The Next Light

Puzzler time.

Here is the new puzzler for today.

This one is short, and not that detailed. Sometimes you just gotta give a simple one.

Here it is.

I was driving on an access road going to get on the freeway. There was a convertible in front of me, top down.

Beautiful day.

There was a couple in the car, which I assume were husband and wife. The car was a small sport type with a standard transmission.

We had about three stoplights to go until the on ramp for the freeway.

At every stoplight, the couple would turn to each other and have a conversation. When the light turned green, the conversation would stop until they stopped at the next light.

In other words, they would stop talking until they'd come up to the next light.

Then at the light, while stopped, they would start talking again.

The puzzler is, why did they only talk at red lights?

There was no loud background noise. The car was not excessively noisy. They did not have the radio on.

Good luck.

Answer the Puzzler »

Remember last week's puzzler?

Buggy Whip Syndrome

This one is simple and short.

Here we go.

Most people have heard of the companies that go out of business because they were making buggy whips, which was a euphemism for the fact that current technology had surpassed them. All the companies that, in fact, did make buggy whips, of course, all went out of business. Not all, but 99.9% of them went out of business when cars came along, because you didn't need buggy whips anymore. So the phrase has come to mean that technology has passed them by.

But there was a company that you wouldn't think would have gone out of business. Back in 1919, the Scott Muffler Company was a thing. And you would think that with the mass production of cars, that company would flourish at that time.

One would think that they couldn't miss, right?

And yet, the Scott Muffler Company fell victim to the buggy whip syndrome and went out of business in the following decade.

And the puzzler question is, how did that happen?