The Alchemist's Lab, deep in the bowels of the BBC.............

Chris Maslanka's warm-up puzzles

1. I draw something on a piece of paper and I look at it through a magnifying glass but it is not magnified. What might I have drawn?

2. Find 2 letters which will go in the same order in front of: LC, ES or DM and the 3 letters in the same order that go again after all of those to make 3 of a kind.

3. We may look for questions in an alchemist's laboratory but answers may be found there too. Now which two answers may they be?

Rob Eastaway

4. You have 2 pieces of fuse wire, and when you set light to the end of either of these pieces they both take exactly one hour to burn through. Find a way of using both pieces of fuse wire to measure exactly three quarters of an hour.

Val Gilbert

5. We have four people: Jack Wax, Ann Pit, Joe Brown and John Carrot. They get stoned and following that there are eight people. How did they get stoned and who are the eight people?

David Bodycombe

6. David has a monster that lives in his basement. The problem is that this monster can only say numbers, so it asks for certain types of food by grunting a number. If it wants a vegetable it will grunt 16 at David, if it wants a bird it will grunt 10 and if it wants to eat an insect it will snarl 2. The same logic applies to drinks. If it wants a hot beverage it will grunt 20. One day David asked it what it wanted to eat and it grunted 21. What should David do?

Chris Maslanka

7. Find single-word anagrams of:

   1. Lioness

   2. African lion

The Panel Beater this week came from R.M. Bass of Cranham in Gloucestershire.

8. How do you place a fairy light or any other small object at the geometrical centre of a perfectly ordinary, undistorted inflated round balloon but still remaining outside it?

Chris Maslanka's listeners' puzzle

9. Igor and the cakes. Frankenstein often sends Igor down to the valley to Ye Olde Village Bakery which is run by Friar Tuckshop. Both the Friar and the Baron know that Igor can't resist scoffing some of the cakes en route, so the Friar normally writes on the box a little note 'this box contains so many cakes', so many being how ever many there are. On this occasion Igor eats a third of the cakes and intelligently doctors the message on the box by adding a single stroke of the pen. The baron has a good idea of how many cakes there were, and how many Igor had eaten. But the puzzle is this - the Friar has written down the number of cakes in the box. What single pen stroke will allow Igor to scoff a third of the cakes without detection? How many were there in the box?

*****

Happy Puzzling!

Please address any suggestions, observations or puzzles of your own to:

maslanka@puzzlemaster.co.uk

Solutions to the above puzzles will appear here in due course