Short Stuff: Jigsaw Puzzles

I do. I mean it's been a while, but yes, I like a good puzzle. Um, a jigsaw puzzle in particular, I'd like to say, like a very heartwarming one, like maybe a jigsaw puzzle of a Thomas Kincaid painting, or of flowers or kittens or something, and nothing's terribly hard, just something like occupying rather than challenging. Yeah. I didn't uh do a lot of puzzles. I mean I guess I did when I was a kid, and then probably didn't for a long time. And we weren't a puzzle

family really, Um, but I did. There was one week in college where a dude down the street for me. A friend got a big puzzle and it was just one of those things in college where you've got time and three or four of us got together and drank a lot for like a week and did this huge puzzle and just had so much fun. And that's the last puzzle I've done except for, you know, doing little puzzles with my daughter. That sounds like a fun fun that's a great puzzle story. It was a lot of fun.

I imagine that whole like weekend starting with a musical number where like your friends sticks his head out the front door. He's like, gets here and you stick your head out and you're like, sort of here, it's here, the puzzle finally here. Uh, that's exactly That's exactly how it went down. This is a lot of jibber jabber for his short stuff, isn't it. Yeah, So we should just go ahead and get to it and say that a named Sir John Spillsbury. They called him the dough Boy.

He was a engraver in England and a map maker in the mid seventeen hundreds and he gets credit in seventeen sixty six for creating the first jigsaw puzzle when he Uh, put a map on a piece of wood, cut it out, cut the countries out, and said, here you go. Teachers, use this to teach geography. I love things where it's just like there, it is right there. That was the first time it ever happened. That's the beginning of it. There's your origin story. It's nice and tidy.

So UM. It was kind of a teaching tool at first, but also people were like, it's kind of fun putting the countries, and let's do this at home too, or um, at our friend's house over a long weekend while we drink. So it kind of kind of took off and then um, in very short order. It also became a marketing tool too, where companies would kind of, you know, maybe give away, um a jigsaw puzzle that was a photo of a mobile gas Asian or something like that. Um. So they

became very ubiquitous pretty quickly. Yeah, and they still do stuff like that to promote your company. Um. They can be little marketing tools. I no, Kodak has one that they sell that they say is the world's largest at fifty one pieces plus eight and a half feet by six point to five ft. None of those things are even close it's not the biggest at all. They're really full of it, Chuck. I think they can just say whatever they want their code. What are you gonna do?

I guess so. Yeah, So Codak does sell that one. It's like four hundred bucks, and I mean, it's nothing to sneeze at. It's a giant, huge puzzle. Our problem with it is that they call it the world's largest jigsaw puzzle. And I'm guessing it's not just us who have a problem with it, but the people at the Guinness World Records probably have a bit of a problem

with it too. Either that or Codex lawyers were like, we have to ward this just perfectly, or else were getting some trouble here because it turns out that this Kodak world's Largest Jigsaw puzzle is fairly mediocre compared to some of the other jigsaw puzzles that are around that

take the cake for world's largest anything. Yeah, there was one in two thousand eighteen in Dubai that Guinness recognized and it was an honor of the Year of Zaid, which is a year long tribute to the person who founded the U A B S Sorry the U A E. Yeah, Shaik Zayed been Sultan all nine in Nice. I think, I think I got it. And this thing was sixty five almost sixty six thousand square feet. Yeah that's um, that's pretty pretty impressive if you have you seen it, Yeah,

it was pretty it was awesome. I mean, like the pieces themselves are giant. They're like about a foot or so square, and you know, the whole thing was a little it was like kind of light cardboard, but when put together, was quite impressive for sure. And Codex had fifty pieces in change. There was one in Ho Chi Min City in Vietnam that the students at the university there put this thing together and it had over a half a million pieces, right, so um, that was I

think of a giant lotus flower, right, beautiful it is. Um. So there's definitely bigger puzzles than the one that Codex touting is the world's largest jigsaw puzzle. Um. But some people say, okay, that's great. Yeah, that's really time consuming. But any schmo with all of the pieces can put that thing together. Other people and this is totally unsurprising to me that there's like a whole subculture of people who are like, I want to be challenged by a

jigsaw puzzle. As it turns out, you don't have to have a football field size jigsaw puzzle to be challenged. You can do it with some very small surface areas. There's one in particular called ice Puzzle nine that's just nine pieces, but it's possibly the hardest jigsaw puzzle on the planet. All right, well, let's take a break there and we'll tell you more about ice Puzzle nine right after this. Have you seen this thing? I have? Have you seen the video of someone putting it together? No?

I saw a video of the guy putting jigsaw puzzle twenty three together or twenty nine. So this is a designer and I think he did both of these. Name you Osaka. And if you look at ice Puzzle nine, it's a tray, a blue tray that's about as big as your two hands put together. It's very small, and

it's only got those nine pieces in there. You know, they don't look like your standard puzzle pieces there sort of you know, they can be flattened places and curvy, just like a puzzle, but like a jigsaw puzzle, but there's just something a little different. And when you look at it, when you look at you think how hard could that be And then I went to a YouTube that showed a guy putting it together and it was so easy, and I was like, how do people not

get that? That's how easy it is. And the only thing I can think of is that it's it's easy when you see someone doing it, but very hard when you're just have the puzzle pieces. It must be because this famous puzzler, Chris Ramsey took him two hours and nine minutes and said that it was exhausting, right, and he's yeah, he he doesn't seem to be the kind who would take like a dive for a puzzle maker, like he seems legit. You know, there's a There was another one. I saw a video called from a guy

