PRISONER EXPRESS

Here's an easy one first: Lawyers lie on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays: all other days they tell the truth. Judges, however, lie on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. All other days they tell the truth. Now, you hear the lawyer casually mention, "Yesterday was one of my lying days." The judge then replies, "Yesterday was one of my lying days too." From nothing more than these two statements and the given information above about the characteristics of lawyers and judges, you and your superior thought processes are able to deduce what day it is by grabbing a calendar and going over each day of the week, to see which day both statements can be permitted by the rules. HINT: obviously it can't be Sunday, when both lawyers and judges tell the truth, since yesterday (Saturday) was a lying day for the judge, but not the lawyer. So, is your brain-light of sufficient wattage for you to uncover the correct day of the week in, say, 10 minutes, or before cellie does?

Or do you need another hint? Don't bother to guess, because guessing makes a loser five times out of six (or six out of seven if you insist it's Sunday). You will know you have the correct answer when you reach a day where both answers are allowed by the rules. Your brain will grow to solve this!

Ready for something a little harder, or are you still rattling your cups across the bars, yelling at the screws to bring you some aspirin? It's okay to stop and rest. You can't run until after you've crawled.

You are babysitting four other cellies in a five-rack cage. While you're behind the sheet taking a dump, you hear a heavy crash, and suddenly that loud, obnoxious gangsta-rap music you've been pumping out the bean-hole all morning stops and a flood of peace and quiet erupts. One of your "bras" has accidentally knocked your boom box down while dancing and cavorting mindlessly to the "music." You begin shrieking at them, and "Alice" says, "Don't look at me like that, 'cause I didn't do it!"

Burpmaster B looks up suddenly from the top rack and says, "I did it."

Crazy tells you, "Dong-Dong did it."

Dong-Dong says to you, "Alice is a liar!"

Now you've studied these misfits for years and have gathered an enormous store of trivial information about them that tells you that only one of the above statements is true. All the rest of your cellies are lying. Knowing this, your gigantean brain sorts out all the possibilities in less than 15 minutes and tells you exactly who, without any doubt, trashed your ghetto blaster.

This time you don't get a calendar as an artificial aid. But you can use a pencil and paper. Make a column of the answers, like: A = I didn't do it, B = I did it, C = d did it and D = I lied. Then put True/False boxes in front of each entry. You know only one statement is true, so go down the line testing each statement. When you find a combination where only one statement is true, you will immediately see who did it.

How efficient are you? This is a maximization problem, especially suited to people who live complex lives full of variables. You got lost in the rich district when your homies ditched you after a pilfering expedition. You wake up in the bell-tower of a Catholic church, where two gold ropes, ten inches apart, disappear into tiny holes 40 feet up in the ceiling. You're about to go into D.T.'s and need alcohol and heroin real soon. You have a knife and you could just reach up as high you can and hack off seven feet of gold from each rope, then run for the pawn shop. This would not be very efficient, and it would be nice to get a little extra so you could afford some crack to smoke with your heroin. You are not afraid to take some risk of falling and killing yourself, and consider climbing up one rope, chop the one next to it down, and get away with 40 plus 7 feet of gold rope. But this is only 54% efficient, you've got a big, super brain, and aren't afraid to use it. So, how much gold rope could you get away with, using just a knife, your brain, and your climbing skills?

My huge brain, which is much bigger than yours, told me how to get away with 100% of the rope with only a little danger of falling and killing myself; I was very proud. Then a little Irish car-thief kid told me how to get 100% of the ropes with almost no danger of falling. So, don't be discouraged just because you guys all have relatively puny or flaccid brains. Even an orangutan can have a momentary flash of insight!

Had enough? That's too bad, because we are not finished yet. They just made me take one of those, "Test of Adult Basic Education" (TABE) thingies, and I got a "12.9 plus" in all four categories. This makes me very angry. Why? Because it didn't have a single square root on it or any algebra! I didn't miss a single question because when I went to school, they made us learn all this by the sixth grade! Yes! Because of all your border-hoppers and "play-yahs," my kids get to grow up stupid because they've dumbed-down "education" so much that any knucklehead can get a GED! They ought to call it a test of adolescent basic education, but we Caucasians have to be polite and respect "diversity" of failed cultures.

