This is not a pharmacy [ANSWERED]

this is not a pharmacy...

so far we have had puzzles about ships, planes, tractors, cars, bikes, it's time to go cultural

< click

SV of this pharmacy please

Apr 22, 2015 6:53:38 GMT krenek said:

so far we have had puzzles about ships, planes, tractors, cars, bikes, it's time to go cultural

I'm not going to wait until 5 clues are given to say that ships, planes, cars etc.... are cultural too. 

I'm following two leads in this puzzle. One obvious (red herring?), the other one, not so obvious.  So far, no results. Damn search words. 

Apr 22, 2015 14:55:55 GMT johnluke said:

Apr 22, 2015 6:53:38 GMT krenek said:

so far we have had puzzles about ships, planes, tractors, cars, bikes, it's time to go cultural

I'm not going to wait until 5 clues are given to say that ships, planes, cars etc.... are cultural too. 

I'm following two leads in this puzzle. One obvious (red herring?), the other one, not so obvious.  So far, no results. Damn search words. 

This is impossible for me aswell. I will have to work on this when I have some free time this evening 

bravo walter!

time for a clue?

SPOILER: Click to show

your first clue:


and: the pharmacy is of course a red herring!...

90 views

Apr 23, 2015 19:24:10 GMT krenek said:

90 views

       1 winner     

OK, so now we know what this was about all this time; so much for all the other possibilities in the picture; but that doesn't mean we know what the search words are (it's all about keywords in the end!   ). I did a couple of searches with no results. If those things have a specific name and are only found in this town, good, but I don't know what name it is.... 

It took a long time before it finally dawned on me! (Too long. ) I posted a puzzle on a highly related subject some years ago.

Apr 23, 2015 20:48:09 GMT johnluke said:

Apr 23, 2015 19:24:10 GMT krenek said:

90 views

       1 winner     

well johnluke, you know that some puzzles are "easy", some "less easy" and some are "more difficult" to find, nothing new!?!

Apr 23, 2015 20:53:25 GMT johnluke said:

(...) it's all about keywords in the end!

certainly not!
sometimes you have first to follow a way, an idea... like here:

NEW CLUES:

SPOILER: Click to show

146 views

Apr 24, 2015 7:27:25 GMT krenek said:

Apr 23, 2015 20:48:09 GMT johnluke said:

       1 winner     

well johnluke, you know that some puzzles are "easy", some "less easy" and some are "more difficult" to find, nothing new!?!

Apr 23, 2015 20:53:25 GMT johnluke said:

(...) it's all about keywords in the end!

certainly not!
sometimes you have first to follow a way, an idea... like here:

NEW CLUES:

SPOILER: Click to show

146 views

Hey, my first post from my phone... and from work (lunch break).

Krenek, do you really think I didn't see the link with Magritte? You hurt my feelings... That's the first thing I checked: pharmacie Magritte, rue Magritte etc. And now Magritte street lamps... and since you said it was a red herring I gave
up that lead. Now I also searched bowler hat lamps and such. No luck. :/ Key words. ^^

It beats me

SPOILER: Click to show

SPOILER: Click to show

OK, so now, here's a summary of what happened: The title immediately made me think of Magritte (Ceci n'est pas ... has become a cliché phrase in French because of him!). I start looking at his birthplace, deathplace, places where he lived. But I was aware it might be a red herring, and there might be some tiny pixels in the image that reeeeaaally were the solution. At which point you say JL is right, the pharmacy is a red herring, which makes me give up the whole Magritte thing. I start looking at tiny things in the image, and see this little guy in the fountain (like 10 pixels in the image) and I think that's the solution, and I search and search for the fountain and don't find it and give up. You then say it's not tiny pixels, it's big and in the foreground. I see the lampposts with their bowler hats like in Magritte paintings and now I start looking for street lamps shaped like bowler hats. No results. Then you post clues showing it's all about Magritte after all! WHAAAT? So here I go again back to Wiki and finally find the place, which I would have found almost immediately if I had followed my first hunch!

So allow me to post this fountain which is near your pharmacy. I looked for it for too long not to post it here. 

Walter_V_R, bridgeplayer, johnluke, well done!

a n s w e r :

SPOILER: Click to show

Place du Perron, Châtelet, Belgium, 50.404544°N 4.521506°E

the way to find out:
> the bowler hat street lights + the title "this is not a..." should lead to
> the painter René Magritte, one of the most well-known 20th century artists (not only imho)
> what town would have such street lights in honor of him?
> magritte used to live in châtelet, where there is a magritte walk in the center of the city featuring various surrealistic representations

too:
> a wikipedia (do not use always and only google) search with the keywords "magritte street lights" lists châtelet

indeed, the point was to find the name of this surrealistic painter, magritte

(wiki)

rarely i do post puzzles that are "a little more" difficult than other, i did this time, yeah!

266 views

Apr 24, 2015 10:25:16 GMT johnluke said:

Krenek, do you really think I didn't see the link with Magritte? You hurt my feelings...

well, i do not post clues only for you, johnluke!

