{"id":33672,"date":"2022-04-23T13:33:54","date_gmt":"2022-04-23T18:33:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=33672"},"modified":"2022-04-23T13:35:28","modified_gmt":"2022-04-23T18:35:28","slug":"vintage-cubes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=33672","title":{"rendered":"Vintage Cubes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My neighbor’s autistic son, the one who a few months ago challenged me to solve a Rubik’s Cube by solving one side and then an adjacent side<\/a>, which I didn’t think could be done but now I do all the time, broke his Rubik’s Cube a few months ago. I never asked how. It doesn’t matter. Boys have a way of breaking things you don’t think are breakable. That’s just how boys are. Having been a boy myself, I speak from personal experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, the last few months, when I’ve gone to the Community Aid in south York, which I don’t often do but will sometimes pop my head in for a look around when I go to the Weis Market over there, I’ve checked the toy shelves for a used Rubik’s Cube for him. I found a speed cube there for two dollars in the fall, which was nice, because now I have a cube I can fiddle with at home and a cube I can fiddle with at the office. But I haven’t seen one since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today they had one! Not only did they have one, but it’s a vintage Rubik’s Cube from the early 1980s, back when blue was opposite white and yellow was opposite green. (Today, yellow is opposite white and blue is opposite green.) I snatched it up right away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
Vintage!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I will be perfectly honest and say I was tempted to keep it for myself. It’s vintage! It’s exactly like the Rubik’s Cubes I grew up with and completely failed to solve save by knifing the things and ripping them apart! (I was quite good at that.) But no, a promise to myself is still a promise, and I promised myself that I would buy him a Rubik’s Cube at a secondhand shop if I found one. And so I did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He asked me to solve it when I got home and gave it to him, which I did. It was hard as hell, not so much because the colors are “wrong” (though that threw me off a little at various point), but because the cube was very stiff and difficult to turn. It probably needs to be disassembled — or at least rotated — and some WD-40 sprayed into the mechanism. So what should have taken me about two minutes took me closer to five, not to mention my arm muscles were surprisingly flexed and tired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, he now has a Rubik’s Cube, and it’s solved, and I’m sure in the morning he’ll tell me that somehow it got messed up overnight and can I solve it for him again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which I will, happily, because that’s what I do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My neighbor’s autistic son, the one who a few months ago challenged me to solve a Rubik’s Cube by solving one side and then an adjacent side, which I didn’t think could be done but now I do all the time, broke his Rubik’s Cube a few months ago. I never asked how. It doesn’tContinue reading “Vintage Cubes”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[4639],"class_list":["post-33672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-rubiks-cube","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33672\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}