I think that this one was from Two Minute Mysteries. Really pissed me off when I was a third grader.
A guy makes a bet with a blind man, claiming that he can sneak unnoticed into a room where the blind man is waiting and replace his glass of ice cubes with one filled with ginger ale. The trick, of course, is that he had brought his own bag of ice cubes made from frozen ginger ale. He puts them into the glass instead of the regular ice, waits half an hour, and voila. Yeah, very clever. But here’s the kicker. The final clue was that the trickster had commented “Wow, this ice is cold” while filling the glass. *Obviously * that was such a useless thing to say that he *must * have been speaking to cover up the sound made by opening an insulated bag.
Almost. The letter back from the Vatican was a form letter that said His Holiness gets “hundreds” of letters and cannot possibly reply to them all. But Tom was careful not to lie, exactly, to a priest: when Father asked about the letter, Tom said, “Well, I can’t discuss exactly what was in it … but I think His Holiness would like it if we started a basketball team here.”
How many Mad Scientists books were there? I only recall two, one of which had on its back cover a write-up that talked about the “six” wacky geniuses, oddly forgetting the seventh member - the narrator!
How about Alvin Fernald? Anyone remember him? Heck, he was even a television anchorman once, found a kid a dad (whom he then cleared of past bank robbery charges), and talked with Walter Cronkite (who, I believe, promised Alvin some ice cream).
You missed the crucial part. He was supposed to have done it while running. Trying to put something in your back right pocket with your left hand would be quite difficult. That story was actually quite neat, because it started with Bugs Meany hiring Encyclopedia to solve some crime.
“To-to-to be, or not to-to-to be, that is the question.” (which was actually a clue directing people to house 222B) is all I remember from those books.
Two collections of stories (published in magazines originally, as I remember), one novel The Big Kerplop, which had a very limited original printing but is now much more available in a new printing (as hinted above :smack: ), and an unpublished book, The Big Chunk of Ice, which will be [printed for the first time this November.](The Big Chunk of Ice )
“Thank you for contacting the Vatican. Your plea to the Pope is important to us. Please stay on the line, and His Holiness will help you as soon as possible. [peppy Muzak version of Ave Maria plays]”
I mentioned it before, but while we’re on the subject of kid brainteasers, does anyone recall Mindtrap? I believe it’s still sold in stores, but I remember playing with it a good 10 years ago myself. It’s a massive deck of square cards, each of which have some kind of brainteaser or another involving all sorts of knowledge. There was a game that went along with it, but I had fun just going through the cards and trying to solve them. Some of them were detective stories; literally only a paragraph or two because of the size of the card. Because of the economy of space, they were written far more cleanly, but the solution was often tricky anyway. The writers were much more clever than Sobol. One of the ones I recall (paraphrasing from memory):
Some of them were harder than that, but that’s the one that sticks in my head. Sobol did better with the story aspect, but I always preferred the problem-solving aspect more.
I remember one where it was something like “What’s-his-name-big-shot-detective-guy was driving down the road. All of a sudden, the car shifted by itself. WHSBSDG smiled and kept on driving. Why?”
He was driving an automatic.
My thought at the time, and still now, is what the hell of kind of question is that? So the man doesn’t know how to drive a stick. Big freaking deal. How is that little-question-card worthy?
My view is that the point is to encourage critical thinking. The question is phrased in an uncommon way in order to suggest something strange is happening. If you let yourself be led by the phrasing, you can find yourself going down a weird path, but if you can step back and look at the situation objectively, the answer’s obvious.
Does anyone remember this one? I’ve only got a partial memory. As a child I once read a book, the hero was a sickly boy pretty much confined to bed, who sent his friends out to search for clues, then solved the mystery from his bedroom. His name was Peter Brayne, or possibly Paul or Phillip,m definitely somethingm bbeginning with ‘P.’ He adopted the nickname ‘Peabrain.’
That’s all I remember. I only read one book, but I got the impression it was one of a series. It was probably British, and maybe was never published anywhere else. Anyone know it?
It was actually within the school. Tom’s class vs. the older class (which included his brother Sweyn). That’s why Tom had to resort to “covering the spread” in order to make his class feel like winners…no matter what his class did, the others were inevitably taller and faster (longer-legged), there was no way his class was going to manage a victory against them.
Hee, that didn’t occur to me. But the girl was always finding jewel thieves and counterfeiters and whatnot, you’d think they’d have a LITTLE faith. I know that when I was 14 I didn’t foil a single counterfeiting ring.
