Writing Right

Time for the puzzler this week. Here we go.

Here is an interesting fact. Leonardo da Vinci was left handed, but he wrote backwards. He wrote from the right side of the page to the left side of the page. And he didn't write the way we write. He practiced what was called 'mirror writing.' He actually wrote backwards. So if you held up a mirror to what he wrote, you could read it. If you ever read The Da Vinci Code, then you know this already.

I thought this was kind of interesting. Then I remembered when we were kids in school, every kid that was left handed was forced to learn to write with their right hand, almost without exception.

This is hardly ever done now.

But back then there was a very good reason for it.

There was a practical reason for it, which for the most part, does not exist today.

What was that reason?

Answer the Puzzler »

Remember last week's puzzler?

Two Tokens

Here we go.

We used this one many, many years ago.

A blind man enters the subway by walking down the stairs with the assistance of his seeing-eye dog.

When he gets to the bottom of the stairs, there is a cage behind which is sitting a woman who's the token vendor. That is how long ago this was, because they have not used tokens in decades... And there's a sign there that says, "Tokens, 40 cents."

The blind man reaches into his pocket and through the slit in the cage he hands the woman a dollar.

No words are spoken. She has never seen him before. They don't know each other at all. She hands him two tokens and 20 cents change. We know this puzzler is old because you can't ride the subway for 40 cents anywhere in the world.

The puzzler question is very simple, how did she know he wanted two tokens?