This week’s puzzle:

After being fired from his job, a man gets into trouble when the musician he has a crush on is in the wrong place at the right time. He tries to fix everything, but a coworker’s honesty and tendency to overthink make the situation a whole lot stickier.

Last week’s puzzle:

A luckless man tries to get his wife back after she leaves the house without warning him. He enlists the help of her father, but nothing can get her to return, and he leaves town because he is unable to face up to the situation.

And the answer is . . . ▼

Every morning young children they greet
To make their brains with knowledge replete
Even adults, I bet
Can tell you how to get
How to get there, to Sesame Street

Event: Sesame Street debuts
Year: 1969
Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Sesame_Street

It would have been the stupidest, most utterly meaningless question he could have asked in that situation.  It would have shown that he completely missed the point.  But for some reason, Matthew had a very difficult time convincing his brain not to lead off with the question, “Where did you get that shovel?”

After a few minutes of silence, uninterrupted by either the woman (who was still unconscious) or Jack (who was making vague motions with his mouth as if talking was something he had only ever seen on TV before), Matthew was able to ask the much more sensible: “What happened here?”

“I don’t know,” his friend replied.  Despite his stunned state, it came out easily; it is, after all, the natural default statement for when you can’t figure out what to say.  The follow-up, however, came much more slowly.  Matthew had not seen Jack this confused since he had once tried to explain to him, for some foolish reason, that there had once been an Eastern Roman Empire that did not, in fact, contain Rome.

“I was digging,” he began, pointing at the shovel.  He seemed to want to make sure that Matthew understood the very basic parts of the story, as a sort of preemptive apology for that fact that there would be later portions that made no sense.  “For the treasure.  Then all of a sudden I thought I heard something behind me.  I was worried about other treasure hunters coming to steal our prize, so I quickly jumped up and spun around to see what was going on.  I, uh, didn’t have time to put down the shovel, and . . .,” he trailed off, gesturing toward the woman.

“You’d better go look for help,” Matthew suggested.  “I’ll wait here and try to see if she’s okay.”

Jack nodded and took off, still holding the shovel.  Despite the recent accident, Matthew couldn’t really blame his friend for hanging on to it.  A shovel is simple, solid, easy to understand.  It stood in direct contrast to the person it had just laid out, who was still a rather large mystery.

Matthew knelt down next to her.  On closer inspection, she appeared to be more like ten or fifteen years older than him.  That, however, was about all the closer inspection revealed.  Much of her face was either lying against the ground or covered up by her hood, and the part that wasn’t was marred by an unsightly, shovel-shaped mark.  There did not appear to be any bleeding, and she was still breathing, and that was as far as Matthew’s medical expertise took him.

After a minute or two, Matthew decided that he wished he had gone off for help and left Jack there, because he wasn’t sure what to do.  Despite his friend’s tendency to get out of control, it was rare that he actually knocked someone out, so Matthew did not have much experience with the situation.  His instincts said that it was probably best to just let her lie there, so that was what he did.

It took about a minute for his curiosity to get the better of him, at which point he started shaking her by the shoulder in an attempt to wake her up.

Her eyes fluttered open.  She glanced around, started to lift her head, winced, and then continued with the process anyway.  She did not seem nearly as shocked as the person who hit her had.

“Are you alright?” Matthew asked.  He probably had the Italian version of the phrase written down somewhere on him, but at times like this, people don’t generally think to dive for guidebooks.

She looked up at him and adopted an expression of surprise that might have been a lot more convincing if Matthew didn’t have any suspicions about her.  “I am . . . well,” she answered.  “Thank you muchly.”  Her accent was strong but not too hard to understand.  “I am striked?”

Matthew nodded brusquely.  Jack could handle the apologies.  Now that he had confirmed that the damage was mostly just cosmetic, he felt no qualms about moving past pleasantries.  “What are you doing here?”

“I?  I am to see-sighting.  Touristing.  You are same, no?”

“No, you’re not.  I know you’ve been following me.  I’d like you to tell me why.”  It seemed a little to crude to add, “If you don’t, I’ll have my friend come back and whang you with the shovel again.”

The woman sighed.  The innocent look flickered out of her eyes.  “Yes, you are right,” she said.  “I am caught red-handed.”  Though her grammar and vocabulary improved markedly after she gave up the act, her accent remained about the same.  “Where is your friend?  It is best if I can explain to both of you.”

They set off in search of Jack, who as usual was not hard to find.  He standing in the middle of the ruins of the amphitheatre and shouting for help, presumably either because he thought that the acoustics there would send his message out farther or because he just thought the most interesting-looking building on site was also the headquarters.

Once Jack had finished apologizing (as with everything else he did, he put in much more effort than was necessary), the woman had them sit down.  “Let me explain.  No, that will take too long.  Let me sum up.  I work for the Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Interna.  It is much like your CIA.  I am assigned to follow you for your protection.  You appear to have discovered a major conspiracy and your lives may be at risk.”

Matthew was too stunned and disappointed for words.  Jack, on the other hand, was not at all surprised at this, or at the fact that they had been followed for days.  “I knew it!” he crowed triumphantly.  “I knew I had to be right about one of them!  So which is it?”

The woman grimaced.  “That is a problem.  We are not sure also.”

Canto the Third: Cloud Wears a Dress, Sector Seven Feels the Press

Darkness was all that Cloud saw
And all he felt was dirt
Voices were all that he heard
And all he knew was hurt

“Now that was an impressive fall”
A mystery voice said
“You can forget about skinned knees
You really should be dead

“I mean, not even Greg Louganis
Could survive that dive”
“Wait,” said Cloud.  “You’re telling me
I’m actu’lly alive?”

