But here’s the twist.  We both know that at a certain point, usually five or ten minutes after we leave the house, I will turn around and go home.  We both know that leaving smelly surprises around the house are not an acceptable gift for our family.  The last piece of information, by the way, works both ways.  She knows that I would find it difficult to come home and report to the boss (my wife that is) that the dog came back leaving absolutely nothing in the street.  She concludes therefore, that I will keep going until she does something.  And she’s not completely wrong, unless of course some show is about to start in a few minutes (she has no access to this confidential information).

So there we are, out in the cold street.  I want to go back home, she wants to stay out.  We look at each other and the game starts.  She walks around, and in front of my hopeful eyes gets to position.  She smells the hope and decides to go sniff something new.  Disappointment.  A few more steps, and she starts to go around as if to find the exact hole in the ground which will serve as tonight’s toilet.  She sits in the strange way dogs sit when they’re about to introduce a new smelly surprise to the world, she even looks at me with reassurance as if to say: “don’t worry, you’ll get to watch your stupid show in a minute”.  But then that bastard neighbor’s dog shows up and they’re at each other’s behind sniffing as if Chanel number 5 is a thing of the past.  The last phenomenon probably explains why our dog Linda smells the same on both ends.  Disappointment.

That’s the point that I really give up, go home, and take the risk that what happened the other night would happen again.  What happened was that I woke up at 4:00 AM thinking that in my absence, my wife had accepted a homeless horse with some serious bowel issues as a house guest.  Instead, as it turned out, our dog, who had won the game that night, chose to leave a hefty pile of warm crap in the entrance to my youngest son’s room.  And there I was, 4:00 AM, in front of a busy work day, collecting warm and stinking pieces of fresh dung, cleaning and washing the floor, opening the windows to the cold night air.  What really struck me that night was that my expectation was for a 12 lbs dog to leave behind a few ounces of poop.  Instead, I saw a pile that resembles only large zoo animals production, or alternatively, large farm animals.  How the hell could this outstanding amount come out of such little dog.  Truthfully, I started thinking about accomplices, but then dismissed it as a crazy thought of a tired person at 4:00 AM.

We’re negotiating a truce.  I do hope that we can compromise.  Forget the TV and the dosing off.  Walk me all you want, just leave my house crap free.

The supermarket is another game I play with my wife.  She prepares a list of groceries for me, and I go get it every Friday morning after I drop the kids off at school.  I know the supermarket’s pretty well.  I know where almost everything is.  When I get in, I park the cart right inside the store, and I get the list out.  I study the list,  trying to memorize it.  My objective is to make a single pass of the store, getting everything the first time.  Never returning to the same aisle.  Dorit, who’s playing the game remotely, has a completely opposite objective.  Her objective is to to have me walk around the huge store, grabbing one product at the time, moving on to the other side of the store as the cart gets heavier and heavier and its front left wheel gets nastier and nastier with each turn.  The best is at the meats section.  One must take a number and wait the long line.  Once you use your turn to get whatever kind of meat you need, the turn is over forever, and realizing that somewhere down the list another kind was somewhere else on the list (why????), I must take another number and wait the line again.

I end up at the check out line behind the only old lady in the Middle East who still uses checks for grocery shopping.  Did I mention already that the definition of game is to determine a winner?  In my dog and supermarket game theory, the objective is to determine a loser.  Me.

1. If one wanted to surround the earth with rope, he will need roughly 40,000 km of rope.  What if he wanted to have the rope 1 meter away from the ground, how much additional rope is needed?

2. A father of three was on his deathbed.  He was the owner of seventeen camels.  He wrote a will: “please give half my camels to my older son, a third to the middle son, and two ninths to the youngest”.  The brothers were utterly and totally confused.  They didn’t know how to execute the will.  Finally they went to a wise lady who lived close by.  She solved the problem for them.  Can you guess what her solution was?

As I said, solutions and insights next week.

Riddle number 1.  If one wanted to surround the earth with rope, he will need roughly 40,000 km of rope.  What if he wanted to have the rope 1 meter away from the ground, how much rope will he need?  Amazingly, the answer is with 2*pi rope which is roughly 6.28 meters, you can get the rope to be 1 meter away from the ground.  So with even less than 10 meters, you could easily get a donkey to crawl under…

The circumference of the earth is roughly 40,000 km.  This makes the radius roughly 6,366 km.  Your question is basically to increase the radius by 1 meter or to make it 6366001 meters.

6366000*2*pi = 39998757.665505247

6366001*2*pi = 39998763.948690554

763.9486 – 757.6655 = 6.2831 (roughly 2*pi)

Increase the radius by 1 meter will yield an additional 6.28 in the circumference.  (Easy for a donkey, harder for an elephant…

Riddle number 2.  This one has some insights.  The old lady suggested that they take her only camel – as a gift.  They did, and suddenly everything worked out.  The older son received nine camels, the middle son six, and the younger one – two.  But when they came to actually split the inheritance, they couldn’t help noticing that there was one camel extra.  Naturally, they returned it to the old wise lady…

Insights? don’t rush to conclusions before you understand the problem and have a chance to work it.  Another one: sometimes you need a physical help to solve a problem, when virtual help is perfectly sufficient.

1. If one wanted to surround the earth with rope, he will need roughly 40,000 km of rope.  What if he wanted to have the rope 1 meter away from the ground, how much additional rope is needed?

2. A father of three was on his deathbed.  He was the owner of seventeen camels.  He wrote a will: “please give half my camels to my older son, a third to the middle son, and two ninths to the youngest”.  The brothers were utterly and totally confused.  They didn’t know how to execute the will.  Finally they went to a wise lady who lived close by.  She solved the problem for them.  Can you guess what her solution was?

As I said, solutions and insights next week.