Know Your Picture Characters Entry #24
A. 沖縄 B. 九州 C. 四国 D. 北海道 E. 本州
Clearly this past week’s challenge was much too simple, barely worthy of the name “challenge” at all. Not only did two of the three guessers come up with the correct answer, but one of them swept the board, an unprecedented KYPC feat as far as I can remember. Whether by using pronunciation or thinking inside the box, Dragon and Theoman both found their way to C quite easily. Let’s just hope that they feel considerable shame at having solved the puzzle without bothering to learn anything at all about temples, unlike Shirley. While she failed to come up with the correct answer, she has probably managed to win the goodwill of the people of Kyushu by saying that B, their island, is so pretty. And in the end, isn’t that what really counts? Though as I look back, I notice that she also called Shikoku unattractive, so I guess she’s par for the course.
In case anyone did not tune in to Theoman’s mighty streak, I will point out that A is Okinawa (the “open sea rope,” which means we’re talking about kanji used for sound, not meaning, here), B is Kyushu (the “nine states”), C is Shikoku, (the “four provinces”), D is Hokkaido (the “northern sea road,” though despite the presence of the character for north, I think this name is mainly an attempt to imitate the indigenous people’s name for the island), and E is Honshu (the “origin state”).
Anyway, it’s obvious that you people are too smart for my own good. It’s time to beat some sense out of you with a really challenging challenge. Hmm . . . sense . . . I’ve got it! Another geography puzzle, just for Dragon! No, wait! We’ll have a puzzle about senses. Where would we be without senses? Completely unable to interact with the world around us, for one thing. We would also be very bored. Thus I present a cure for boredom: try to figure out which sense is which. Feel free to use any of your own senses to help you come up with the answer, though, for the sake of your monitor, I have to recommend against employing your sense of taste. Because of the recent disappointingly stellar performance, I’ll have you try to pick out the sense of touch, the broadest and most poorly defined of the five senses. Other than that it should be easy, because there are only five senses . . . or are there?
A. 嗅覚 B. 視覚 C. 触覚 D. 第六感 E. 聴覚 F. 平衡覚 G. 味覚
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3 Comments »
September 27th, 2010 at 6:53 am
Well, let’s see. Six of the choices have the same ending character, so clearly that means “sense” and one of them is spider sense or The Sixth Sense (which is really only another kind of sight, isn’t it?) or something. D is apparently not a sense at all, and probably just something random and totally unrelated that you threw in to confuse us. I’m betting it means “water-skiing.” Anyway, back to the real senses. In the first character of A, a man holds a strange box in his right hand. In his left hand, he is reaching out either his finger or a stick (obviously the finger would be a better example of the sense of touch, but it’s at sort of an odd angle) to touch the box and determine its identity. I think the answer here is clear.
September 28th, 2010 at 3:36 pm
Well, I do see a few characters I recognize, but none of them have to do with touch, so I’ll steer clear of them. That said, I’ll go with C, which looks the most unfamiliar.
September 29th, 2010 at 4:58 pm
I seem to be distracted by that mysterious remark artfully inserted right at the end to confuse us by insinuating that there maybe are more than 5 senses. Well, why not? Quantum Mechanics tells us that there are even more than 4 dimensions, so why not more than 5 senses? Therefore, I am going to exorcise my distraction by dealing with this profound question. OF COURSE there are more. Sense of humor for instance. And the closely allied sense of the absurd. D., which doesn’t have the cute little figure at the end of all the others, clearly is differentiated from the more organic senses and I’m guessing shows a man balancing humor in his right hand with the absurd in his right.
Having cleared that up, to get down to business—I think there is a sort of touchy-feely quality about F. Hence, F.