named the Puzzle Guy. Who have you ever heard Croatian people talk speak English? I think this is the video I saw. Okay, so that guy did he Jiggs. He did Jigsaw Puzzle twenty nine too, and he had some real trouble with it. In fact, at the end of the um the puzzle, when he had the last two pieces, he was explaining how he couldn't get them to fit, when he accidentally got them to fit and was actually

surprised that he finished the puzzle. Yeah, but it's great, man, I love I love that accidents so greatation people speak English, if they just sound so just friendly and amiable, it's awesome. But as he was putting this together, one of the big problems with Jigsaw Puzzle twenty nine, which was also made by u Osaka, as you were saying, um, it has five corner pieces, so one of the corner pieces actually fits into the inside of the puzzle, and it

just seems to be extraordinarily difficult to put together. One of the reasons why it's tough is all the pieces are exactly the same. It doesn't form a picture. Um, I should say they look exactly the same, not shape wise, but but colorwise. They're this translucent blue or whatever. Um. So you just have to tell from the shape. And then some of the shapes look like they should fit certain sizes um of like holes and that what they're called. The shapes go in the holes in the spaces spaces, um.

But they just don't quite fit. It looks very mad and it was maddening just to watch the video Yese and Ice Puzzle nine. I wish I hadn't watched it, and that I would have just bought it to see how I would do. Um, and and I think, and I don't want to give it away. But when you put the last piece in it, the idea is that you have to get all the pieces inside that tray. It's not necessarily what you think of as a puzzle, which is they all fit perfectly together and form a

perfect picture. Um. That's the only kind of hint I will give is that, uh, you know, there can be space in that trade. They just gotta all fit in there, right, That makes sense. That's a good hint. I don't want to ruin it. So speak of ruining, man, did you see the video of Dave Evans from Dorset, England, who uh, basically created the I guess it was certified as the world's largest hand cut wooden jigsaw puzzle. No. So this guy, this poor guy, he created a jigsaw puzzle, an enormous one.

It was like, um, twenty ft by eight feet and if you're in the UK, it's six meters by two and a half meters. It was just this giant puzzle and he had it completed. He spent two weeks putting it together, after assembling, like cutting it and then it took him another two weeks just to put it together. And he had in this giant piece of plywood in his workshop showing it off and it somebody was filming it and it just collapsed and he walks into the frame. It just like about to lose his mind. He just

can't believe that just happened. Was captured. Yes, yeah, that moment was captured on video and his reaction was captured on video. It's worth it's worth checking out because you just agonize for the guy. It took him another sixteen days with a bunch of assistants to put it back together. Well, here's another interesting record, and this these are the records that kind of cracked me up. There are two people seemingly battling it out for the largest collection of jigsaw

puzzles record. Uh Louisa figure Redo I Guess of South Paulo, Brazil and then Georgina gil Lacuna of the Philippines. Um have over a thousand puzzles each, and they keep kind of coming back and forth. And this is just such a weird record because the only thing you have to do is just buy more puzzles. Yeah, that's it, That's all there is to it. Yeah, like where does it end? I guess one of them is gonna have to kick

the bucket. I guess so. But then someone else takes over the collection and they're like, I'm gonna buy eight more puzzles. I'm winning. You would hope so, but but I mean, like, um, you would hope that your arch nemesis would have enough class to be like, my puzzle collection must be destroyed upon my death. Oh that's what you do. Yeah, just set it ablaze or distributed in a bunch of different pieces to different people. Now, set

it ablaze. Don't give it to children, all right? You know, how about this, chuck, If you're in favor of setting in a place, you could give them to children a need, But you have to stipulate in your will that a piece is taken from every single one of those puzzles, and those pieces are set ablaze. How about that? Yeah, that's the worst. We've gotten a lot of hand me down puzzles, which is what happens when you have a

kid and all of them are missing pieces. Why you should just know not to even take a hand me down puzzle because it's happen, you know. So, Uh, you want to talk about this last thing, this seventred person puzzle. March of last year or two thousand nineteen, more than seventeen hundred people um got together to form the largest human jigsaw puzzle on record. And this one was cool because it raised awareness for autism spectrum to order. And the piece itself that they formed out of human beings

is the symbol for the Autism Speaks organization. And I think there were I don't know if there was controversy, but that was surely no one like got mad about this, but the question did arise. Is it a puzzle if it's just a puzzle piece, or is it a puzzle piece if there's no puzzle for it to fit into? Oh well that too, uh, And Ginnis said, you know what this is, everybody. This is a largest human image record. In other words, everyone getting together, and when you look

at it from space it looks like something else. Some marketing research assistant saved the day. Oh yes, I guess. The last thing we have to say about jigsaw puzzles is that that one great Simpsons reference where there there's some people sitting at a bed and breakfast putting a jigsaw puzzle together. It's clearly of a donkey, and a woman puts a piece into like the donkey's shoulder and says, oh, it's a donkey. Right. That's like, well, you're not watching

what we do in the shadows, are you. No, I'm saving it all up, I think. All right, Well, for the fans, just let me say that's like Jackie Daytona and his toothpick. Okay, there you go. I don't want to know anything else about it. Well, thanks for joining us on short Stuff, everybody. Short Stuff is apt Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radios How

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