The Potato Chip Puzzles_ The Puzzling World of Winston Breen - Eric Berlin [9]
Jake looked disgusted. “Forget it. I’m done.”
“Win?” said Mal.
“Yeah, sure. One more game.” But he couldn’t shake off the strange phone call. Who was that?
Frowning and distracted and knowing that Mal was about to wipe the floor with him, he nonetheless sat down and started a new swordfight. Jake threw himself back on the sofa.
Winston shook his head and tried to move the phone call to a holding cell in his brain, to think about later. “Hey, Jake,” said Winston as he took the controller. “If you don’t want to play this anymore, I know something else you can do.”
“What?” said Jake.
“There’s something fun that you can do that contains the letters of SWORD in that order, but has nothing to do with swords.”
Jake nodded, unsurprised. Puzzles popped out of Winston with no notice. “And I have to figure out what that is.”
“Well, I’ll tell you later if you can’t get it.”
(Answer, page 239.)
CHAPTER THREE
THE LAST TIME Winston participated in a large-scale puzzle event, he’d woken up at dawn and spent several hours wandering around his house, urging time to go faster. Time refused. Winston had pulled his hair out in frustration as he watched the minutes crawl, crawl, crawl.
When Winston opened his eyes on Friday morning, he knew immediately that the same thing was going to happen again. The light in his room was wrong—instead of bright summer sun, it was a pale mixture of daylight and darkness. Bracing himself for the worst, he rolled over and looked at his clock. Five forty-five. All year long he’d gotten up at seven o’clock, groaning and wishing for ten more minutes of sleep. Now, on the first day of summer vacation, he was awake and raring to go before full sunrise.
There was nothing to be done about it. He was awake like it was high noon. Winston got up and wandered around the house. There was nobody to talk to—his parents and sister were still asleep. He flipped through the television stations, but the only things on were news shows, infomercials, and cartoons for babies.
On one channel, though, he came across a commercial for Simon’s Potato Chips. He knew it was unlikely to contain any clues for today’s event, but he still had to stop and watch it. The commercial showed a bunch of young people, supposedly at a party, except that everybody was standing around, bored and glum. Suddenly a guy with a wide smile showed up holding a bag of (new!) Simon’s Potato Squares, and the party was transformed: The music began thumping, and guest after guest grabbed handfuls of chips, which were indeed perfectly square. Fueled by this magical new snack food, everyone began dancing and chatting and having fun. “Think square!” said the guy who had brought the chips, his teeth flashing white as he held up the bag for the camera.
Winston turned off the television, amused. Did people really believe this? That a bag of potato chips could turn a boring party into New Year’s Eve? Winston guessed that commercials like this must work at least sometimes, since it seemed like every other ad followed the same script.
The commercial gave him an idea, though. He went back to his room and went online to look up information about Dmitri Simon, the founder of Simon’s Snack Foods and the guy whose voice they had heard on the answering machine.
The company Web site had most of what he wanted to know. A page marked “History” showed a big picture of Dmitri Simon’s pudgy, smiling, bearded face. Simon had started his company after being fired from five jobs in a row. He made the first batches of his now-famous potato chips in a pizzeria’s kitchen. He started off by selling them to delis and other stores out of the back of his car. People loved them, and he soon had more requests for his chips than he could handle. He borrowed money from everyone he knew and opened a small factory. Now he was one of the richest men in the state.
He was also one of the oddest men in the state, as Winston learned while searching the Net for more information. Simon had more money than he knew what to do with, and he gave a lot of it away. Rather than merely