John Mahar's Blog

Education, Spanish, Travel, Poems, Bonnaroo reports, and more.

Saturday, July 15, 2006

well, news from my friend brian. he´s in peru, and while his adventurous exploits pale in comparison to mine, i thought i´d let you know about some of the things that have been happening. although, as his girlfriend pointed out, the things he has to tell are pretty ridiculous. Apparently, the two most exciting things on the trip so far have been doing math puzzles with some Columbians and rolling a giant rock down a hill. Brian swears the rock is ¨the size of a VW bug with the front and back cut off,¨ but, if we use some of his damn logic math puzzles, isn´t a car with the front and the back cut off completely gone? I shouldn´t nitpick. Supposedly he and his friend both knocked keystones from either side of this rock out at the same time to send it bouncing destructively down into the valley 3000 or more feet below. ¨It sounded like airplanes taking off for five minutes,¨he said. The Columbians had quite a puzzle, which he relayed to me in spanish, so I pretended to understand and nodded and smiled. Good puzzle. One of them was a math professor and the other a student of the professor. They argued like cats and dogs over the solution to a probability puzzle that, even after having been shown to be wrong, the young Columbian, while saying goodbye to Brian, remarked, ¨the chance is 50-50, period.¨
Now he´s off to fetch a dead body from the hills, or so he says. I never quite know when he´s truthing or lying.