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David Pike:

You probably won't find a provenance or instructions for your calendar device because these were once classics among the "shiny gifts" manufactured in India for the "navigator who has everything" :). Not all of these toys were cheap dust-collector novelty items, but some were.

You closed your latest message with the seven wives puzzle. In this holiday season we should turn to that great pantheon of Christmas adventure tales, originally written by Charles Dickens himself, or so they say, the "Die Hard" movies. In "Die Hard 3" (not actually a Christmas movie, but the previous two "Die Hard" films are famously festive holiday fables), the villain, played by Jeremy Irons (*), gives our heroes, played by Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson, thirty seconds to solve the riddle. They think fast... They mutiply seven by seven by seven by seven... it's 2401 (and yes, all this computation is done on-screen)! And then, they realize... they skipped the opening line of the riddle. The screen cap (attached below) covers it. The answer is one.

Frank Reed
* What? no navigation connection? Don't worry --I found one. Jeremy Irons, in the year 2000, five years after Die Hard 3, was Rupert Gould (!), the horology expert who restored John Harrison's famous "marine clocks", in the mini-series production of Longitude.

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