Mt Whitney Zone Forums The Chat Room What In The World Happened Here?

Second clue: This was not the original cube farm...

Damn! I was reading Dilbert strips trying to figure out if a character was based on that fellow.

Do I need to look up the first clue?

Answer: What In The World Happened Here? LXXXIX: (89)

This was the entrance to "Harry", the successful tunnel in the Great Escape. Paul Brickhill wrote the book. The movie starring Steve McQueen took a lot of liberties with the facts - at least as far as motorcycles were involved. Although only three tunnelers returned to England, the war effort in Germany was affected by the half a million soldiers and police required to conduct a search for the escapees. Fifty escapees were shot by the Nazis in cold blood. Stalag Luft III was evacuated on the anniversary of the posting.

XCIII (93) Do I need to look up the first clue?

Yes. Confusion reigns.

Just to be clear, Harry began under the stove in the original picture for this puzzle.

Hint: In the picture, the old man is 101.

What In The World Happened Here? XCV (95):

What In The World Happened Here? XCV (95):


I'm pretty sure that must be the Lord's Cricket Field where the Starship Bistromath landed and was hidden with the use of an SEP Field (Somebody Else's Problem)....but I could be wrong

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Douglas Adams has his character Ford Prefect describe Somebody Else's Problem in Life, the Universe and Everything, the third book in the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series:

An SEP is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem.... The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won't see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye.
The technology involved in making something properly invisible is so mind-bogglingly complex that 999,999,999 times out of a billion it's simpler just to take the thing away and do without it....... The "Somebody Else's Problem field" is much simpler, more effective, and "can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery."
This is because it relies on people's natural predisposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain.
In this case, the Starship Bistromath ("a small upended Italian bistro" with "guidance fins, rocket engines and escape hatches") has been hidden from the crowd watching a Cricket match at Lord's by an SEP field. People may see it, but they take absolutely no notice of it.

The book says that the SEP field is derived from Bistromathics and in particular the concept of an imaginary number called a "recipriversexcluson" whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. Modern science has been slow to investigate this further, though Professor John Wettlaufer (of Yale University) has apparently observed that it is very important for physicists working outside the mainstream "to have a genuine interest in learning about someone else's problem." However, he admitted that "not many people want to do this."[10]

Good answer, tdtz, but what really happened here is just about as improbable as the Bistromath. (HHGTTG seems to be a recurring theme around here.) Recipriversexcluson sounds a lot like the Windows mutex.

"Lord's Cricket Field" - 1 out of 3 is OK for Baseball but not so good in Cricket.

Here is the wiki for Lord's Cricket Ground. If you look at the stats, you'll see that Lord's has a really strong home ground record.

wagga,
Damn! I was so sure that I was going to get that one right!

Answer: What In The World Happened Here? XCI: (91)

The (Non-native) trees are on San Miguel Island at Cuyler Harbor.

There was a movie link, too:

"Cuyler WAS used as a location for the 1935 filming of Mutiny on the Bounty but the crew "mutinied" over the remoteness of the location, bad weather (a crew member was reportedly swept overboard and lost), and the constant wind. The site was abandoned in favor of the Isthmus at Catalina."

SteveC & I lead a Sierra Club outing there last century, with 9 backpackers. It was in July, and we were the first campers on the entire island that year. We had a phenomenal trip out, the water was like a mill pond and we could see a long way up the coast. The ranger stated that he had never seen such conditions in his 12 years on the island.

We hiked out to Point Bennett and slaughtered a pineapple or 2 and had a great time.

We like to point out that Tongass Forest in Alaska - a long ways off - gets around 10,000 visitors a year. San Miguel, only 55 miles from Greater LA, gets around 200 campers.

I think everybody is stumped on this one: You are looking for something unique.

does "stumped" = amputee = Special Olympics ?

can't help make that conclusion as I sit here with my 10 week old titanium and polyethylene knee

Well, ok. I think that we established earlier that it was the site of the 1900 Summer Olympics. The most unique feature was that they were the only Olympic Games not run by the IOC. Control was handed over to a special committee associated with the 1900 Exposition Universelle.

At the center of the picture is the Velodrome de Vincennes. It was the main stadium for the Games, although Athletics (or, as we Yanks say, Track and Field) was contested elsewhere. The velodrome was also the finish of the Tour de France from 1968 - 1974, a period that included the five victories of Eddy Merckx.

If it wasn't in London and it must be a cricket stadium, it was time to look Down Under again.

Was there a riot there?

Whoa Steve, that one is too easy.

Cricket Riot? About as improbable as hooking up a Giant Marlin from a kayak.

So you're saying that anything can happen once? At least Down Under.

Jim Murray was a sports writer for the LA Times. Had he not gone with the casual version of his name (and had he also grown a long white beard), he might have taken on more formal writing projects, like a major league dictionary. But someone beat him to it. An ancestor?