The disappearing man

May 29, 2006 4:24 PM

Where does the extra bloke go?

I've printed this out and chopped it up but I still can't see what happens. I know someone here will be able to make it obvious to me.

posted by tellurian to sports, hobbies, & recreation (11 answers total)

Umm... you meant to permalink this post, right?
posted by jonson at 4:27 PM on May 29, 2006

This might help.
posted by MadamM at 4:33 PM on May 29, 2006

I've made one of these. The trick is that each guy has a different part of his body on the dividing line, such that from one to the next, the difference is only a few inches. When you slide the bodies over, they each lose/gain those inches, until you get to the end, by which time you have a complete guy.

When there is an extra guy, the guy at one end will be missing the bottom of his shoes, and the guy at the other end will be missing the top of his hair, and everyone in between is missing something and so a little bit shorter.

When I say "end", I mean if you were to line the guys up in order of how high they sit across the cutting-line, their actual order from left to right is designed to obfuscate this.

It helps to remove the obfuscation - draw them out in order of rising height on the dividing line, and then just slide the top half one man along, and back again, instead of the swapping-peices method they show which is designed to make it harder to follow what is going on.
posted by -harlequin- at 4:38 PM on May 29, 2006

No jonson, I wanted to avoid the boobies. Perfect answer MadamM, thanks.
posted by tellurian at 5:02 PM on May 29, 2006

Jonson was probably asking since the site isn't letting you hotlink to the photo, so we got dumped on the home page instead, and then had to go looking for a relevant page there if we wanted to contribute. madamm made all that unnecessary i s'pose.
posted by misterbrandt at 5:34 PM on May 29, 2006

Oh, sorry, I didn't realise that was happening. It works fine on my machine. Will I ever get the hang of this internet?
posted by tellurian at 6:12 PM on May 29, 2006

I have no idea, but WTF IS THIS???
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 7:31 PM on May 29, 2006

The site won't let you link directly to images, sort of. The first time you click on an image link it goes to the front page, but the second time it goes to the image. Very strange.
posted by MadamM at 9:33 PM on May 29, 2006

Ah! dirtynumbangelboy, you made the same mistake as I did. Did you mean this? And, I'm not 100% sure but it looks like different ways people have sex depending on their nationality. Are they Americans masturbating?
posted by tellurian at 10:07 PM on May 29, 2006

Oops! I think I got that wrong. Did you mean this? I'm going now.
posted by tellurian at 10:14 PM on May 29, 2006

I have no idea, but WTF IS THIS???

"Bilan on the Euro-vision - photo-toad."

Sheesh, everyone knows that.

"The performer: Dima Bilan comes from southern Russia and has released three albums in his native country and picked up two MTV Russian Music Awards in 2005," apparently.
posted by Savannah at 10:35 PM on May 29, 2006