Puzzle Fantastica #1 Update #B: Wherein we broach the subject of evidence

It is about confirmation bias. At least the meta-experiment is. We need to be looking for things that disprove our guesses rather than prove them.

Could it be as simple as everything is spotted? The Elvis package has large dots on it, the cow is spotted, the fish is spotted. In the video, the playground equipment has large, circular dots. In the novel, the charcters name is Colin (pun on colon?) and it talks about pox.

But, I'm sure this has been pointed out 500 times by now.

The first thing that sprang to my mind was the movie "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou".

1) the fish - there's lot's of fish in the movie
2) the cow - the view of the cow is very similiar to the presentational view of the Team Zissou's boat, the Belafonte.
3) the elvis - elvis, a pop icon like david bowie who gets a lot of indirect attention in the movie through both his original songs and Seu Jorge's Portugese interpretations.

these were my original thoughts. as i saw the later clues later, i guess i can apply connections to them as well.

4) the birds - in the clip there's an uninflated inflatable whale lying on the lawn, that's more aquatic stuff for you
5) the novel - well... the spots of the pox has already been pointed out, and the "holy grail" of the movie is the Jaugar Shark which sports a jaguar like pattern. While not exactly spotty, jaguar patterns are unarguably spottish.

So there you go.

Someone already said the birds might be cowbirds - I think they are (evidence). And to summarize previous comments: the fish is definitely a type of cowfish (Tetrosomus gibbosus), the cow's a cow [factory], and there is a type of pox called the cowpox.

Elvis > ??? > Cows!

[ Collect underpants > ??? > Profit! ]

A follow-up to my previous comment:

Cow Elvis.

Things that were never in my kitchen.

Is the answer actually Stephen Hawking's recent question on Yahoo answers: "How can the human race survive another 100 years?" Also, the clues seem to give 2 possible answers to that question:

1-making earth's environment more sustainable
2-populating outer space

The idea of a predatory fish, like a piranha, seems out of place, like humans living in space. Also, the piranha could be in the midst of an evolutionary process that will eventually have them living on land -- a complete transition to another world. The number 8 near its eye suggests something I don't totally understand called a Piranha RISC archetecture. It was called the Piranha 16 (8x2), could be 8bit, 16bit, or 32bit, and was built in .8 micron silicon. From what I gather, it's an addition to a cpu processor that allows it to better handle its workload, i.e. improving the existing environment in order to make it more sustainable. It was introduced in 1994, like the final clue, "about 13 years" ago, making the "bed" cure the "disease".

The number 8 suggests Elvis' birthday, January 8, which is shared by Stephen Hawking. On January 8, 1994 (about 13 years ago), a Russian cosmonaut spent a then-record 437 days in space on Mir. The movie is set at the 1962 (6=2=8) world's fair in Seattle, where the Space Needle was introduced, its top made to resemble a flying saucer. Also, the World's Fair in Korea in 1993 (13 years ago) was themed "The Challenge of a New Road of Development", with other sub-themes based on sustainable development. Elvis played a cropduster in the movie, cropdusting helping to sustain plantlife. Also, Kurt Russell made his debut in that movie. Later, in 1994 (about 13 years ago), he starred in the movie Stargate, which spawned the television series', all based on space travel.

The cow-as-a-machine shows natural sustained life. Cow eats plantlife, cow excretes waste which is consumed by plantlife, the cycle sustains itself. Not sure about a space travel simile w/ the cow besides the reports of unexplained cattle mutilations that people like to attribute to aliens. Alien cows were part of the pilot episode of South Park, which aired in August (8th month). That's the second SP reference in this thread. :D

More from August: Elvis was born in 1935; on August 14, 1935, the Social Security Act (helping make life sustainable during times of difficulty) was passed into law. Elvis died in 1977; on August 13, 1977, the NASA space shuttle made its first test flight.

The video of the birds shows them possibly exhausting their resources on the land that they're on, and suggests their ability to fly somewhere else. Also, all the non-biodegradable plastics in the yard contrast the green land where the birds are feeding.