“Hang on!  Don’t go!  Who are you?  Please!”
Inside his head Cloud cried
“Don’t worry ‘bout me,” said the voice
“You’re the one who almost died”

This week’s puzzle:

A luckless man tries to get his wife back after she leaves the house without warning him. He enlists the help of her father, but nothing can get her to return, and he leaves town because he is unable to face up to the situation.

Last week’s puzzle:

The luckiest man in town has his home invaded by people who are conspiring to take what rightfully belongs to a child. A young man and an old woman try to make sure that everything ends up where it’s supposed to be, but after one causes the death of the other, the conspiracy succeeds.

And the answer is . . . ▼

Roosevelt was all ready to go
But Colombia wanted more dough
Revolt he did promote
Backed up by a gunboat
Got the Canal Zone cheap: quid pro quo

Event: Panama separates from Colombia
Year: 1903
Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_Panama_from_Colombia

The ability to post pictures has been restored . . . or perhaps restored itself (I’m not too clear on the details). Either way, it means the return of Jack and Matthew and their weekly picture adventures. Pictures have now been added to those posts where I was unable to before, and I am re-posting the most recent installment for those who need to catch up. New adventures will start next week.

And for those of you who liked Brevity=Wit, don’t worry, it may very well be back again some day (the more I hear about it, the more likely it is to return).

“I should have known this would happen,” Matthew grumbled.

Matthew had lost his friend. The moment the possibility of pirate treasure came up, Jack had, as expected, gone a bit berserk. The search for a shovel, metal detector, wheelbarrow, and all the other tools of the amateur treasure hunter immediately became paramount. Unfortunately for Jack, since Ostia Antica was primarily a sleepy archaeological dig site, they did not have any of the items he was looking for, at least not in a place where an ordinary tourist could get his hands on them. Thus the radius of the search expanded rapidly, to the point where Matthew was no longer able to keep up.

He was not, however, overly concerned about Jack’s disappearance. Sure, Jack still had the only key to their hotel room, but Matthew was confident that he would be able to find him at the end of the day when he needed to. His friend had never been good at keeping himself hidden. In addition, despite Jack’s frantic desire to find a shovel no matter how long it took, Matthew was confident that his friend would not get far. For an amateur treasure hunter, Jack had an astonishingly poor grasp of maps, and since his skill with the local language was juvenile at best, Matthew could not see him managing to figure out a train or anything else that would take him out of the area. There was always the risk that Jack would attempt to do something foolish, but as he himself had said, there was no one around, so what could he do?

Matthew had other things to worry about, anyway: he was searching for the person in gray. Although he grumbled out of habit, for once Matthew was actually pleased that his friend had managed to disappear. It made hunting for the gray-clad figure much easier when he did not have to explain to Jack what he was doing or make up a semi-plausible excuse to avoid the question. He was free of distractions. Ostia Antica was deserted. It was just Matthew and the person in gray . . .

. . . except that it wasn’t. Unlike Jack, Matthew could not feel that the site was empty, because he kept drifting back into the past, when it was not “Ostia Antica” but just plain old “Ostia.” To him the port was still alive. The buildings were whole, the streets were teeming with activities both legal and otherwise. On the one hand, this meant that for Matthew the site was interesting enough to not require inventing a phony hunt for pirate treasure. On the other hand, it wasn’t at all helpful if you were trying to find something.

Matthew groaned. He supposed that he should not really have been surprised. Earlier, when he was attempting to forget about the figure in gray and focus on the past, the modern world had constantly intruded on his thoughts. Now, naturally, the opposite was true. It figured. Every time he tried to peer around the corner to catch the person that had been pursuing him, he ran into a shady merchant sailor trying to sell him a special salve that could only be found in the distant reaches of the forests of Germany, presumably because in any other location it would have been considered poisonous.

Even when Matthew was able to clear his head and return to the present, a different sort of distraction was there to plague him: doubt. Part of him believed that he had no reason to think that he could catch the person in gray even if he could devote his full attention to the problem. The kind of person who behaves like that, said a voice in the back of his mind, is the kind of person that is very good at not being found. Matthew tried to argue that he had spotted the figure a couple of times already, but he countered that seeing someone for a moment through a crowd is very different from being close enough to actually communicate with him.

Matthew was forced to admit that this was true, but a few moments later he rallied, saying that he was giving way too much credit to this mysterious figure in gray. He had no reason to believe that this was some sort of James Bond-like super spy. Why would a person like that be following him? Again, the counterargument came right back: You have no reason to believe that any sort of person would be following you, by all normal logic. And yet here you are.

Eventually, Matthew was forced to concede that he was right: his chances of finding the figure in gray were next to nil. Even if this person wasn’t expecting Matthew to be looking for him, that slim advantage had been eliminated, since Matthew had spent the last few hours snooping around the area in an obvious manner. Even if he had managed to track him down, Matthew still had not been able to answer the question, “Then what do I do?” So he called off the pointless search and switched to a more meaningful one: finding Jack. Rather than glancing around corners in what he thought was a stealthy manner, he kept his eyes to the ground, looking for places where someone had been frantically digging with a rock, his hands, or whatever he could find.

It was because he was staring at the ground that he spotted the woman first. She was lying on the ground in an awkward position, as if she had been struck and suddenly fell into unconsciousness. The woman was probably a few years older than Matthew and Jack, and she appeared to be Italian. After a quick glance, Matthew almost certainly would have next looked up to see his friend, who was carrying a shovel and looking much more bewildered than usual, except for one other things that caught his eye.

She was wearing a gray hooded cloak.