RAY: Hi, we're back. You're listening to Car Talk with us, Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers here to talk about cars, car repair and the answer to last week's Puzzler. And for those of you who think my brother's just another pretty face.
TOM: That doesn't include my wife by the way. She doesn't even think I'm just a pretty face.
RAY: And what she thinks of you we can't repeat on the air.
TOM: No.
RAY: My brother in a second solved Will Short's little puzzle he gives.
TOM: Ah, it took more than a second.
RAY: I mean, all right, 20 seconds.
TOM: The deal was you take a name of an old car, you replace the first letter and you get the name of a currently made car.
RAY: Right.
TOM: And the answer is --
RAY: And it's not the model, it's the make of car.
TOM: Make of car. It's the Cord and the Ford. Ah, Will, where's Will when you really need him?
RAY: Well, there may be others. But I think that's --
TOM: There may be others, but --
RAY: That's certainly an acceptable answer.
TOM: -- that's the one that jumped right out at me.
RAY: Right. It only works if the number is two.
TOM: It only works if the number is two.
RAY: Anyway, to get back to the business at hand, ah, this, last week's puzzler was a non-automotive, non-historic, non-folkloric, non-faceted word puzzle.
TOM: Oh, yeah.
RAY: And I, here's what I did. I gave out a list of words, and the assignment was to tell me what those words had in common. And I'll repeat the list. Deft, as in no one would ever call my brother deft.
TOM: No, I hear perfectly.
RAY: Are you deft in one ear? First. My brother came in first in the ugly contest. Calmness. A calmness set in as my brother left the room. Canopy. Pass the canopy said Bugsy. No, that wasn't it. A canopy covered the entrance to the garage so my brother wouldn't get wet when he got up in the middle of the night. Laughing. My brother's mental condition is no laughing matter. Stupid.
TOM: Forget, don't even, don't go there.
RAY: Stew easy. Crab cake. I won't go there either. Hijack, as in the hijacker gave up immediately when he realized by brother was one of the passengers. Wow. Well, you could actually solve it by just using the first two words.
TOM: Really?
RAY: Yeah.
TOM: Deft and first.
RAY: What all of these words have in common is they all contain three consecutive letters of the alphabet.
TOM: Oh.
RAY: Is that sneaky?
TOM: So they do.
RAY: D-E-F-R-S-T-L-M-N, N-O-P in canopy.
TOM: O-P?
RAY: G-H-I in laughing, et cetera, et cetera, S-T-U in stupid.
TOM: Very, very good.
RAY: A-B-C in crab cake. Do we have a winner?
TOM: H-I-J. Yeah, yeah we do.
RAY: You didn't trust me did you?
TOM: No I didn't. Yeah, we have a winner. It's John Leete, L-E-E-T-E from Arlington, Virginia. And for having his answer selected at random from the back hole full of correct answers that we got, John is gonna get a $25 gift certificate to the Shameless Commerce Division, which is at the Car Talk section of Cars.com. And with that $25 gift certificate John can get a Best of Car Talk cassette or a CD or so many things that I can't even begin, I already did begin, didn't I?
RAY: You already said that.
TOM: I can't even end.
RAY: Anyway, we'll have a new Puzzler coming up in the third half of today's show, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, our number is 888-CARTALK, that's 8-8-8-2-2-7-8-2-5-5. Hello, you're on Car Talk.
[ Car Talk Puzzler ]
