. All the children in a school are lying in the playground with broken legs. After several attempts, an ambulance is called. What happened?
A. The teachers all had dyscalculia, which caused them to draw out the hopscotch layouts in the playground with all the numbers permuted into leg-breakingly difficult orders, and also made it hard for them to dial 999 correctly.
Q. There's a dark room. What happened?
A. Someone turned the lights out!

(Of course this is much more fun to play than to recount, and the other players' "wrong" guesses tend to be at least as good as the eventual official solution.)

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