A PUZZLING CONCLUSION

BY KEN WEBER

A mobile fish market

When the Toronto Grey & Bruce Railway extended its line from Orangeville to Owen Sound in 1873, a Georgian Bay fisherman rented flatcar space on the afternoon southbound freight and began operating a weekly mobile fish market using barrels of dry ice to keep his inventory fresh. On the very first run he sold out of whitefish at the Shelburne station while at Orangeville, customers bought much of the pike and pickerel. Farther south at Caledon, smelt was a big hit and at the Mono Road station several people bought lampreys. When the train reached Bolton there was just one customer at the station. She quickly noted the names of the fish and their prices shown with the barrels and calculated that bass would be only 2 cents a pound, a real bargain, so she bought the entire stock. How did she know the price of bass?

WHITEFISH 23¢ SMELT 19¢ PICKEREL 16¢ PIKE 16¢ LAMPREYS 12¢ BASS

Alphabet country

When arranged in proper order, the string of letters below will present the names of three different European countries. Each one is a member of the European Union and each can be reached by ship on the same large and storied sea. Just to make the puzzle a bit more interesting, one letter in the string is superfluous.

L T I N A A M P E S T Y I L A A

The sock drawer

If you know that of the eight different patterns of socks jammed into the drawer, there are exactly four pairs of each pattern including hearts, then you also know the smallest number of socks you would have to pull out of the drawer, if the room is pitch black and you wanted to be absolutely sure you have pulled at least three heart ones.

Sweet seven

Use the seven clues to find and then anagram letters in the honeycomb graph to make seven regular English words, each seven letters long. The letters used for each word must be in circles of adjacent cells, as shown in the example (the answer to Clue #1).

Some letters will be used in more than one word. Four letters in the honeycomb are not needed. One of them is ‘W’.

1 — To lead an orchestra 2 — To tease persistently 3 — A stop on the way 4 — One more 5 — Consumed excessively 6 — A small pad 7 — To express disapproval

You’re awake? Then try these

1

Emilio is running from home as fast as he can. He makes a sharp left turn, does it again – then again – and is suddenly confronted by two people in masks! Who are they?

2

What’s the affectionate message here? A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T V W X Y Z 3

You know what these are: O T T F F And these: M T W T F These too: J F M A M What are these? M I N T S 4

You have two coins totalling 35¢. One is not a dime. What are the coins?

5

There are five friends in Mia’s kitchen as she makes lasagna. Kate is playing chess and Caleb is reading while Veet watches a soap on TV. What is Perry doing?

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