The novel clue could just be all a metaphor. The sick guy = humanity, the bed is explicitly called "his world". After he got a new "world" he was ok again. The story isn't about him, it's about the bed. The puzzle is about our "new" world.

One last bit, maybe there are allusions to a third solution being divine intervention. Maybe the piranha's evolution is due to divine plan. The cow bears and rears calves, things that could be considered divine. Elvis' movie contains a love story, and Seal says that love's divine. (sorry.) Also Elvis' birthday, 1/8, is the day Roman Catholics feast in honor of the Virgin Mary, and his date of death, 8/16, is a feast day for Saint Roch, who cured skin diseases (pox). Humanity could just be food factories, blessed with food by and indulging in food in celebration of the Gods. To the birds in the video, the human is God, spreading food over the ground for them. In the novel opening, the curing of the man's illness is sort of a miracle. Like Nostradamus' miracles with those suffering from the plague, where he aired out rooms and cleaned sheets. Saint Roch is said to have cured people of the plague as well.

I have way too much time on my hands and a Wikipedia fetish.

It's simple. Elvis would have lived longer had he eaten more fish than beef.

TKS

I liked the toilet answer.
Fish die in their own toilets.
Cows die in their own toilets.
Elvis died on his own toilet.
All the plastic toys are turning
the earth into a big toilet. And
you can read a novel when you're
on the toilet. It all fits. ;)

Well I don't think I'm going to add much but I thought I would add some things I noticed, that haven't been mentioned so far. In the film there is a boat and an inflatable whale, which is deflated except for the tail. Also I was thinking about the birds and 'four and twenty blackbirds' came to mind, I had forgotten how that rhyme went so I looked it up. Relevant line:"The king was in his counting house counting up his money." perhaps all the lines are relevant or completely irrelevant of course. Elvis is referred to as the King. So there you go. Anyway that was fun. Perhaps the Elvis is king thing has some bearing on the puzzle, that is substitute King for Elvis in the puzzle. In more unhelpful news, googling king world's fair brought up a musical group named 'King of France' that is on a record label called 'World's Fair'.

Fish

Cow(A food factory)
King(whose in his counting house counting out his money)
Needle
Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie
Whaling(Moby Dick? a quest? or just hunting species to extinction?)
Pox
The bed, I feel is a seabed or riverbed, or as someone else has already said, an environment.

Well I don't have much, I get corporate greed destroying the environment coupled with a theme of disease and vaccinations and an idea about changing or leaving our world. Can't quite get all those together into something pat. That's it for now, maybe I'll help jolt someone into figuring it out, or just confuse the issue entirely.

Wanted to point out a satellite clue that is found at the post about moles (link). The image clearly has the same "50" as depicted in the video. I think there are possibly two key points here - that is, the video is (1) of Dave's lawn or (2) something about moles(?)

I thought I would highlight the fact that one of the World's Fair dudes saw fit to emphasize the fish's boxfishness over at this link. I think that's significant.

boxfish, cow factory, elvis movie, cowbirds, and a bed infected with (arguably, apparently) the pox.

I'm frustrated by how ill-defined the puzzle is. Is the answer something they all have in common? Is it a sequence of words? What part(s) of the clues is (are) important? Is it about Elvis, the movie, or the poster for the movie?

Finally, I'd like to mention that some of the leaps people have made are hilarious. Pesticides guy, I'm looking in your direction.

I'm not sure that 'Ostraciontidae' in of itself suggests 'boxes'. The family name derives from the Greek "ostrakon" meaning 'shell' or 'piece of pottery onto which the ancient Greeks would scratch the name of a politician to cast a ballot for his banishment' (i.e. ostracize).

The cow hypothesis is gaining steam I see, and in a similar way to the world of science in general, is replicating and surviving to become common wisdom despite the shaky grounding of at least a couple of its arguments. It's only an imperfect best fit, and probably misleading, yet some think it can be nothing else. Interesting.

Apparently I posted this repy on the wrong page:

Collectives, or collective consciousness

The first two images were undoubtedly obtained from wikimedia and historycooperative while the third is likely from IMDB. All of these sites are created and maintained by collectives.

The flock of birds is obvious.