(No mention of the town of Chatelet in the English Wikipedia article about Magritte. Not that I have ever heard of him. Not that I know too much about arts of this kind)

Apr 27, 2015 7:47:30 GMT krenek said:

Apr 24, 2015 10:25:16 GMT johnluke said:

Krenek, do you really think I didn't see the link with Magritte? You hurt my feelings...

well, i do not post clues only for you, johnluke!

Of course you don't. I was only replying to you saying this:

"certainly not!

sometimes you have first to follow a way, an idea... like here:
" (and you gave your paintings clue).

So you were implying I wasn't aware this puzzle was about Magritte. As I explained (at length, see above!), I saw it immediately, because of the title (not because of the lamps though). 

Apr 27, 2015 8:00:08 GMT hhgygy said:

(No mention of the town of Chatelet in the English Wikipedia article about Magritte. Not that I have ever heard of him. Not that I know too much about arts of this kind)

The French wiki article does. And then both the French and English article about Châtelet mention the Magritte walk, to be fair. All you had to know is that it was a "walk". Not a street, no a house, not a museum, not a monument, not "lampposts" or "street lamps" (that doesn't return any results, believe me, I tried  ). 

My mistake was to give up my first hunch and believe the Magritte part was a red herring. The pharmacy was the red herring, not the Magritte part. Oh well. 

Apr 27, 2015 8:20:51 GMT johnluke said:

Apr 27, 2015 8:00:08 GMT hhgygy said:

(No mention of the town of Chatelet in the English Wikipedia article about Magritte. Not that I have ever heard of him. Not that I know too much about arts of this kind)

And then both the French and English article about Châtelet mention the Magritte walk, to be fair. All you had to know is that it was a "walk". Not a street, no a house, not a museum, not a monument, not "lampposts" or "street lamps" (that doesn't return any results, believe me, I tried  ). 

But that is ignotum per ignotius because first you have to know about Chatelet and you don't

Apr 27, 2015 8:29:30 GMT hhgygy said:

Apr 27, 2015 8:20:51 GMT johnluke said:

And then both the French and English article about Châtelet mention the Magritte walk, to be fair. All you had to know is that it was a "walk". Not a street, no a house, not a museum, not a monument, not "lampposts" or "street lamps" (that doesn't return any results, believe me, I tried  ). 

But that is ignotum per ignotius because first you have to know about Chatelet and you don't

Exactly!    A case where the clue is useful only if you already know the solution. In ten years of F&G I've seen plenty of those. 

Apr 27, 2015 8:35:46 GMT johnluke said:

Apr 27, 2015 8:29:30 GMT hhgygy said:

But that is ignotum per ignotius because first you have to know about Chatelet and you don't

Exactly!    A case where the clue is useful only if you already know the solution. In ten years of F&G I've seen plenty of those. 

OK, I was a bit lazy, that's true because today, even if you don't speak French (or Malay or Hungarian) you can still have Google translate wikipedia articles from other languages.
I just didn't care enough to find these trivia about Magritte.

Apr 27, 2015 8:47:45 GMT hhgygy said:

Apr 27, 2015 8:35:46 GMT johnluke said:

Exactly!    A case where the clue is useful only if you already know the solution. In ten years of F&G I've seen plenty of those. 

OK, I was a bit lazy, that's true because today, even if you don't speak French (or Malay or Hungarian) you can still have Google translate wikipedia articles from other languages.
I just didn't care enough to find these trivia about Magritte.

The Wikipedia articles in "other languages" are not Google translations (for the most part!) but real original articles written by local contributors. Hence the mention of the town in the French article but not the English one. Some contributors do translate articles from other languages, but even then it's a human translation, not a horrible literal software translation that creates only gibberish, certainly not in the style of an encyclopedia. I just wanted to say this for the record. 

Apr 27, 2015 8:55:26 GMT johnluke said:

Apr 27, 2015 8:47:45 GMT hhgygy said:

OK, I was a bit lazy, that's true because today, even if you don't speak French (or Malay or Hungarian) you can still have Google translate wikipedia articles from other languages.
I just didn't care enough to find these trivia about Magritte.

The Wikipedia articles in "other languages" are not Google translations (for the most part!) but real original articles written by local contributors. Hence the mention of the town in the French article but not the English one. Some contributors do translate articles from other languages, but even then it's a human translation, not a horrible literal software translation that creates only gibberish, certainly not in the style of an encyclopedia. I just wanted to say this for the record. 

I haven't said anything to the contrary. I just said, if there is a more detailed article in another wiki in an unknown language, you can use GoogleTranslate.

Apr 27, 2015 9:07:10 GMT hhgygy said:

Apr 27, 2015 8:55:26 GMT johnluke said:

The Wikipedia articles in "other languages" are not Google translations (for the most part!) but real original articles written by local contributors. Hence the mention of the town in the French article but not the English one. Some contributors do translate articles from other languages, but even then it's a human translation, not a horrible literal software translation that creates only gibberish, certainly not in the style of an encyclopedia. I just wanted to say this for the record. 

I haven't said anything to the contrary. I just said, if there is a more detailed article in another wiki in an unknown language, you can use GoogleTranslate.

Ooohh, my mistake, sorry. I should've read more carefully.