So, if you want some real respect, that is respect that is not given out of us feeling sorry for you, but which is earned, riddle me this: Where on earth can you fly 100 miles south, then turn due west and fly another 100 miles, then turn north and fly another 100 miles, and land at the same place you took off from? If you give up, I'll give you a hint: The earth is not flat! For more information on this problem, see trigonometry.

If you figured that out, that's good for ordinary respect among the homies. For earned respect that gets dumb people to point you out and whisper to their buds, "He's a certified genius!", you have to do a little bit more: Figure out the indefinite other places where a guy can do the same thing. All of them are still on earth, and they all involve flying in one or more complete circles around a well-known geographical point, usually marked with the flags of several nations. Still with me? Just three of you haven't yet torn this up and flushed it? Good! Feel the burn? That's your little homie brain growing!

You're at the crack-house and Dealer-Dan has nine eight-balls for you to choose from. Every one of his 8-balls is a rip-off except one. The only way you can tell is to weigh them. The good one is heavier than the rip-offs. The only scale is a two-pan balance that has no weights. You have to weigh the 8-balls against each other. You can afford to buy one 8-ball. The candy-pants gang is breaking in the back break door to rob everyone, so you don't have a lot of time to find the heavy bag o' crack. Use your big Cadillac brain to figure out how to find the heavy one and split by using the pan scales only two times!

You don't want to overtax your nervous system, so put this away and let your brain rest for a day or two before you try to go any farther. I don't want you to wake up with a blood-clot. Nobody expects you to keep up with my massive, James Clerk Maxwell-Type thinking machine. I've spent over 50 years making sure that my brain-muscle can choke yours out, so don't be embarrassed!

So, are you all rested up? Great! No obscene growth pop out of the forehead while you slept last night? Excellent! Because it's time for some of Honkie-Jim's elementary algebra! You caught a huge fish at the derby; a sure winner of the grand prize! But while you were dancing around, passing out pattie-slaps to your homies, some people you owe cut it up into three pieces and ran away with it. You caught one of them, and the other two were kind enough to give you some information on their pieces. The end result is that you know that the head of the fish weighs nine pounds. You know that the body weighs as much as the head and the tail together. You know that the tail weighs as much as the head and half the body. How much does the whole fish weigh?

You can't figure it out unless you can write the equation for it, so I'll give you that: Body = Head + Tail. This is not enough to solve the problem because the weight of the tail includes some of the body. So we have to expand on this equation like so: B = H + (H+1/2 B) inside the parenthesis is a more concise definition of T. Now, in algebra, we know we can add, subtract, multiply and divide any equation, as long as we do the same to both sides. Thus, the problem becomes trivial if we simply subtract Â" B from both sides (1/2 B = 9 + 9). Okay, forget that problem, maybe I'm the one who had an embolism. Try this instead: Your community service entails making you work for a farmer. He gives you $100 to buy 100 chickens. He tells you to buy at least one of each; spend all the money; come back with exactly 100 chickens. Roosters cost $5, hens cost $1.00, and chicks cost $.05. How many of each satisfies these directions? HINT: "Diophantine Analysis."

If you got wore out by doing that one, without using logic first, you probably are in no shape to use the law of intersecting chords: A * A' = B * B' To calibrate a measuring stick for a cylindrical gasoline tank lying on it side. No matter; we, meaning you, got a good mental workout already. So here's one for tomorrow, when you may need another dose of fresh air: There's a refrigerator with its door off in a perfectly insulated, closed room. No heat can get in or out. It's plugged up and running. So, what is happening to the air in the room? Does it get hotter, colder, or stay the same temperature?

If you need a hint, see "entropy," while thinking about electricity.

Now that was some fresh air, agree?