Puzzler of the week

[Scott MacLean]

This week's puzzler:

One crisp autumn day, a farmer neighbor of mine asked for a hand laying in his supply of firewood for the coming winter. Standing next to his woodshed was an ancient circular saw, which he used to cut logs to stove length. The saw was driven by a wide leather belt, that looped from a wide pulley on the saw to another pulley, which was affixed to the power takeoff of his equally ancient Jeep.

Now, for those of you who don't know what a power takeoff is, most work vehicles have an auxiliary shaft coming out of the transmission. You can put the vehicle in neutral, engage the power takeoff, and have power go from the engine, through the transmission, and drive another shaft, which is not connected to the wheels. In this case, it would deliver the engine's power to this old-time saw with the leather belt.

As he was maneuvering the Jeep into position, he asked if I could run back to the barn, and bring back the large crowbar which was in the back corner of the barn. It was about a mile down the hill to the barn, and then I had to walk back with a 20-pound crowbar on my shoulder. But, I obliged, because he's my neighbor, and I'd probably get some firewood out of it, if nothing else.

By the time I got back, he had moved the Jeep into the proper position. I took the crowbar and kind of stuck it into the ground, and leaned it against the tailgate. He chocked the wheels, lined up the pulleys, started the engine and engaged the power takeoff.

He runs the engine, and cuts up all his wood, and at the end of the day we were picking up our tools. I remarked that we hadn't needed the crowbar after all.

He says, "Oh no, you're wrong. The crowbar was used. In fact, it was essential to the operation, and had we not had it, we wouldn't have been able to do what we did. He said he'd forgotten to bring the crowbar once, and he would never make that mistake again."

The question is, what was the crowbar for?

Last week's puzzler:

I was driving down South through Texas on the way to visit relatives who had recently moved to Austin. I hadn't been to Texas since I was in the Air Force in basic training at Lackland Field.

Texas was as I remembered it: The usually long, dusty and mostly empty Texas roads.  I hadn't been paying much attention to the road signs off to the side of the main highway we were on-- they were mostly country road numbers-- when one sign off to the left caught my eye. It was "Golf Road." So, I mused to my wife and kids, "Hey, maybe they're gonna open a golf course out here in the middle of nowhere, in this Godforsaken wasteland! Or maybe Mr. Golf was some famous hero from Texas's great history. Maybe he was at the Alamo!"

Later, we passed another road sign, and I announced to the family, "I know what the name of the next road after this will be." My wife was skeptical. How could two completely unrelated signs, Golf Road and this other one that I had just noticed, predict the third street we were going to encounter? Sure enough, though, we came to that road a few minutes later, and it's exactly as I'd predicted.

There are two possible answers to this puzzler.

This puzzler was loaded with hints, if you were paying attention.

Last week's puzzler answer:

Don't forget, at the very beginning I said that this guy had been in the Air Force, basic training.

He's in a part of the world where there are lots of Air Force bases, and there's something called the phonetic alphabet, which is used to replace letters with words. And the beginning of the phonetic alphabet goes Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India. So going up he saw Hotel Road next and knew that India was going to be the third, or he saw Fox Trot, and he knew that Echo was going to be the next.