The Trance

We have a very interesting puzzler ready for this week. Much better than last week, I promise!
This puzzler involves our trusted producer, Dougie.

This is something that happened a long time ago, so I'm going to
try to remember all the facts correctly.

Okay, here goes.

It was a hot and muggy night. Dougie is in a major, major city someplace. I think the city was Los Angeles. He was out there on some public radio shindig that he'd gotten free tickets to or something.

I'm even gonna give you the date. It was August 17th, 1992. So, this was a long, long time ago. It was around 10 o'clock at night, and Doug is heading east on route 10. He was about 50 miles outside of LA driving his old 1978 Cutlass Salon. Great car!

He's driving along and he passes a car stopped by the side of the road, this car just kind of pulled over. The driver's sitting in the car. The poor guy had broken down. What does Dougie do? He blows right by him and doesn't even slow down.

Over the next several miles, he sees several more cars and they're all stopped by the side of the road. And the people are just sitting in their cars. Now, he's thinking, if one of these people had trouble with their car, you would think that they would get out and open the hood and you look under there. You know, to see if there's something wrong with the engine. That's what you do when you're broken down on the side of the road. But none of them had done this. They are all pulled over to the side of the road and sitting there in the car, transfixed somehow just staring out into space like some alien tractor beam had to pull them over to the side of the road.

It was a hot, muggy night, August 17, 1992, in the city of Los Angeles, California. Over the next five miles, he sees like 10 more cars stopped at the side of the road. And none of the drivers of those cars are looking under the hood or changing tires or anything like that.

And he noticed that none of the passengers were talking. Nobody in the car was talking to anyone else in the car. He said it was like they were all almost in a trance.

So the question is, why were these cars pulled over? What had happened?

Good luck, my friends!

Answer the Puzzler »

Remember last week's puzzler?

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other

The puzzler today is a quick little puzzlement. It isn't the best puzzler, but it will do in a pinch! My brother hated this one.

I'll look for a better one next time, I promise.

Okay, I'm going to give you four words. One of them doesn't belong in this group of words. Here are the words.

Oriole. As in the bird, a Baltimore Oriole.
Month. Like in the calendar, a month.
Oil. Like motor oil.
Orange. Like the color or the fruit.

Oriole, month, oil, and orange.

And the question is which one of those words does not belong with the other three?

My brother said, "Well, you get three that begin with 'O' and one that begins with 'M'..." But that's kind of a Mickey Mouse answer, I think. It's too obvious. That isn't what we are looking for. And then he thought more about it and said, "Well, you have three words which are real things like Oriole, oil, and orange and one of them is an abstract concept." All those 3 things are made by nature and a month is a man-made thing.
So I thought that was a pretty good answer. While it is a great answer, it is unacceptable. There is a better answer out there than those two.

This is really a three part puzzler.

A. Which word doesn't belong?
2. Why doesn't it belong?.
III. On a scale of 1-5, how bad is this puzzler? 5 is it stinks a lot, 1 is it stinks just a little bit...

Good luck!