As clued by the mention of a song in the flavortext, this is about a song. Looking a few of the less ambiguous pictures up (or remembering the song), we see that they all come from "We Didn't Start the Fire", but we have several issues:
- The numbers don't seem to have anything to do with the thing imaged.
- We haven't actually used the fact that these are all from We Didn't Start The Fire.
The second number in each image is the length of this next item (which is strongly confirmed by very long items such as BRITISH BEATLEMANIA and RICHARD NIXON BACK AGAIN). This also answers the question of how the table is ordered; it's alphabetical in the next item.
We now index into the next item by the first number (so, e.g., taking the first of the 7 letters of ALABAMA, which is A, the third of the 18 letters of BRITISH BEATLEMANIA, which is I, etc.):
| Puzzle order | Picture | #/# | Next item | Letter |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | BUDAPEST | 1/7 | ALABAMA | A |
| 2 | LAWRENCE OF ARABIA | 3/18 | BRITISH BEATLEMANIA | I |
| 3 | HULA HOOPS | 3/6 | CASTRO | S |
| 4 | HARRY TRUMAN | 3/8 | DORIS DAY | R |
| 5 | THE CATCHER IN THE RYE | 3/10 | EISENHOWER | S |
| 6 | PETER PAN | 4/12 | ELVIS PRESLEY | I |
| 7 | LITTLE ROCK | 7/9 | PASTERNAK | N |
| 8 | HO CHI MINH | 8/21 | RICHARD NIXON BACK AGAIN | N |
| 9 | NORTH KOREA | 3/10 | SOUTH KOREA | U |
| 10 | H-BOMB | 1/8 | SUGAR RAY | S |
Well, this doesn't look good. We now have to realize that we need to reorder in song order (or we can anagram, but reordering is intended):
| Puzzle order | Picture | #/# | Next item | Letter |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | HARRY TRUMAN | 3/8 | DORIS DAY | R |
| 9 | NORTH KOREA | 3/10 | SOUTH KOREA | U |
| 10 | H-BOMB | 1/8 | SUGAR RAY | S |
| 5 | THE CATCHER IN THE RYE | 3/10 | EISENHOWER | S |
| 6 | PETER PAN | 4/12 | ELVIS PRESLEY | I |
| 1 | BUDAPEST | 1/7 | ALABAMA | A |
| 7 | LITTLE ROCK | 7/9 | PASTERNAK | N |
| 3 | HULA HOOPS | 3/6 | CASTRO | S |
| 2 | LAWRENCE OF ARABIA | 3/18 | BRITISH BEATLEMANIA | I |
| 8 | HO CHI MINH | 8/21 | RICHARD NIXON BACK AGAIN | N |
We now get RUSSIANS IN, which sounds good. But putting this in will just give us "Keep going!" "Russians in" appears in "We Didn't Start the Fire"; the puzzle answer is the next word, AFGHANISTAN.
Authors' Notes
There have been quite a few We Didn't Start the Fire puzzles; it's a strange dataset ripe with puzzle potential. I've sort of wanted to write one for a while but been unsure of good mechanics; this slot, intended to be easier than usual, seemed like a good place to put a mechanically-simple puzzle about it.
Originally the flavortext had a magical singing fire that was always burning, but that felt too obvious to some testsolvers. I'm still unsure what the right line of obviousness there is.