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11-3-2005 Dear Aunt Nettie:
Can you help me find
the fallacy in this exercise? |
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Dear Philosopher: "You have a weed eater, which means you have a lawn, which means you have a house, which means you have kids..." Well, he or she went off the rails right there, didn't he or she? Logical reasoning: "You have a weed eater, which means you have a goat, which means you live in the country, which means you commute to class, which means that, between taking care of the goat and commuting to school, you haven't had the time to read the Course Description."  |
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11-15-2005 Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Speedy: Under normal circumstances, about 70 miles an hour. In congested areas this can drop to as low as 15 miles an hour. When construction forces detours, the messages may have to be routed through a different limb and back again. Check 650 AM on your radio for lane closures, accidents, etc., before sending important messages. |
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11-20-2005 Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Zippy: Light, as you know, is composed of protons which travel at 186,000 miles (300,000 kilograms) per second and is measured in lumens (86,000 lumens = 1 cubic pound of light). Dark is the opposite. It travels at the same speed, but goes only backwards, weighs less and is measured in gloomens. What you think of as darkness is really only light leaving very quickly, forming a void. The best analogy is a bathtub full of water. When you pull the plug, the water flows away in a counterclockwise direction in the Northern Hemisphere, and clockwise in the Western Hemisphere, where it is used by primitive people as a means of telling time. The tub is eventually empty, forming a vacuum. The same thing happens with light: when you turn off a switch, the light drains away from the room in a counterclockwise direction in the Northern Hemisphere, clockwise in the Western Hemisphere, where it is used by primitive people as a means of distinguishing day from night. Of course light and dark travel much faster than water, whose speed is determined by the size of the hose. There are some places on earth, like caves and coal mines, where the light has all drained away over many millennia, leaving the cave or mineshaft completely at the mercy of the dark. This "lost light," to use the scientific term, eventually ponds deep, deep in the earth in great sodden puddles of sullen light, which can be recovered by drilling, although the cost is horrendous, which is why people use fresh light for most things, and leave the aged and senile light for the curiosity of phrenologists (that branch of science dealing with leftover lumpy light). Astrologers have used the speed of darkness to determine the age of the universe, just as they have used the speed of light, except that light is 27 minutes faster. No one knows why, but it plays the very devil with railroad schedules. Astrologers have also determined that there is a whole bunch (2.3 x 10³¹² murchisons¹) of "light dark" surrounding our galaxies. Although that sounds like a contradiction in terms, it probably is. -------------------------- ¹ Named after the great phrenologist Edwina Murchison, discoverer of anti-reflections |
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11-24-2005 Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Russophile: It was originally called "All My Children's Young and Restless Days of Our Lives," one of the longest-running daytime "soap novels" in Russian media history, set in the thrilling days of yesteryear. In the first chapter we see the oafish Pierre Bezukhov, illegitimate son of the Princess Anastasia and a swineherd, making yet another of his comic pratfalls while serving tea to the Grand Duchess Bolkonski as everyone at the ball pretends not to notice the war going on outside, or the incessant pounding of Napoleon on the front door. (The servants have been ordered to admit no one lacking a diamond stickpin and spats.) In the second through forty-eighth chapters we follow Pierre as he agonizes over questions of cosmic importance. How should one live a moral life in an imperfect world? Are the demands of society more important than the needs of the individual? Should he free his serfs, or simply convince them to dress better? Where does one go to have a three-cornered hat cleaned and blocked? And what about those onion-shaped domes of the Kremlin-- how on earth do you go about building something like that, or are they actually inflatable? Is life in a monastery better than winning at cribbage? Will this book stay on the best-seller lists longer than that scrounger Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment? In the forty-ninth through seventy-second chapters we see Pierre's efforts to romance the beautiful but libertine Elena Kuragin, who lives in a cottage in the woods with seven dwarfs and rides a motorcycle to church on Sundays. Is this the kind of woman he wants as the mother of his children? Or should he choose that other princess, the one in a coma in the glass box behind all those spiny briars and brambles? Certainly she would be lower maintenance, and wouldn't embarrass him by popping wheelies on Lebednef Street on a Saturday night after the bars close. But being in a coma would make royal receptions impossible, unless he could hire a puppet-master to animate her with strings of invisible fishing line. But them, how do you hide a puppet-master on a baroque ceiling? And what about doorways? Doorways would certainly be a challenge. And what if the puppet-master got drunk and made her sing the dirty version of "Midnight in Moscow" while doing the can-can? Would