The novel is being written by more than one author and is to be shaped by the guesses to this puzzle; another collective act.

I like it Mike, except that the High-Res version of Elvis appears to be from Amazon.com, and is different than the small version.

allright, more craziness. Someone else had noticed the whale, it turns out, and came up with Moby Dick, and "The Life Aquatic"(good one). Along those lines I come up with "The Fisher King" a movie by Terry Gilliam, involving a catatonic man who wakes up and is questing for the holy grail. Another movie by Terry Gilliam is "12 Monkeys" which is about how most of humanity is wiped out by a virus and is forced to live underground. Hmm, then of course we have Monty Python's "The Holy Grail" which was also directed by Terry Gilliam(I think, he was part of the Python group, did the animations and such), which includes a King and cows and a quest...going down these lines of reasoning I came up with this, supposedly the holy grail was on display at the....

Chicago World's Fair!
I gotta go with the holy grail as the answer, or maybe there's another step up like "Man's quest for immortatlity" or something like that.

I posted this to the wrong page I think. So here's my theory once again...

The answer is this: Pesticides

1. Tetrosomus gibbosus is a poisonous fish that can make humans ill.

2. "It Happened at the World's Fair" is a movie involving a cropduster (and a chubby Elvis Presley and lots of cheez).

3. Cows produce meat and milk for us using the energy they get from feed (hay, corn, etc) grown with pesticides.

4. Birds and other animals feed on small insects that have eaten vegetation treated with pesticides; the chemicals are passed along the food chain, from the creatures that eat the plants, to the animals that eat these creatures, and so on.

5. People get "sick", experiencing various adverse effects of the pesticides that make their way through the food chain to us. This is not a story about the sick people, though. It's a story about pesticides (like the bed in the final clue, this is the reason for the sickness).

Dave: What I meant is that when I did a quick google search for Ostraciontidae, I mostly got definitions, and most of them were simply "boxfish".

Also, the cow thing seemed most likely to me because otherwise it would be a strange coincidence that there would be a cow, a cowfish and cowbirds (plus cowpox?) in the clues.

I'm not sure which page we're supposed to be posting on so I'll repost my latest entry here.

I'm backing up and sticking with my 'grass' theory. There's just too much grass involved in everything about this puzzle. I cannot believe it to be accidental. Gary Lockwood's 'Splendor in the Grass' role. Elvis apparently sang a lyric in the movie about 'greener grass.' The cow lives and eats in grass. The cowfish lives and eats at the grassy sea bed, sometimes called grass beds. The birds are obviously eating in the grass. Children have apparently been playing on the grass. And the novel intro parallels somehow a storyline in the novel 'The Secret Garden.' It seems very focused on the bed and its rejuvenative effect.

So I have a hunch that the grass is where this puzzle wants to take us. Things are lying in the grass all over. Splendor in the Grass, living in the grass, eating in the grass, lying in the grass. Wordsworth wrote a line in a poem about 'splendour in the grass.' He connects directly to Walt Whitman, who wrote 'Leaves of Grass.'

So I suggest that the answer lies in the grass.

How about "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court".

It covers all the ideas.

We've got Fish-King- King Arthur
The main character was the head of a factory.
We've got blackbirds and a Moby Dick reference which can both be referenced to the conclusion of the first three clues. The final clue is the beginning of a novel, written in a similar 'reflecting upon past events' narrative style.

Also maybe "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". Charlie's family hasn't been out of bed in 20 years.

I doubt that either of these is the answer, but the holy grail idea has merit, not the least of which is the story that it was displayed at the Chicago World's Fair. At any rate we have a 'King' as a clue,in the context of the worlds fair, and a direct connection between that particular worlds fair(the fair referred to on this site) and the holy grail. Not a lot of tricky reasoning for that.

In the film clip the deflated whale and the boat are decidedly out of place in that back yard, they stick out as the most interesting objects, outside of the subject of interest which is the birds. The whale and the boat immediately bring to mind Moby Dick(another novel, written in the same narrative style etc), especially with the whale being 'dead' and all. This whale toy doesn't belong in the backyard. So we have a novel, a quest, and another not toohard to sell reference to a king, via the blackbirds.

