Riddling Rubiks

So when we were young, about every Chinese New Year we had to head down to Johor for the annual hometown visit. The trips up and down, at that time over 15 years back, were terrible...we got carsick every single time. So it was a Pavlovian response to have us going rubbery in the knees at the thought of a 6-hour trip to JB, with the prospect of us having plastic bags always at the ready. Not that we always end up barfing but we'll definitely feel poorly till we finally arrive at grandmum's place. It was a good thing that such trips would be for a week or so too, if it was a 2-day trip or so we would never, ever head down to JB or Singapore unless we were flying, even now as we're all grown up.

Incidentally, we used to have darn good bladder control in those days. Those were the days where the carbonated drinks also come in them glass bottles, we thinks you only find soda water in these kind of bottles nowadays? So there'll be bottles of these in the car, and we'll have sapu-ed a fair lot of those without needing a pit stop. Nowadays, we still drink plenty but we stop plenty too. Sigh. Age.

Well while the trips were bad in those days the time at grandmum's wasn't so bad. Asides from the garang-looking uncle, a couple of mischevious cousins, almost all relatives speaking in Cantonese (yes yes regardless of how long we've been exposed to the language we're still hopeless), there was the chance that we would make a day trip to Singapore, fireworks, some shopping, or that our aunt from UK would be visiting (with souvenirs, of course).

And so back in the old house, in the store room under the stairs there's this small table where a drawer would be full of CNY memorabilia. Game & Watches, playing cards, and Rubiks games.

UK-Aunt brought back puzzles with her, a different one for all of us. And so in the drawer we have...Rubik's Cube, Rubik's Magic, and Rubik's Clock.

Rubik's Cube we're sure you know. In fact we lost the Cube, and so happened that we found a decent-looking unoriginal Rubik's Cube in...Curve Bazaar we thinks. Decent we say, because there be some other's that have horrible colours that'll blind us as we attempt to solve it. We've never solved it all the time we had one before, because our fiddlings were essentially just random rotations until we got all the colours on one side. Managing two sides and we would be happy. But never, of course, attempted to systematically work our way with the thing - never had the patience as a kid (well probably not even now...). Although finally we've managed to solve the Cube - but still have no idea how it actually goes. There were a bit of pointers and after much backtracking we'd just gotten it back to it's starting state. Gonna mess it up again to work on it.

How about Rubik's Magic and Rubik's Clock? The point of Rubik's Magic was to link up the three separate rings, like so.

Magic was probably the only one we ever solved, and by accident the first time too. There were times when the puzzle got so damned screwed up that we almost gave it up for a lost cause. But it got solved and we were happy that we managed, and then delegated the puzzle to other things, like becoming a chair.

As for Clock, the objective was to have all 9 clocks on both faces pointing at 12 o'clock. We also never had the patience to sit and figure it out other than randomly plugging the dials. And now when we might be interested to try, the mechanism's broken or something. :S

Oh well. Now, where are all our other little puzzles, like the metal ones or the wooden bits with string? Gotta ransack the room darnit.