Is Ed’s wife writing a story?
Is Ed helping his wife?
AARRGGHH.
Ok, he’s writing a book and she’s helping, and she is telling him about this “three minute mystery” wherein a guy hangs himself and makes it look like a murder by standing on a block of ice. He looks around his bathroom to see if it would work. I’ll go out on a limb here - but she explains why he was “found out” - puddle of water on the floor.
Was Ed a sword swallower?
Sala, can’t you count?!? I said NO camels! That’s FIVE camels!
Axel Wheeler asks: Is Ed’s wife writing a story?
NO
Is Ed helping his wife?
NO
Missy2U asks: Ok, he’s writing a book and she’s helping,
NO
and she is telling him about this “three minute mystery”
YES!!!
wherein a guy hangs himself and makes it look like a murder by standing on a block of ice. He looks around his bathroom to see if it would work.
YES!!!
I have to leave now, folks.
Ed and his wife are simply playing three minute mysteries. She gives him the one we had just yesterday, about the guy who dies in the bathroom over a puddle of water, he asks her lots of questions, goes into the bathroom to get ideas, and finally realizes the solution.
- Rick
Is Ed playing a Three-Minute Mystery game with his wife, wherein the answer involves a man who hung himself and made it look like murder by using an ice cube, and Ed walks into the bathroom to visualize the puzzle and suddenly realizes what the ‘puddle of water on the floor’ in the puzzle signifys?
JMCJ
“Y’know, I would invite y’all to go feltch a dead goat, but that would be abuse of a perfectly good dead goat and an insult to all those who engage in that practice for fun.” -weirddave, set to maximum flame
Simulpost! The winner is John Corrado!! Nicely done – and now I have twelve very irritated people in the conference room waiting for me so I must go.
Well done, John!
- Rick
Aw, heck. Damn time limit.
JMCJ
“Y’know, I would invite y’all to go feltch a dead goat, but that would be abuse of a perfectly good dead goat and an insult to all those who engage in that practice for fun.” -weirddave, set to maximum flame
Wait! What? I won? Cool! Thanks!
JMCJ
“Y’know, I would invite y’all to go feltch a dead goat, but that would be abuse of a perfectly good dead goat and an insult to all those who engage in that practice for fun.” -weirddave, set to maximum flame
Is this a real conference room?
Are they irritated because of the cactus 3-minute mystery?
Is there…awwwww, forget it. Thanks!
And NOW the angry mob storms Mystery Mountain. I hate to say it Bricker, but that was lame.
a. There’s nothing bathroom specific in there that the man would have to see to suddenly understand.
b. In order to guess this 3MM, you’d actually have to have read the thread with the original ice cube thread.
c. Irrelevant, but I’ve never seen a bathroom that had any fixtures you could actually hang yourself with. You want to do away with yourself in the bathroom, you get a plugged in clock radio and drop it into the tub.
e. From my limited knowledge of hanging, there’d usually be a puddle under the body from an unambiguous source.
…or am I just a sore loser?
Is there some schedule for these mysteries or are they spontaneous? Is there a website devoted to them? This is a great time-killer (not to mention job-killer).
Not to burst your bubble, Finagle, but…
Never saw the thread; just familiar with that as a murder mystery plot trick.
As for guessing that it was a 3MM, it was the “Did Ed ask his wife a lot of questions? YES” and “Did she answer them? YES” that made me realize what was going on.
I make no argument for or against the possibility of hanging onself and standing on an ice cube in the bathroom.
JMCJ
“Y’know, I would invite y’all to go feltch a dead goat, but that would be abuse of a perfectly good dead goat and an insult to all those who engage in that practice for fun.” -weirddave, set to maximum flame
Even if true, what the man was doing was hoping, since he wasn’t getting anywhere just asking his wife, was that actually looking at the bathroom would spark an idea. This is not inherently unbelievable, in my view. He looks, he asks, and suddenyl gets a flash of insight - not so different from the moment when you realize a puzzle’s solution.
No. See John Corrado’s comments above. Admittedly, knowing that original 3MM would help greatly.
You don’t “guess” Three Minute Mysteries. I know that a flash of insight is what solves most of them. But you deduce them, using logic. Inexorably, you eliminate possibility after possibility until nothing remains but the solution.
I solved a similar 3MM without knowing the predicate mystery - in the one I was working, in order to win, you had to first deduce the “wrapping” - that is, that the husband and wife were working a three minute mystery, then deduce the premise of the mystery they were working, and then solve it.
It can be done, in other words. Now, it’s hell of a lot easier when you’re doing this face to face, and you don’t have to wait a minute or more for each question and response. But it can be done.
Irrelevant and also not true. For a good vision of how to hang yourself in the bathroom, see, eg., An Officer and a Gentleman (1982, Paramount Pictures), in which David Keith’s character hangs himself in a motel bathroom.
This is essentially a collateral attack on the original ice cube puzzle, not on the validity of the man and wife puzzle today. In any event, even if there were a puddle from sources other than water, questioning would reveal that. This puzzle mentions water specifically, by the way.
No. But I stand by this puzzle. It may not be a Hall of Famer, but it’s internally consistent, and logically solveable.
But if you didn’t like it… sorry. Can’t please all the folks all the time…
- Rick
Maybe it’s me, but I think part of the craft of generating a 3MM is putting in only the elements essential to getting the mystery.
This implies that everything you do mention is essential. The man going into the bathroom and seeing that the floor is dry is misdirection to a degree that it seems like not playing fair with your audience. The puzzle would be unchanged if you had said “Ed scratched his butt and said, ‘I understand.’.” I think it’s only a good puzzle if seeing something in their bathroom led to a solution.
Now here’s an alternate version that would satisfy me. Exactly the same setup, but the fictional dead person was found in the bathtub with a clock radio. The argument between the Ed and his wife was whether it was murder or suicide. The wife claims it was murder.
Ed goes into the bathroom and sees the GFI (ground fault interruptor) outlets and realized that they would have prevented the man from killing himself. Thus, the murderer must have used an extension cord attached to the clock radio. Removing the extension cord led to water on the floor.