I've Got a Good Feeling About This

You've probably seen this video clip by now. It's a fairly amazing feat, but as Chris Jones explains, the contestant's reasoning leads to a fairly certain answer. As an experiment, I explained the game and the situation with this puzzle in three separate classes I taught today, with between one and six students each. With a little prodding, (circling the _'__ and _) each group was able to solve the puzzle within a couple minutes. These are groups of non-native English speakers, and certainly not big English-language puzzle fans. All the groups looked at it as an impossible task, but realized it wasn't as difficult as it seemed at first. An interesting reflection on possibility and appearances.

Shoe-wax lipbalm

It's getting cold and the air is dry here in Sweden, and since we were at a pharmacy last weekend we decided to pick up a tube of a new lip balm. (why is it pictured upside-down on their website?) The cashier sold us on the lanolin content, and reading the Norwegian description I picked up on the beeswax content too. (Oddly, beeswax wasn't mentioned in the Swedish description.) I told the cashier that it sounded a lot like my shoe wax, and there was a good laugh all around.

After coming home, I decided to compare the labels more closely. Indeed, both my "universal lederbalsam" and Decubal Dry Spots Balm share almost their entire ingredients list:

Beeswax (cera alba), lanolin, paraffinum liquidum (petroleum jelly), petrolatum, and castor oil (ricinus communis oil) are the basic components in both the shoe wax, selling for €80 per liter (note the price tag on mine was in Swedish kronor, making it actually significantly cheaper than the suggested retail price), and the lip balm, which at 65 kr for 30ml makes it about €230 per liter. It's hard to say what the exact proportions of the two compounds are, but they have a similar texture and odor. I suppose the Decubal has more lanolin, which can't be cheap. (Unrelated: In Sweden there's a whole ad campaign based on the premise that "cheap" sounds like "sheep" in English. Ridiculous.)

Anyway, something to ponder.

It's not a pizza until it comes out of the oven!

We made pumpkin pizza last night, with a nice pumpkin-base sauce and smoked wild boar. My daughter wanted to add cucumbers, so I let her put one on a corner, and showed her one of my favorite Seinfeld clips:

Zombie Bicycle Thief

$6 for a tube and $10 for labor?