Friday, December 31, 2010

Ladles and Jellyspoons

The famous speaker who no one had heard of said:
Ladles and jellyspoons, hobos and tramps,
cross-eyed mosquitos and bow-legged ants,
I stand before you to sit behind you
to tell you something I know nothing about.
Next Thursday, which is Good Friday,
there's a Mother's Day meeting for fathers only;
wear your best clothes if you haven't any.
Please come if you can't; if you can, stay at home.
Admission is free, pay at the door;
pull up a chair and sit on the floor.
It makes no difference where you sit,
the man in the gallery's sure to spit.
The show is over, but before you go,
let me tell you a story I don't really know.
One bright day in the middle of the night,
two dead boys got up to fight.
(The blind man went to see fair play;
the mute man went to shout "hooray!")
Back to back they faced each other,
drew their swords and shot each other.
A deaf policeman heard the noise,
and came and killed the two dead boys.
A paralysed donkey passing by
kicked the blind man in the eye;
knocked him through a nine-inch wall,
into a dry ditch and drowned them all.
If you don't believe this lie is true,
ask the blind man; he saw it too,
through a knothole in a wooden brick wall.
And the man with no legs walked away.

-Carl Withers, 1948

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Has it ever occured to you that the only reason we have a base-10 number system (that is, one that is counted in secondary increments of 10), is because humans have 10 fingers? An alien species with six fingers on each hand would likely have a base-12 number system.


Big round year numbers like 2000 don't mean anything and celebrating the fact that you happened to have been alive on thee dawn of a millennium is absurd . Our number system is completely anthropic and these dates don't mean anything. A different number system would produce a completely different date.

By the way, 2012 is also completely ridiculous and the only significance of the date is the fact that is marks the end of a human-made calender. Is it a coincidence that every generation of human-kind has had some form of forthcoming apocalypse or doomsday to mark the end of their time? NO! People are self-important narcissists. We all try to justify our existence as important. Our existence in this particular period of time is pure coincidence and will remain purely insignificant in the generations to come.

Gosh.

P.S. That was pretty nihilistic wasn't it?