The Carrot

He has never taken his cube apart either

(LOS ANGELES) – TODAY’S human interest story comes from Southern California, where 35-year-old Jason Kuhn was revealed to have never taken the stickers off his cube and rearranged them to appear as though he had solved it.

Kuhn invited us to his East Los Angeles home where he has lived all his life. “Sure, I had a Rubik’s cube,” he said, digging through a dusty box he pulled from his attic. “It was a huge fad when I was growing up in the 80’s. All my friends had one.”

He finally found the cube under a pile of old Transformers toys. It’s still mostly scrambled, but the beginnings of one layer were visibly in progress. The stickers, while worn, are still neat and stuck on tightly. “Yeah, I never felt like taking them off. It just felt like cheating, you know? Also I was a terrible nail-biter as a kid and was never able to peel them off cleanly.”

Friends and classmates had no such qualms. “Every other day someone would bring a solved cube to school in triumph. You could usually tell they cheated though, they always had shoddy misaligned stickering.”

Kuhn might never have been discovered if not for Daniel Lee, 15, one of the burgeoning new generation of speedcubers who weren’t even alive during the original Rubik’s cube boom in the 1980’s. Lee recalled, “I was just practicing my one-hand solving at the bus stop and [Jason] approached me. He told me he had one as a kid. I figured the next thing he was going to say was ‘I used to peel the stickers off,’ but I was surprised.”

Asked what he was going to do now, Kuhn looked thoughtfully at his old cube and said “Well, I might finally figure out how to solve it, now that all the kids are doing it legitimately. I really don’t know if it makes me that special, that I never peeled the stickers off. I don’t think I’m going to let it affect my personal life or go to my head or anything. I’m just like anyone else, trying to live one day at a time.”