Paging Doctor Spock

According to Einstein, the putative creator of this puzzle, 98% of the people in the world aren’t able to figure out an answer. Are you in the illustrious / deeply nerdy 2%?

The Facts:
1. There are five houses in a row in different colors.
2. In each house lives a person with a different nationality.
3. The five owners drink a different drink, smoke a different brand of cigar and keep a different pet, one of which is a Walleye Pike.

The Question:
Who owns the fish?

Some Hints:
1. The Brit lives in the red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The green house is on the left of the white house.
5. The green house owner drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes Pall Malls keeps birds.
7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhills.
8. The man living in the house right in the center drinks milk.
9. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
10. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next to the one who smokes Dunhills.
12. The owner who smokes Bluemasters drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Princes.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.

Yes, this is solvable with the information provided; I banged out the answer in about ten minutes.

Also, I hate puzzles.

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People are always telling me their life stories and they always tell me they have done so because I am a good listener. In fact I am a terrible listener, I don’t listen to a word: what I am doing is looking like I am listening while concentrating all my energy on not listening, on finding some refuge beyond what is being said. It is easy to be a good listener in America: all you have to do is not interrupt and it is easy not to interrupt when you are not paying attention.

– Geoff Dyer

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Ass Gasket

A few days ago, skimming through the always excellent Ask Metafilter, I stumbled across a great post asking about America’s quirks as seen by foreigners.

A slew of international readers weighed in, listing the number of American flags in non-civic setting, the giant portion sizes, that cigarettes are sold at drug stores with news agents and tobacconist shops nowhere to be seen.

And then, one said: paper toilet seat covers.

And I thought: paper toilet seat covers?!? Certainly, we must not be the only country using them. The very idea of pooping sans-paper struck me viscerally as below barbaric. Were all of these foreign people raised by wolves?

But a bit of cursory Googling confirmed the usual; we’re the ones who are really the barbarians here. Toilet seats, it seems, are actually far cleaner than faucets, door handles, toilet paper rolls, even office desks and workstations. And, further, it’s essentially impossible to catch anything from a toilet seat, regardless of germ content. From the Mayo Clinic and the CDC on down, the consensus was clear: the seat covers are an odd Americanism, a placebo at best.

(Also discovered in that Googling: women’s bathrooms apparently have twice as many germs as men’s, and men, who get the bum rap for supposedly carelessly peeing on toilet seats, are actually much less likely to do so; we lift the seat when peeing, whereas germaphobic women apparently pop a high squat hovering over the seat and pee all over the place. The fairer sex indeed.)

Of course, I’m not alone in my faith in the power of the toilet seat cover. A USA Today poll showed that nearly 90 percent of Americans erroneously believe diseases can be transmitted by sitting on toilet seats. Which is why, perhaps, even armed with the knowledge that I’m accomplishing nothing by doing so, in the days since discovering this all, I’ve continued to paper up – I just also feel vaguely guilty and foolish for doing so. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

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Rolling

A month or so back, Greenlig.ht moved into new, larger digs – a sublet space in NoMad. (For those keeping score, that’s North of Madison [Square Park], the central upper 20’s. My brother maintains that you can make any New York neighborhood hot just by renaming it with a smart acronym, and therefore suggests buying up property at the [otherwise rather financial and stodgy] southern tip of Manhattan, then rebranding it as NOSFERATU – North of the South Ferry Terminal – then raking in the returns. But I digress.)

The new space, which is fairly cavernous, belongs originally to a guerrilla marketing firm that’s since moved most of their team out of town. We’ve taken over the majority of the floor, but the marketing guys have hung on to a couple of desks at one end, and continue to use the office to store all kinds of previously-used guerrilla marketing stuff.

Our conference room, for example, is divided off by a wall of giant CRT TVs, once used in the early 90’s as an MTV advertising installation. The waiting area features both a Shark Week table (missing the requisite great-white-bite-shaped chunk) and a giant Dunkin’ Donut.

And, most interestingly, the space houses a small fleet of Segways.

When the Segway first came out, I was dying to ride one. But, as the Segway craze quickly passed, I started to think I’d lost my chance. Until, walking into this new space, I discovered a dozen of them, neatly lined up and plugged into wall jacks. They looked a bit worse for the wear, held together in some places by layered duct tape, but they were real, honest-to-God Segways nonetheless.

My Greenlig.ht colleagues and I have, obviously, taken the Segways for countless spins around the office: straightforward drag racing, obstacle-laden steeplechases, even Segway polo, using rulers to smack around Bank of America promotional rubber bouncy balls.

Yes, it holds itself upright, and, yes, it’s impressive to control forward and backward motion by leaning rather than by gas or break. But actually steering the thing, using it in a real-life situation, feels clunky, unwieldy, mildly unsafe.

A few weeks in, it’s clear to me why the Segway never really took off. It wasn’t too much hype, or not enough, or even the rather high price tag. It was that, well, Segways kind of suck.

As the old saw goes, you can’t polish a turd. It’s a good reminder that business, while not easy, is at least simple: if marketing won’t save you, there’s not much you can do but make a truly excellent product in the first place.

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