Speaker 1: Hello, puzzlers, Welcome to the Puzzler Podcast The Hot Towel
Speaker 1: at your Puzzle Spa. I am your host, A J. Jacobs,
Speaker 1: and I am here with our chief puzzle Officer, Greg Pulisko.
Speaker 2: Welcome Greg, Thank you Ajay, I'm enjoying a little hot towel. Actually,
Speaker 2: think of the puzzler is the cucumbers on your eyes?
Speaker 1: The puzzle spot All right, all right, everyone go back
Speaker 1: and mentally change the intro because that is more accurate.
Speaker 1: By the way, Happy April Fool's Day, Greg, Is.
Speaker 2: It really are you teasing me? Is this?
Speaker 1: Well, it is a prank because we're recording it several
Speaker 1: weeks ahead of time.
Speaker 2: But well, pull back the curtain.
Speaker 1: But for our sake, yes, it is April Fool's Day.
Speaker 1: And I was thinking though, for puzzlers, every day is
Speaker 1: April Fool's Day, because puzzles are kind of like a
Speaker 1: little mild prank. They're all about misdirection and gotcha moments.
Speaker 1: So I wanted today to celebrate April Fool's Day by
Speaker 1: talking about three famous puzzle pranks that have had varying
Speaker 1: degrees of success. So are you ready?
Speaker 2: I'm I'm ready. I always love puzzles. I love pranks,
Speaker 2: and I love your stories about puzzles, so listen to.
Speaker 1: You, all right. Puzzle prank number one. You might remember
Speaker 1: this the April Fool's Day crossword puzzle in the New
Speaker 1: York Times in two thy sixteen, And when I describe it,
Speaker 1: you might remember it was friend of the show. Peter
Speaker 1: Gordon wrote a crossword on April first, twenty sixteen that
Speaker 1: struck fear into the hearts of crossword lovers everywhere. Very
Speaker 1: controversial but brilliant because when you solve the puzzle and
Speaker 1: read the answers together, they said, do two budget cuts.
Speaker 1: The New York Times crossword puzzle will end tomorrow. And
Speaker 1: people freaked out. Do you remember that?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, where do you go? Well, no, because I
Speaker 2: recognized it was April Fool's Day. But it was a
Speaker 2: fun thing to discover.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, as I went back and read the comments and
Speaker 1: people were I mean, most people thought it was brilliant,
Speaker 1: but there were people who got it. I guess some
Speaker 1: local newspapers printed a few days later, so they got
Speaker 1: it on like, you know, April eighth, and they're like,
Speaker 1: you know, what the hell? And yeah, people were really
Speaker 1: tearing their hair out Oh, by the way, the word
Speaker 1: prank has appeared in the New York Times crossword puzzle
Speaker 1: many times, and you often play the crossword family feud
Speaker 1: game with us. So what is your guest? What is
Speaker 1: the most common clue for prank? What is the most
Speaker 1: common prank used by New York Times puzzle makers?
Speaker 2: The most common clue for prank is probably April Fool's Day,
Speaker 2: antic or something.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm looking for more like, what is an actual prank?
Speaker 1: Like loosening the top on a salt shaker?
Speaker 2: Like, oh, what prank do they use to clue the
Speaker 2: word prank? Putting a banana peel on the floor. Nope, no,
Speaker 2: because nobody really ever does that. Have you ever actually
Speaker 2: seen somebody slip on a banana peel?
Speaker 1: No, that would be serious litigation like that. That's not
Speaker 1: a good prank. That's like a lawsuit.
Speaker 2: All right, tased in your Oreo cookies.
Speaker 1: That's a good one, but it's not in there. Short sheating,
Speaker 1: short cheating four or five short sheating, which I've never
Speaker 1: done or had done to me, have.
Speaker 2: You, nor I? But you go to camp, and you
Speaker 2: go to college wherever you go, there is it's you know,
Speaker 2: a thing everybody talks about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, everyone talks about, but I've never seen it done.
Speaker 1: I feel it's Yeah.
Speaker 2: Not to digress too much. We did a thing in
Speaker 2: college once where we well, one of our friends was
Speaker 2: at class. We took his entire dorm room and moved
Speaker 2: it into the quad and set up all the furniture
Speaker 2: in the exact same configuration.
Speaker 1: Well, that is good. That's the way beyond short cheating.
Speaker 1: By the way, as always, thanks to x word info website,
Speaker 1: which is the one where they list every clue in
Speaker 1: the New York Times. Ever, it's crazy, all right. Moving
Speaker 1: on to prank number two. As you might remember Greg.
Speaker 1: In the book The Puzzler written by aj Jacobs with
Speaker 1: Puzzles by Greg Pliska, there is a section on Stave
Speaker 1: jigsaw puzzles. And this is a company with the craziest,
Speaker 1: trickiest and most expensive jigsaw puzzles in the world. They
Speaker 1: are hand carved out of wood. They run from four
Speaker 1: hundred dollars up to ten thousand dollars. I visited the
Speaker 1: factory in Vermont, and it's wild because there are these
Speaker 1: five people at these contraptions that look like sewing machines.
