What I’m offering to you this week has all sorts of possible applications. Feel free to apply it to fit your particular situation.
A couple of weeks ago I described my wife’s challenge of assembling her 2,000-piece jigsaw puzzle Christmas present.
Go back to the WW II era, when the Allies were struggling to solve the Nazi’s Enigma device challenge. It was the Polish mathematician and cryptologist Marian Rejewski who began to decipher its secret messages. If he were alive today, I don’t think he could cope with the evil prank I’m about to describe.
Suppose you wanted to inflict revenge on the person who dinged your car without owning up to it, or bilked you out of your retirement savings, or had a mongrel that got your purebred pregnant.
Here’s what you do. Purchase two different 2,000 or more piece jigsaw puzzles. Preferably, both would contain similar scenes with lots of almost uniform foliage consisting of a dozen almost identical shades of green. Divide the contents of both boxes in half, thus creating two sets of pieces.
Gift wrap the 50-50 mix in one of the original boxes, then find a way of anonymously presenting it to your two victims.
My victim number one would be that Putin fellow. His puzzle would be made of two map puzzles, one a map of Russia, the other a map of Ukraine. Eventually he would learn that the two can never be one.
What to do with the second mix puzzle? It’s too late to send it to Hitler, or Jack the Ripper, or that ex-president who wants a crack at another term. (I don’t think that last one could even assemble a ten-piece jigsaw puzzle.) I’d have the second puzzle delivered to Vladimir’s Kremlin office.
I’d have Amazon drop one off the door of
his dacha retreat. If only I could have the pleasure of watching his futile struggle to put the two half puzzles together. He’d have no more success than his current futile effort to make Ukraine part of Russia.
Putting the unmatchable pieces together would be as easy as the challenge in the children’s nursery rhyme, “Humpty Dumpty had a great fall…All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.”
