This article is classified "Real"
Jigsaw puzzles are a unique idea formulated by people of the planet Earth.
They are basically constructed by taking a perfectly good picture, mounting
it on a perfectly good piece of heavy cardboard, taking a perfectly good
knife or saw and breaking the picture up into hundreds and thousands of
tiny pieces, possibly never to be reassembled again.
Once a puzzle is disassembled, you will see by looking at an average piece
that each piece has a number of male and female edges, of which obviously
the male (should) fit into the female.
Many people will often ask why another would want to break up a perfectly
good picture into hundreds and thousands of tiny pieces, and the answer is
simple: they're idiots [1]. Not only does this make the picture impossible
to see once it's disassembled, but it creates the need for another person
to sit down for hours, days or perhaps weeks in order to put the picture
back together again. As it is well known that a disassembled and jumbled
puzzle is in a higher entropy state [2] than the original picture was, and
as the natural trend in this universe is to increase entropy (until such a
time as the universe begins to recollapse, at which time this statement may
no longer hold), it can easily be seen that some energy, often a quite
large amount of energy, is required to put the picture back into its
original state. This leads to the First Law of Jigsaw Puzzles:
1) Any jigsaw puzzle will take much, much, much more energy to
put back together than it did to take apart.
There are several proven methods of dealing with jigsaw puzzles.
It sounds strange to mention it here, but one option is to actually put the
puzzle together. This usually requires a drug to allow your mind to forget
what it is you are doing, and for this purpose, alcohol will work fine.
You also need a table large enough so that you might try to fight off the
Second Law:
2) Any given jigsaw puzzle will expand to fill up the entire
surface on which it is being put together.
You may observe, however, that this law is occasionally broken, however, as
someone mentioned in another article, there are a great many laws that are
often broken. Traffic laws, for instance.
The puzzler, once emptying the puzzle onto the surface of the table will
then attempt to make the pieces fit together. This stage usually begins by
joining the edge pieces up, as they are the easiest to recognise. However,
a jigsaw company a few years ago realised this strategy and released their
puzzles (called Impuzzibles) without any edge pieces, plus an extra few
pieces thrown in to confuse the puzzler. These puzzles are the same ones
that have the most creatively frustrating of pictures on them. One of them
is a photo of rows of eggs. Another is a photo of a heap of baked beans.
Others are worse [3].
The edge will then be complete, assuming no pieces are missing from the
puzzle. This is a stupid assumption, which is encapsulated by the Third
Law:
3) Any given jigsaw puzzle at any time, except (but not
excluding) the first time the puzzle has been attempted will
have a number of pieces missing. A number of these pieces
will be edge pieces. This will be due to pieces lost
previously, pieces eaten previously (not usually by humans)
and pieces borrowed by humans in the hope they will be the
person to place the last piece. This last reason explains why
there are usually more pieces missing than the number of
people who know about the existence of the puzzle.
Now the centre section can be filled in (missing pieces excepted, see
above). This can also be done by a few methods: at random, by shape, by
colour and by picture.
Doing a puzzle at random means that once the edges are established, the
puzzler gets every single piece and attempts to insert it into every single
recess on the puzzle. This usually means trying to fit male edges into
female edges, but some puzzlers even try to fit male into male or female
into female. There is a technical name for these particular people:
morons. You may have thought previously that this word just meant people
were stupid in general, but in actuality this is the defining test.
Doing it by shape is not much better that doing it at random, but at least
there is some strategy in looking for a piece that will actually fit. This
basically involves looking at the existing interlocked pieces, seeing what
general shape the piece that you are looking for has, finding all the
pieces with that shape and inserting the piece. This strategy works best
nearer completion of the puzzle, as there will be less pieces left to sift
through.
Doing the puzzle by colour involves finding all pieces with a colour
roughly the same as a given existing interlocked section of the puzzle.
This works particularly well in brightly coloured puzzles but is not so
successful in those nature puzzles that grandma gives you, with almost all
grass and sky. A combination of colour and shape is actually quite a quick
way to get the job done.
