Brain Food

http://www.rinkworks.com/brainfood/p/latreal1.shtml

If you are looking for some intellectual stimulation try Brain Food:Lateral Thinking Puzzles. These puzzles, unlike most puzzles, are inexact. In a sense, they are a hybrid between puzzles and storytelling. In each puzzle, some clues to a scenario are given, but the clues don’t tell the full story. Your job is to fill in the details and complete the story. Obviously, there is usually more than one answer to any given puzzle, but, in general, only one solution is truly satisfying.

You can try solving these puzzles on your own – that’s certainly a legitimate way to go about this – but usually you can have more fun if you involve other people. The way this works is, you look at the answer (maybe you want to try the puzzle on your own first!), then read just the clues to your friends. Your friends must determine the answer by asking questions about it, which you may answer only with yes, no, or doesn’t matter. You can adjust the difficulty of the puzzle by varying the initial clues, throwing in red herrings, and so forth.

One word of warning – for some reason, these puzzles have a tendency to be rather morbid.

Here’s an example :

A man walks into a bar and asks for a drink. The bartender pulls out a gun and points it at him. The man says, “Thank you,” and walks out.

The solution :

The man has hiccups; the bartender scares them away by pulling a gun.

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