Speaker 1: After a nuclear disaster, there's like warp and they are
Speaker 1: carving painted wood into these crazy shapes like dogs and
Speaker 1: rainbows and astronauts, and they are They're famous for their
Speaker 1: tricky puzzle. So some of the puzzles have holes in
Speaker 1: the middle or they're no straight edges. The guy who
Speaker 1: runs it calls himself Chief Tormentor.
Speaker 2: It's my new title.
Speaker 1: Actually, yes, you are a Chief torment.
Speaker 2: I'm going to be coming up from the puzzle dungeon
Speaker 2: rather than the puzzle lab.
Speaker 1: I like it. Well. A few years ago, on April first,
Speaker 1: the Chief Tormentor went too far with his tormenting. He
Speaker 1: sold some puzzles where some of the pieces were too
Speaker 1: big to fit. They were like twenty percent bigger than
Speaker 1: they should have been. People were not happy. They did
Speaker 1: not think that was funny, and he had to refund
Speaker 1: all of their money. So that was a prank that
Speaker 1: did not that went awry.
Speaker 2: I guess you designed the regular sized piece and then
Speaker 2: you have your magic apocalyptic sewing machine. Do it like
Speaker 2: a larger cut of that one exactly?
Speaker 1: I think that was it, but never to be done again.
Speaker 2: All right, well, but the wooden pieces are more durable
Speaker 2: than the normal kind of cardboarding one is that the idea?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's just a joy to do them.
Speaker 1: They're like, they're lovely there, and you can rent them,
Speaker 1: so if you you know, four hundred dollars is a
Speaker 1: crazy amount, but you can rent them or swap them.
Speaker 2: Did you rent them by the hour? It's gonna be bad, right, like, go.
Speaker 1: God, that would be I know because some of them,
Speaker 1: like the one that they consider the hardest, took me weeks.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that would be more expensive on an hourly basis,
Speaker 1: all right. Pruzzle prank number three. This is an old one,
Speaker 1: a classic from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. This
Speaker 1: is not, by the way, not April Fools, but it
Speaker 1: isn't in the prank genre, so we include it. Alice
Speaker 1: is at the tea party and the mad Hatter asks
Speaker 1: her riddle. He says, why is a raven like a
Speaker 1: writing desk? And Alice gives up and the mad Hatter says,
Speaker 1: I haven't the slightest idea, And so basically it was
Speaker 1: a riddle with no answer. Alice was not happy. She said,
Speaker 1: stop wasting my time. And it turns out readers agreed
Speaker 1: with Alice. They were like, stop wasting our time, Lewis Carroll.
Speaker 1: They wanted an answer to the riddle, which again was
Speaker 1: why is a raven like a writing desk? And they
Speaker 1: pestered him so much that eventually, in the preface to
Speaker 1: a volume that came out later, he said, all right,
Speaker 1: I'm going to give you an answer, even though it's
Speaker 1: made up after the fact that His answer was because
Speaker 1: it can produce a few notes, though they are very flat,
Speaker 1: and it is never put with the wrong end in front.
Speaker 1: So there it is. It can produce a few notes
Speaker 1: though they are very flat.
Speaker 2: There's another answer to that, though, that I know, which
Speaker 2: is they both have inky quills.
Speaker 1: Oh there you go.
Speaker 2: There the feathers are quills that are inky black, or
Speaker 2: the desk has oh good night. But really it's funner
Speaker 2: without an answer, because that long, convoluted response from Lewis
Speaker 2: Carroll is a little kind of a doesn't land the punchline?
Speaker 1: Really?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, I mean, I think that is. And that
Speaker 1: has become a little niche pastime of what are alternative
Speaker 1: answers to Lewis Carroll's riddle? You had one, let me
Speaker 1: give you another couple. Because Edgar Allan Poe wrote on both,
Speaker 1: he wrote on a desk and he wrote about ravens.
Speaker 2: Uh, that's a good one.
Speaker 1: Actually, what about because they both have two eyes? So
Speaker 1: ravens have two eyes, and writing desk is two eyes
Speaker 1: as in the letter.
Speaker 2: That's very good. That's also why a cow is like
Speaker 2: a writing desk, and why you're like a writing desk,
Speaker 2: and why a giraffe is like a writ desk.
Speaker 1: But it's all purpose. Yeah, how about they both involve quills?
Speaker 1: I think you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they both have inky quills, which gets even more specific.
Speaker 1: Right. I heard all these theories first from this Lewis
Speaker 1: Carroll expert who has thousands of Lewis Carroll books and
Speaker 1: paraphernalia in his house. And I asked him what his
Speaker 1: favorite answer was, and he said his favorite answer is
Speaker 1: there's a B in both. There's a B in both.
