busybee comics

Narration: I got my brother a Homer Simpson's Head Rubik's Cube puzzle for Hanukkah.

Narration: Basically a 2x2x2 Rubik's Cube shaped like, well, Homer Simpson's head.

Narration: My brother immediately got it to where he couldn't restore it.

Narration: So I worked on it for a while, while "watching" cartoons.

fluffy: [[thinking]] Maybe this will work...

TV: Oh Inu Yasha! You naughty kittycat!

Diagram: 8 factorial. 2x2x2 3 orientations 6 faces 4 rotations = (8! * 3^8)/24

Diagram: or select one as origin - 7! * 3^7

Narration: At about 2:30 a.m. I finally decided to go to bed. Before I could sleep, I worked out (with two different approaches) that there are, at most 11022480 permutations, making a it feasible for a brute-force graph theory approach. (But I couldn't figure out a decent enumeration.)

fluffy: Yay!

Dad: Hey, great! Let me see it.

fluffy: No way, you'll mess it up!

Narration: Finally, tonight while "watching" "Scrooged" on TV with my dad at around midnight, I managed to get it back to the original configuration.

Narration: I had a really hard time not envisioning the Rubik's Cube transformations happening to everyone's head while watching the rest of the movie.