Well, my thoughts that follow eventually lead to an answer of sorts, but I'm figuring it out as I go along, so I'll warn you it's not terribly well organized and quite probably rife with contradictions and general foolishness. Also, I came to this puzzle just today through BoingBoing, so I apologize for any points I may bring up that have already been beaten to death in earlier posts.

So, first of all we have the boxfish. Fish of the Ostraciidae family can release a toxin when stressed that may kill off every other fish in the tank. Which is a fairly straightforward metaphor, both for human environmental destruction in general and perhaps for nuclear war in specific. This may serve as an opening theme.

The second element is used as a figure in environmental historian Linda Nash's essay called "The Agency of Nature or the Nature of Agency?" This piece talks about considering the environment as an active agent in shaping human intentions and human history: "It is worth considering how our stories might be different if human beings appeared not as the motor of history but as partners in a conversation with a larger world, both animate and inanimate, about the possibilities of existence." The "food factory" illustration represents the opposing view of nature-as-machine, and perhaps also the tendency to view human agents as shaping and engineering their environment - engineering the cow to produce more milk, for example.

What I took from all this is a call to look at the implications of all the other clues through the perspective suggested by Nash. This takes the emphasis away from the boxfish poisoning the other fish, and includes as equally important the stress on the boxfish that made it freak out and poison everybody - caused perhaps by tank conditions, the other fish, its human owners, or nature itself if in the wild. This makes the boxfish metaphor a bit richer, encompassing as it does the stress of survival on the human species that drives it to sometimes destructive technology...

Which brings us to the 1962 World's Fair. The sidebar caption which identifies this image as "something to do with Elvis" sounds a bit playfully misleading to my ears - Elvis, I think, may be a bit of a red herring. The Century 21 fair has a lot more metaphorical potential - coming a few years after Sputnik, and overlapping temporally with the Cuban Missile Crisis, its theme of space-age science building a better world was fraught with Cold War tension, both below and on the surface. Historylink.org describes a World of Tomorrow exhibit explicitly framed by images of a frightened family in a fallout shelter. The themes are of technology saving the world, but of course, what the world needed saved from was the result of other technology. Science is a two-edged sword here!

In general, from its wild architecture to its themes of space and technology, the Fair was all about man transcending the environment. So what do you get when you look at it from Nash's perspective? What was nature's role in the intention to build the Space Needle? If anything, the Space Needle represents an intention to escape nature - gravity, attachment to the earth, etc. Has nature really pissed us off so much that we want to break up with her altogether? Our romantic longing to fly away into space is often taken for granted - why on earth do we feel that way? Maybe our intention to take off or kill each other is shaped by the environment's inability to sustain us. Nature is, perhaps, a passive-aggressive sort of girlfriend, breaking up with us by making us think it was our idea.

Following all this nuclear war stuff, we get an odd little video of birds hopping around a backyard full of totally awesome toys. I don't know if the fact that those kids are hell of spoiled has any metaphorical significance, but hey, that was my first thought. My parents preferred us to make our own toys out of sticks and old shirts. Anyway, in the context of the other clues, this certainly has a post-apocalyptic feel - you can see these birds as filling a niche abandoned by humans, either through self-destruction or space travel. Or maybe what it's implying is that our human constructions are now part of the environment with which we and other animals interact.

And finally we have the novel about Colin, which wraps up a number of these themes. Colin was sick, so he moved to a new bed, and then he was okay. But the story is about the bed! (But which bed?) The story echoes Nash's essay in pointing out that Colin's environment, which we think of as an incidental object until the third paragraph, was in fact the major player in this story. Maybe the puzzle is all about subject/object confusion! It's not about the fish, the cow, Elvis, birds, or Colin; it's about the tank, the essay, the World's Fair, the yard, and the Bed!

In summary: the puzzle is about the environment as actor, and how our environment in particular may be rejecting us. (As the story says, "it was decided that a new bed was needed" - not necessarily decided by Colin.) Or so my interpretation goes.

Everything shown is in (or should be in) the public domain.
Their original copyrights have expired.
Can it be that simple?