Speaker 1: And I was like really, And then he kept repeating
Speaker 1: it and I finally got it, and I was annoyed
Speaker 1: but also kind of impressed, which is, yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: B in the word in the word both.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not an It's as absurd as the other question.
Speaker 1: Is, right, exactly, it's an absurd answer to the absurd question.
Speaker 1: It's kind of annoying, but also kind of clever. And
Speaker 1: it's also all purpose. Like anytime anyone asks you a
Speaker 1: brittle what does X have in common with why? You
Speaker 1: just say, oh, there's a B in both.
Speaker 2: That's good. I like, I'm going to use that as
Speaker 2: the answered everything. There's a bee in both.
Speaker 1: There you go, and that is our April's Fool's Day
Speaker 1: gift to you. Speaking of April Fool's Day, Greg, any
Speaker 1: good pranks that you have played or have had played
Speaker 1: upon you.
Speaker 2: You know, I have a prank story. It wasn't April
Speaker 2: Fools when this happened. It was actually summer. It was
Speaker 2: one of my summer jobs during college. I was a
Speaker 2: type setter at a firm that did labels. So we
Speaker 2: did type for all kinds of different labels, one of
Speaker 2: which was a major grocery chain in California, and we
Speaker 2: did all of the bakery labels, so they were it
Speaker 2: just words afterward, a very tiny, very condensed, little type
Speaker 2: of just all these ridiculous ingredients. And after a long
Speaker 2: summer of doing this, I had a really good rapport
Speaker 2: with the next guy in line, the guy who took
Speaker 2: the type I did, and then he pasted it up,
Speaker 2: and I thought, I'm going to do a funny thing
Speaker 2: for Bill. At the end of the list of ingredients,
Speaker 2: I think it was hot cross buns. It was like
Speaker 2: eight or nine lines of tiny words. I wrote, guaranteed
Speaker 2: to make you vomit in three minutes or less. And
Speaker 2: I just put it in. I didn't say anything. I
Speaker 2: just you know, printed it out and passed it on
Speaker 2: to him to set up. And I thought, this will
Speaker 2: be really funny because he'll be working and he'll see
Speaker 2: it and he'll crack up, and then he'll cut off
Speaker 2: that little sentence and it'll be fine. So, you know,
Speaker 2: we went on with our workday. The week went on,
Speaker 2: I forgot to see if he'd gotten the prank, and
Speaker 2: I went back to college. And a couple months into college,
Speaker 2: I get a call from my former boss says, Greg,
Speaker 2: you're fired. And I said, well, you know, Chuck, you
Speaker 2: know I'm not working there anymore. He says, I know.
Speaker 2: That's why you're getting fired instead of Bill or anybody else,
Speaker 2: because nobody caught all my mistake. And in fact, the
Speaker 2: grocery chain approved the you know, the mock up of
Speaker 2: the labels. It went into production. They produced ten thousand
Speaker 2: of these labels. And the only thing that saved me
Speaker 2: from like everlasting infamy is that a guy in the
Speaker 2: warehouse was looking for which hot Cross buns he had
Speaker 2: to stick these labels on when he read the label
Speaker 2: down and he noticed the fine print at the end
Speaker 2: that's said, my God guaranteed to make you vomit in
Speaker 2: three minutes or last. Needless to say, he wasn't happy.
Speaker 2: That grocery chain wasn't happy. And I never had a
Speaker 2: career as a typesetter.
Speaker 1: That is crazy. Well, I mean you would have had like,
Speaker 1: that's a multimillion dollar lawsuit. People, no one would ever
Speaker 1: buy him again.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Place would have gone out of business. It
Speaker 2: just so I barely die. So be careful what pranks
Speaker 2: you play.
Speaker 1: That's a good lesson, excellent moral Well that is very funny.
Speaker 1: All right, well folks watch out today or things like that.
Speaker 1: Just be careful.
Speaker 2: Listen to this episode. You can't listen to it till later.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is. Don't do what Greg did, but do
Speaker 1: keep listening to our show. And as an extra credit,
Speaker 1: if you have other answers to Lewis Carroll's riddle, please
Speaker 1: send them in and we'll try to read them on
Speaker 1: the air, and please join us next time for more
Speaker 1: puzzling puzzles that will puzzle you puzzling.
Speaker 2: Hey, they're puzzlers. This is Greg Plisk, your chief puzzle Officer,
Speaker 2: up from the Puzzle Lab, with the answer to the
Speaker 2: extra credit from our previous episode. I played a language
Speaker 2: game with Aj where every word ended in is h E,
Speaker 2: s E or ia n and sounded like the name
Speaker 2: of a language. But wasn't your extra credit clue was
Speaker 2: this it's a condiment or it's a language spoken by
Speaker 2: people who think equines are cool, and that, of course
Speaker 2: would be horse Radish, horse rad ish. I think horses
Speaker 2: are rad and I hope you think horses are rad too,
Speaker 2: and I hope you think puzzles are even more rad.
Speaker 2: Come play some more puzzles with us next time on
Speaker 2: the Puzzler Podcast.