Excuses, excuses

I know, I know.  There you were on Friday, waiting for a review, and nothing happened.  Disappointment is part of life.  Deal with it.

 But seriously, I had a nice follow-up post to Wednesday’s math problem all lined up, but it’s a long weekend over here, and the wife was released early from school, and there were DVDs and snuggling under blankets in the freezing weather and good red wine…you get the picture.  I’m also taking a short break from reviews.  I’m finally making progress with my academic reading with the result that I’m not reading much fiction at present and I want to spread out the reviews I have lined up a little so I don’t run out of them before my reading catches up.

ostrich
Say what now? (Photo credit: I am marlon)

Yesterday was more of the same and today’s no good either:  My dear old mum is turning sixty this week and my sister and her husband have come up for the celebrations.  The wife and I are on our way to me mum’s now for an early birthday dinner consisting of ostrich neck and oxtail stew and whatever my sister decided to whip up to complement that.  (Have you ever eaten ostrich?  It’s yummy.  Almost indistinguishable from beef, except that it has almost no fat, thus the few pieces of oxtail in the stew – it runs the risk of being too dry without it.)

Tomorrow is Youth Day in South Africa.  I wrote a post about it last year, so tomorrow will be business as usual with the next Song Title Challenge.

Also happening this week is me and the missus’s (man, that’s a lot of s’s) fifth wedding anniversary, but more on that later.

In the meantime, see if you can solve this riddle.  After you’ve selected your answer in the poll, click the link to see what I believe is the correct answer.

Oh, and happy Father’s Day to all the dad’s out there.  Have a great one.

Only for geniuses...If:        2 = 6
           3 = 12
           4 = 20
           5 = 30
           6 = 42
Then:      9 = ?

Select an answer here:

7 thoughts on “Excuses, excuses”

  1. I have it! 9 is a dream. John Lennon said so (and ‘No. 9 Dream’ is my entry for the next Song Title Challenge!):

    I voted, incidentally. Yesterday I thought the answer was 90, which it is in strict arithmetic/sequential terms… but there are better answers than that…

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    1. I like that answer. It fits perfectly with the illogic of the rest of the problem.

      I’d better hold off on watching the video until I’ve written the story. Genre?

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      1. Given it was Lennon… genre is ‘surreal’.

        I can never think of Lennon, incidentally, without two things coming to mind. One is that I had my last ever formal music lesson on the day he was shot – the news was arriving here in NZ just as I got home from the lesson. The other is that Frank Zappa performed on stage with Lennon and Ono in 1971 and each released the piece on respective albums of their own. Zappa retitled it ‘A Small Eternity with Yoko Ono’ when he finally released it on his ‘Playground Psychotics’ album. Having now heard the number, it’s an apt title…

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      2. Sci-fi it is, then 😀

        I actually know very little of Lennon’s (and the Beatles’s) music. They were not what you would call popular in the right-wing Afrikaner culture of the old South Africa in which I grew up and my first exposure to their music was only really after high school (except for “Yellow Submarine” – that one seems to have been on the radio since forever). Zappa I didn’t know about until I started reading your blog. Still haven’t decided if I like his music. It’s something different, though, and as commercialised and as “same” as music is becoming these days that’s always good.

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  2. You forgot 9 = Finite = Alright. (That song really was track 9 on the CD…)

    The serious mathematical answer I’d give to that puzzle also wasn’t included. I would say “not 9” because it matches the illogic of the hypothetical without assuming any mathematical function that is not even hinted at in the riddle.

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    1. You should read the comment on the previous post which convincingly argues that, given the illogic of the original problem, nine could be equal to absolutely anything.

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