There would seem to be a contradiction here. Or maybe not because you are quite devious. Is there any change you would make to those answers?
Bicycle pretty much means one thing. The definition **Chronos ** gives is that one thing. That’s the context of the yes answer.
I struggled a bit before answering Riemann’s question. I finally decided that “no” was the less deceptive answer. I appeal to a certain French surrealist.
So are these “bicycle parts” parts of images of a bicycle?
Uh oh…
Yes.
…something along the lines of:
You have family photos that you’re putting in an album, in some of which part of a bicycle is visible.
The key misdirection being the alternate meaning of “bicycle parts”.
Close. What is a common reason for having multiple parts on a table?
Oh, a jigsaw.
It’s a nice riddle. I can see that it creates quite a difficulty in answering questions, though. When I rephrased Chronos’s question it was because I did not think that his phrasing had quite eliminated models or representations of the thing, although I obviously hadn’t quite got all the way to “image” at that point. I follow bike (road) racing, and I couldn’t get out of my head some silly lego-style dioramas that a guy used to make to represent key events in bike races (although that was way too obscure to be the answer). I’ll see if I can track down some of the images.
Whew. I can’t believe someone got it. I was going to ask for a hint.
My art history weakness is showing. Magritte was Belgian.
Here’s one I came up with a few years back…
It concerns the famed seventeenth century writers Miguel Cervantes and William Shakespeare, who both died in 1616 on April 22nd and 23rd respectively.
After witnessing Cervantes’ last breath in Madrid, a man hopped on a horse and rode 200 miles to the nearest port. There, he hopped on a ship which, due to poor winds, took three days to reach London. Once there, he took an overnight carriage to Stratford-upon-Avon where he walked up to a house, went into a bedroom and said “Cervantes is dead”.
William Shakespeare (the author himself) looked at him and said “That sucks”.
How is this possible?
Spain was using a different calendar which had April 22 happening several days before April 23 happened in England?
The adjustment from Julian to Gregorian calendar happened around this time, and in a pretty haphazard way. From reading The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson I know that calendars were still out of whack in different countries in the late 17th century.
Yup, looks like Spain was among the early adopters, removing 10 days in 1582. U.K. did not adjust until 1752. And Turkey in 1927!
Got it in one!
Ok, I’ve got another one.
Part of a police manual gives instructions in a language that none of the police officers speak. Why?
It is written in classical Chinese.
To be pedantic:
Chinese per se is written but never spoken. The spoken languages are Cantonese and Manderin
OR
It is in sign language although that may be difficult to put in a manual.
I know the words used to train police dogs are usually in a foreign language so the suspect can’t confuse the dog by giving a different command (unless he happens to speak Hungarian or something). Is that it?
That was quick! Yeah, the story goes, police dogs are often trained in a language not commonly spoken where they are deployed so as to reduce the chance the criminal can mess with the dog.