Check Out The Big Brains on Em

I had a Rubik's Cube when I was a kid, but I never did figure out how to solve it without disassembling it. I even tried to fool my family that I'd solved it one day. They were running some errand and I asked to stay home alone. Mom thought it was me trying to be independent, but I just wanted the privacy to start prying it open.



During the Awake Over, someone (they all denied being the one, as if it was Serious Trouble, making me think they all took part) rearranged the stickers to try and solve it. Which is the one thing I'd have wished they hadn't tried because they never quite stick right again.



Today Em wanted my help solving the cube my way.

Which is fine with me. In the process of reassembling it, we discovered that the geniuses moving stickers had actually created a cube that didn't solve, so we unrearranged some of them.

On seeing it come apart, Em declared it the 'best toy ever.' When I told her that it was named for the Hungarian teacher, Erno Rubik, she said she wanted to meet him. I said that he sure seemed to be brilliant, had invented some similar puzzles to boot, and she said, 'He must be very rich.'

But I guess he's kind of a recleuse, and I don't know if you could get rich yet in the 1980s in Hungary. I seem to recall hearing that it was one of the first Soviet satellites to start gravitating to market reforms, but who knows?