MIND BENDERS

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With her nefarious plans foiled to get me falling out of the sky on a microlight flight, or being bumped off by whales, Younger Daughter decided the next step was to mess with my mind. She gave me, as one of her Christmas presents, this bar and ten rings thingy. 

 

  It is a version of Chinese torture. Almost all of my time in the hospital recently was taken up in nearly, but not quite, solving it.  It is utterly fiendish. Unfortunately, I got myself locked into one wrong move near the beginning each time, which means that the wrong links are released for the thing to work out.  It has to go all the way backwards and then forwards again in a series of lurching steps.

   Finally, I cracked it, but only after I got back home.  Then I had the fun of working out how to do it all in reverse so as to reattach all the rings. Such fun!  Below you see it starting to shed some of its rings.

 

   From a Christmas cracker I got this puzzle keyring, seen in bits in the first pic. That, too, is a very cunning mind-muddler. One looks at all those bits and cannot conceive that they can possibly form a cube.  Actually, the way in which they fit together is simple – you just have to shunt the pieces into an alternative dimension and then translate them back again in quark time via a cyberstatic wormhole through a supernova. The pieces one initially fits look as though they can have no conceivable relationship with one another, much less that they will marry. Mind you, some married couples seem like that, too.

   Anyway, the puzzles both make a handy variation from Scrabble, Sudoku, crosswords, and quadratic equations for keeping the mental processes active.  

© Colonialist Jan 2012 (Letterdash/WordPress)