A Ton of Fun

Use each clue to identify a famous person who last name ends in the letters T-O-N, like George Washington.

1. Friends star
2. Cotton Club bandleader
3. Batman and Beetlejuice lead
4. Blonde, buxom country music legend

Halfway there!

5. Steamboat developer
6. Author of The Age of Innocence
7. Found of a Kmart rival and a Club
8. She lead a news website called The (her last name) Post

1. Jennifer Aniston
2. Duke Ellington
3. Michael Keaton
4. Dolly Parton

Did you do well so far?

5. Robert Fulton
6. Edith Wharton
7. Sam Walton
8. Arianna Huffington

Posted in Brain Teasers

An Ancient Invention

What ancient invention allows people to see through walls?

A window.

Posted in Riddles

Lucrezia Borgia

Lucrezia Borgia invited a prospective victim to lunch. They ate a hearty meal of roast venison, with a selection of fresh vegetables, all washed down with the finest wine imported from Bordeaux, France.

After the meal, they ate figs and freshly picked grapes.

“Just one apple left”, said Lucrezia, “I insist you have it.

“No”, said the guest, “I couldn’t”.

“Tell you what”, said Lucrezia, “we’ll share it”, and promptly sliced the apple in two with her sharpest knife. The guest and Lucrezia started to eat their respective halves when the guest’s eyes rolled towards the ceiling and he fell over, dead.

“Another victim successfully dispatched,” thought Lucrezia.

How did she do it?

She used a knife coated on just one edge with cyanide. When she sliced the apple in two, only the victim’s half was poisoned.

Posted in Brain Teasers

I’m Something You Might Eat But I Also Kill

I’m something you might eat, but I also kill.
I can cause blindness and burns.
Because of me, people lose limbs.
I’ve even been known to crash cars.

And yet I’m considered beautiful
Small children play with me and parents don’t mind.
Some people even live inside of me.

What am I?

Snow. Every kid has taken a bite of snow, but thousands of people die every year in snowstorms. Watch out for photokeratitis, otherwise known as snow blindness. And if you’re exposed to snow for too long, you can lose limbs to frostbite. Just an inch or two of snow makes them treacherous.

A recent snowfall makes the world white, and kids love to build snowmen, snow forts and have snowball fights. Some people live in igloos, built out of snow.

Posted in Riddles

Never Stolen, Owned By All

I can never be stolen from you.
I am owned by everyone.
Some have more, some have less.

What am I?

Knowledge.

Posted in Riddles
Tagged with

The Ages of a Prince and Princess

A princess is as old as the prince will be when the princess is twice the age that the prince was when the princess’s age was half the sum of their present ages.

What are their ages?

This one took a while to figure out and there are numerous valid ways of finding the answer.

Here is the solution I came up with

I created the following table from the riddle:

 CurrentFuturePast
Princessx2z(x+y)/2
Princeyxz

I then created three equations, since the difference in their age will always be the same.
d = the difference in ages
x – y = d
2z – x = d
x/2 + y/2 – z = d

I then created a matrix and solved it using row reduction.

xyz
1-10d
-102d
.5.5-1d

It reduced to:

xyz
1004d
0103d
0015d/2

This means that you can pick any difference you want (an even one presumably because you want integer ages).
Princess age: 4d
Prince age: 3d

Ages that work

PrincessPrince
43
86
1612
2418
3224
4030
4836
5642
6448
7254
8060

To see other solutions check out the comments from when I posted this on my blog.

Posted in Brain Teasers

Sometimes I Enter With a Gong

I’m a word, six letters long,
I sometimes enter with a gong.

All in order from A to Z,
I start with the letter B.

What is the word?

Begins

It has six letters, when a meditation begins they sound the gong, and the letters are in alphabetical order.

Posted in Riddles
Tagged with

Stars Awash in a Sheen of Light

Stars awash in a sheen of light
It calls out loud in vile delight.
Listeners endure in fright.
Vicious brute that reigns at night,
Evil whelped of heinous bite,
Renewed by wax, it regains might.
A leading way to slay the beast,
Get the hidden weapon thus released.

What is this describing?
Hint: The first letter of each line has a clue

A werewolf (vulnerable to silver bullets).

Posted in Riddles

Same Forward, Backward and Upside Down

What word is the same written forward, backward and upside down?

NOON. The word needs to be a palindrome and made up of only these letters that look the same upside down:

H I N O S X Z

For instance, SOON doesn’t work, because even though each letter looks the same upside down, it reads NOOS.

Posted in Riddles

Sleeping Killer

A man gets ready for bed at 9:45 pm. He makes himself a drink, then turns off the TV and the lights. The night was windy and there was a major storm. The next day he discovers he was the cause of seven deaths. How is this possible?

He lived in a lighthouse as lighthouse keeper. He turned off all the lights by accident, so a ship with 7 passengers couldn’t negotiate the rocky shores. One would think the light switches in a lighthouse would be more clearly marked.

Posted in Brain Teasers