But the best way of doing any puzzle is by picture. Taking a magnifying
glass to view the control picture (on the cover of the box the puzzle came
in) and comparing any piece with the magnified image, find where the piece
goes and put it there. This is a good method only if each piece takes
less than a minute to place, and becomes a really bad method when the
picture on the box is not the same as the puzzle will be, which brings us
to the Fourth Law:
4) The picture on the cover of the box, provided there is one,
will either...
a) Be a picture from a puzzle other than the one which
you are attempting to put together.
b) Be a picture which is basically the same as the one
you are putting together, only with different
colours.
c) Be a picture which is exactly the right control
picture, exactly the right colour but differs only
in that the picture is upside down.
The last of these cases can be rectified rotating the box a half turn [4].
Although puzzles are usually quite time consuming, there is a Fifth Law
that describes how the ease of performing jigsaw completion increases with
age:
5) The ease with which a jigsaw puzzle is completed can be
measured as the inverse of the time required for completion,
and is exponentially proportional to age.
That is, if you are twice as old as another person, you will naturally
complete the puzzle in a quarter of the time. This law, however, is not
very obvious through middle age, but there is a remarkable change at the
age of 60 and older, whereby it almost suddenly becomes incredibly easy
to complete puzzles. This results in most people of age 70 and older
being able to complete puzzles at lightning speed.
Once the puzzle is completed and all the onlookers have dropped in their
concealed pieces, occasionally concealed many days before the puzzle was
begun, you can marvel at the nice-ness of the picture (or lack of it).
This picture that you've put together will then possibly look just as nice
as the picture on the box or even identical, making the entire construction
of the puzzle absolutely pointless.
Here is where the clever people will quickly grab some contact adhesive and
stick the puzzle together permanently and the masochists will tear the
puzzle apart to do some other time.
There are some additional methods which help to fit pieces into places
where they are not designed to fit. A hammer works best for fitting larger
male edges into smaller female edges, although a few bangs with your fist
may be sufficient. To fit a smaller male edge into a larger female edge, a
few drops of hot water will allow the piece to expand to fill the hole.
There is a downside to this, however, in that some people may regard these
methods as cheating, and also the fact that pieces that are placed where
they do not fit will not produce the intended picture, which may make
people wonder why the finished puzzle looks like a collage.
The most effective methods involve not doing the puzzle at all. By
avoiding the puzzle altogether you can actually guarantee a longer life
[5].
However, avoiding jigsaw puzzles is not very easy. Grandmothers tend to
give these horrid things away all the time, and no matter how many she's
already given you, you could always get another dozen, even a week after
the last batch. So the next best thing to do is destroy them.
To effectively destroy a puzzle, first soak in petrol and pack the puzzle
in layers of petrol-soaked paper and cloth. Then you can encase the whole
assembly in dynamite and store in a large drum, accompanied by a fission
bomb. The entire drum can then be set off wherever you choose, although I
would recommend the moon, then a large desert, a small island in the
Pacific (preferably with no inhabitants), or failing all these
possibilities, you could detonate the thing in a small city, like Melbourne
[6].
To conclude, I will just remind you that there are many methods of coping
with a piece of cardboard which some git deliberately took apart. Whether
you decide that you'll complete the puzzle or destroy it (and which way you
may intend to complete the puzzle if that is what you intend to do) is
completely up to you.
[1] Or arts students. But I think that's a clear synonym anyway.
[2] Entropy (defined): The amount of disorder in a system. In general, the
amount of entropy in a system increases with the passing of time, and
for the entropy to decrease, you must add energy to balance the
equation.
[3] The idea of jigsaw puzzles with pictures of food on them was apparently
done for a reason. By looking at heaps of baked beans, for example,
and at the same time being completely frustrated by a puzzle full of
them, you could theoretically be put off baked beans, which would
consequently reduce flatulence. In the same way, puzzles featuring
nothing but eggs could help to cut down cholesterol.
[4] Through the correct axis, i.e. don't turn it upside down.
[5] This is actually not proven, so don't quote me on it.
[6] Provided you don't actually live there.