Blah Box

Feeling Blah

Five Cubic Courses, Dessert

What a meal we’ve had! I hope you’ve saved room for dessert because it’s definitely worth the calories. In fact it’s a good thing we ordered one of these when we first sat down, so they didn’t run out by the time we got around to it.

You’ll likely recall the main course we just finished, the Penultimate Burr Box Set. Well, we couldn’t actually finish it, it’s much too large a portion and quite rich, which is what one might expect during a fine five course meal. But for day to day consumption, Eric actually created a pocket sized and travel friendly little burr set, the “DDD”. That set of 12 burr pieces was designed by Darryl Adams, who coined it “Darryl’s Dense Dozen”. Eric made a tiny case for the metal pieces, just 2.5 inches in greatest length. Like the Penultimate Box, Eric thought about how he might incorporate a puzzle box element to the little DDD set. He came up with a few separate simple ideas, but none could be incorporated efficiently enough to make it worthwhile, so in the end he left any mechanism out. The experience left him feeling a bit blah.

Blah Box by Eric Fuller

Until, that is, he was inspired by the community and his fan base of customers (i.e. “market forces”). Three ideas that were too simple to produce by themselves could be combined into one box after weighing production value and demand. Of course this led to more machining, prototyping, and higher expense, so this approach is always a trade off. But for Eric, the market forces of making better designs and products people want are in the end the highest driver of production. Eric recounts another bump in the Blah saga that is now just a part of the story. It is hard to beta-test everything exhaustively. Blah had an element which allowed a short-cut or unintended solve step which was overlooked. This was easily corrected by changing the properties of one element and “fixes” were sent out, and future production runs changed. There was a lot of drama for something so blah.

It puts the “meh” in mesmerizing

Blah Box is a fantastic puzzle box with a few great steps and a perfectly clever misdirection. Eric says it is hard to make an “interesting” puzzle. A “good” puzzle will mess with your assumptions. A “great” puzzle will create an assumption and use it against you. Like so many of Eric Fuller’s creations, Blah does this so well. Eric seems to have an endless supply of great ideas, perhaps because in his heart he is a collector too, and loves what he does. We are so fortunate that he is incredibly skilled at bringing his ideas to life.

So-So cocktail c. 1921

Toasting such a blah puzzle box requires something only so-so. I’ve turned to one of my favorite cocktail books for some tepid inspiration. Despite the fact that the book is often considered to be the “coolest cocktail book in the world”, I was able to find this absolutely boring recipe. I’m a big fan of Harry Craddock’s book, The Savoy Cocktail Book, which was published in 1930 and illustrated in the eye-catching art deco style of the period by Gilbert Rumbold. Craddock is one of the best known cocktail personalities of the prohibition era, which he escaped from by leaving San Francisco to set up shop at the Savoy in London.

The So-So Cocktail is actually a delicious combination of gin, “Italian” (sweet) vermouth, Calvados and grenadine. It’s unusual in that it uses a split base on gin and Calvados, which work well together in this drink. Vermouth is often used to balance a drink, and the grenadine here is a surprisingly perfect touch. Like the ironically named “Blah” puzzle box, which is in fact nothing of the sort, the So-So is delightful. The name does not refer to any particular mood of the mixer or imbiber, but rather the inventor. The drink can be found even earlier, in Harry MacElhone’s first book, “Harry of Ciro’s ABC of Mixing Cocktails”, 1921, where it is credited to “Mr. P. Soso, the popular manager of Ciro’s Club, London”. Perhaps it’s time this anything but so-so cocktail got the revival it’s due, one hundred years later. Cheers!

A mediocre pair

So-So

1 oz dry gin

1 oz sweet vermouth

½ oz Calvados

½ oz grenadine

Shake ingredients with ice and strain into a favorite glass. Garnishing this drink would inevitably be rather blah.

Enjoy the whole meal and get a little Fuller: 

Special thanks to Eric Fuller for his time and insight into his process and the puzzles featured here over the past few posts.