First Series - coming soon!

The Puzzles

First, a simple one:

1. Why is there so little honey in Brazil?
   
   Solution

2. Like the position of a player struggling to survive at forty (15 letters)
   
   Solution

And here's a lateral one:

3. Don Cappuccino tries to poison his two rivals. He pours them both drinks at his miniature bar. Franco Bollo drinks his slowly and dies in agony. Big Al Dente drinks his quickly and survives without any ill effects. How come?
   
   Solution

4. Where would an English army division in France meet a Shakespearean twin to trap the action of a fisherman with part of an ear?
   
   Solution

5. Arrange these authors in order:

Ken Kesey

Frederick Forsyth

Edith Nesbit

Jerome K Jerome

Charles Dickens

Solution

6. Last night I went to a party, the inaugural meeting of the Compulsive Counter Society. I am not a member, but there were 9 members present, so including me there were 10 people in the room. At the end of the evening I asked the assembled company, 'How many people have you all met?' The first person said, 'Well during the whole evening I've only met one other person'. The second person said, 'I've only met 2 people throughout the entire evening'. And the third person said, '3' and the fourth person said, '4', and so on, until the ninth person said, 'I've met all other nine people'.

How many people have I met during the evening?

Solution

7. What links B, C, F, H, I, K, N, O, P, S, U, V, W and Y (and no other letters of the alphabet).
   
   Solution

8. X dead sergeant X of X, where the aspens are cold but the X. Explain.
   
   Solution

9. On a recent visit to Clockworth I stood on the village green and I caught sight of 3 clocks all telling different times. I said to one of the residents, a Mr Turny Handclock, whose job it was to wind the clocks, that there was no point in having three clocks contradicting one another, whereupon he said that on the contrary there was no point having all three telling the same time as it would make two of them redundant! Each of the clocks was a different number of minutes out and on average they were 30 minutes out. The times presented were 11.55, 12.25 and 1.05. What time was it?
   
   Solution