He’s a character in a Portuguese TV series.
I must be missing something. It doesn’t say “50 years to the day”. If you’re born June 1 1980 and die June 2 1981, folks would say you died “a year later”. Same if you died July 1. There’s a cutoff somewhere – probably varying per person and situation – but if the dude was born in late December 1955 and died January 1, 1986, “50 years later” would work for me.
O jeez. Reading on phone. Nevermind! Mods feel free to delete.
“No, to the pain.”
Two guys are talking at a party, and one of them mentions that he’s in the Navy. The other guy says “that must be tough, having to be away from your family for so long while you’re at sea.”
The Navy guy says “I haven’t had sex with my wife since 2005.”
The other guy says “wow, how on earth do you stand it?”
The Navy guy says “it’s not so bad.” Then he looks at his watch “hell, it’s only 2130, now.”
This right here sours me on “laterial thinking” puzzles. It’s always “nope, that’s wrong” and never even a “hmmmm, you know, that would work, but not the answer I was thinking of personally”.
So the aim is to have the exact same “lateral thinking” as the teller!
I think that’s true for some lateral thinking puzzles, but the good ones do have a pretty unique and plausible solution.
That’s rather like we say at the horse racing track: “I bet on a horse at ten to one. Damn nag didn’t cross the finish line until three-thirty.”
Another possibility is that it actually said that he was born in 1985. It means that he was born in room 1985 of the hospital. There’s no way to tell unless we can get hold of all of the Marilyn vos Savant’s columns. Does anyone here have access to those columns?
TOUR GUIDE: And on this spot, the Magna Carta was signed!
TOURIST: When was that?
TOUR GUIDE: 1215.
TOURIST: Damn, we missed it by twenty minutes!
'Zactly.
The difference between a good or bad puzzle comes down to a) how difficult it is, and b) how unique the answer is.
Lotta writers can master a). Most suck at b).
And for sure the 27th generation plagiarization that so often happens pretty well guarantees the [whatever puzzle] we’re looking at today has been garbled along the way.
Sounds like the date method they use here on the SDMB, for posts dated later this month but not displaying it as last year.
They are playing poker in hotel room 1986.
Note the riddle does not say “the year” 1986.
I’d go with this.
“Playing poker” is too specific not to be a clue or at least a red herring. Otherwise, why not just say “he was born in the year 1985 and died fifty years later in 1986”?
This would work better if he’d got the riddle right though. The way the teller says it “There are three words in the English language that end in ‘gry’” makes the “I said three words in the English language” claim obvious horseshit.
The correct telling is “‘Hungry’ and ‘angry’ are two words that end in ‘gry’. There are three words in the English language. What’s the third?” This makes the “I said there are three words in the English language” reveal at least true, albeit still annoying. (Which isn’t to say whoever told Monroe the riddle didn’t fuck it up.)
(That said, the skill of paying close attention to instructions, parsing them carefully and delivering to the letter is one that in other guises society values highly, such guises being e.g. coders, lawyers, tabletop gamers*.)
I always thought the answer is “Gryphon, I didn’t say which end.”
I bet I can tell you where you got those shoes.
Ahem … got dem shoes.
By “Born in 1985”, it could mean he was born some time before 1985, as in the sense of saying… unlike his younger brother, he was born the last time the Bears won the Superbowl
Unless the logic is pretzel…
Or the sneakers are bad