sounds like a wonderful day, love learning outings..but don't get much opportunity for museums and lectures anymore..we just don't go anywhere..

books..now I can handle books..i have a lot of them..but would love a good road trip

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald are buried in the church cemetery of St. Mary's Catholic Church in Rockville, MD, where we lived for 35 years before moving to WV. Many folks visit their graves each year.

Sounds as if you had an interesting day, Dorph.

"word games played for the duration of the ride... It does keep one on one's toes, mentally speaking...." Bbbbaaaabbbbyyy (hear the Blues Brothers here), that's semantics, semantics, sematics. And that's the South, South, south *yes, not capitalized). I know, I am Southern, so you have the inside voice. Whatever!, as a stated by my best cohort in crime. I'm headed to the zoo. I did it before, and I'll do it again. Yesterday. and frankly my dear............. I am very fed up, and taken exam number 1.............. I don't give a care. Zoo, and studying be danged. Oh. wait. to illustrate my Southern Semantics. Excuse my lack of politics. I only need to graduate, not make 4.1 GPA.

Got a riddle and/or puzzle for y'all.

Two wine connoisseurs stumble across a rare wine that is an eight gallon bucket. They want to divide it equally to take home and save and/or savor. The problem is, besides the eight gallon bucket, they have only a five gallon bucket and a three gallon bucket. How do they get the wine divided equally using only the three buckets that are there?

This problem can be solved lingually or mathematically. What is the sequence to successfully solve the vintners dilemma?

This is a cheeky monkey problem so have at it and have fun. It came from the head of the English department.

Wash your two smaller buckets, inside and out. Fill the fiver full, then from the fiver, fill the three. Now you have two in the fiver. Dump the three back in the big bucket, and put the two from the fiver into the three, for safe keeping.

Fill the fiver a little more than two gallons full again (now that you know what it looks like). Hold it over the big bucket, and lower the three gallon bucket into it so that anything beyond two gallons is displaced and falls into the eight gallon bucket (I'm counting on the buckets themselves having negligible mass).

Now remove the three gallon bucket. Pour the two gallons that are in it into the five gallon bucket. Now the five gallon bucket should contain four gallons, and so should the eight gallon bucket.

More importantly, who stores rare wines in buckets?

The monks who made the wine were poor. Oath of poverty and all that.

Starting with the five gallon bucket is one of two ways to solve it. The second way involves starting with the three gallon bucket.

I suppose another equitable solution might be to fill the 3 gallon and dump it into the fiver, and then fill the three gallon again, and then to mutually consume, swig for swig, the two gallons remaining in the big bucket.

Of course, after drinking a gallon apiece, neither will be very interested in the three gallons in their respective buckets...

OK, I thought about it some more... after all, who in their right mind would drink a gallon of bucket-stored wine made by impoverished monks in one sitting?

Fill up the three gallon bucket. Dump its contents into the fiver. Fill up the three again. Completely fill the fiver. You should have one gallon remaining in the three gallon bucket.

Now completely dump the fiver into the big bucket. Dump the one gallon into the fiver. Completely re-fill the three gallon bucket, and dump those three gallons into the fiver as well. You should now have four gallons in the fiver, four in the eight, and none in the three.

This is a better solution than my first stab at the puzzle because the mass of the three gallon bucket would have unfairly displaced a little extra wine from the five gallon bucket. If the two wine connoisseurs happened to have been siblings, the bickering that would ensue might have driven the impoverished monks to either murder... or to consuming all of their product before it could be found by wine connoisseurs in the first place!