the archimandrite stand for that. What about during Lent? No, no, dealing with the dwarfs would be easier-- we would simply need a bigger bed. And dwarfs don't eat as much as a puppet-master, I'm sure of that. The seventy-third through the one hundred eighty-eighth chapters cover Pierre and Elena's life together, as the war with Napoleon rages around their dacha, seriously interrupting the delivery of kvass to the peasants. The surly peasants get even by planting nothing but geraniums instead of wheat, so the following winter is a difficult one, although quite pretty. Pierre continues his inner monologue, even though Elena has had it up to here with his incessant inner rumblings, which she confuses with hunger pangs. One day she and the dwarf Nadwodny take off for the Crimea, but are captured and eaten by Napoleon's starving troops, who have foolishly burned Moscow to the ground before looking for food in the stores there. The sillies! It's so hard to feed an army of 400,000 on two handfuls of burned groats, regardless of how much extender you use. Good thing they're French, but soon the countryside is bare of snails and slugs and their condition worsens as the temperature approaches fifty below zero and snow is expected in the higher elevations before nightfall. In chapters one hundred eighty-nine through two hundred fifty-six, Pierre takes his inner monologue to the battlefield, where he is astonished to see what happens when an artillery shell hits a horse amidships, as it were. He begs the artillerymen to let him try his luck, and with a little practice he is able to hit a horse dead center with every shot, although he is winged by a flying horseshoe at one point. Unfortunately the attacking forces are infantry, not cavalry, so his position is quickly overrun in spite of having been rendered thoroughly disgusting with puréed horse organs. Should he have shot at the men instead of the horses? Does being captured mean he loses points, or does he have to start over? Whatever happened to the other six dwarfs, anyway? How do you say, "My leg has frozen solid and fallen off," in French? Now if I had married the girl in the glass box, would I be in the pickle I'm in now? What's the French word for pickle? From chapter two hundred and fifty-seven to chapter three hundred and thirty-six, Pierre decides that he can redeem himself and save Russia if he can move to the front of the line of retreat and assassinate Napoleon. Alas, when he has the French leader nearly in his grasp his interior monologue awakens a sentry, who sends him to the back of the line. Later he hears that it wasn't Napoleon after all, only a straw-filled dummy with one hand inside its vest and a three-cornered hat on its bagful-of -leaves head. Napoleon had left in his carriage as soon as the weather turned bad, claiming that snow on the carriage's enameled exterior would void the warranty. Back in Paris he faithfully reads the reviews of the war, and is saddened to see it panned by the critics just as his Battle of Trafalgar was in '05. He spends his time planning a glorious victory at Waterloo for his next campaign. Meanwhile Pierre wrestles with the problem of how he can propose to the girl in the glass box when all his limbs have frozen solid and snapped off. All that remains is his head, which is being carried at the end of a bayonet by an obliging French soldier. Chapter three hundred and thirty-seven to the final chapter, three hundred sixty-five, shows Pierre back at his dacha, preparing to propose to the girl in the glass box. He has worked out a clever plan whereby he has stacked two of the dwarfs, Pozgordny and Ignatz, on top of each other and used Urkfatz and Murphy as his right and left arms respectively, wrapping them all in a voluminous overcoat borrowed from his good friend Nikolai Gogol. With Boleslaw holding his head in place while disguised in a muffler and Rasputin acting as a ventriloquist, he feels that he can pass even the closest inspection, although no longer having an interior means his monologue days are pretty much shot. With much practice he and his appendages learn to ride a horse specially trained by the Moscow Circus, and one day he sets off to the briar-encircled castle to propose to the unconscious princess. As he arrives he sees the now awake and radiant Princess riding away with Prince Charming from a neighboring kingdom. He is so astonished at the sight that he flings his head to the ground in anger. It rolls under the briars, where B'rer Rabbit uses it to top off his tar baby. And if the jackdaws haven't eaten it, it's still there. |
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11-29-2005 Dear Aunt Nettie: |
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Dear Fading: As real as real can be. One recalls the town of Urkhammer, Iowa, during the 1920s and early '30s. For years people passed by the bustling burg of Urkhammer without giving it a second thought. Many people even drove through it, and there are rumors that transactions took place between tourists and the pale, mute Urkhammerovians. In 1928 the first ontological doubts about the town began when aerial photographs showed only empty fields where there should have been homes and streets and stores surrounded by farms and waving fields of grain. A week or so later a lost tourist had his Marmot Speedster topped off with gasoline at the Urkhammer Esso station, then, two miles beyond the town's borders, discovered that his tank was empty. He walked back to demand a refund from the conniving general store and gas pump emporium, only to discover that, regardless of how far he walked, the town remained the same distance ahead of him. Fortunately another motorist picked him up after an hour or two and replenished his car's fuel supply, but the man had been shaken to the core and required a prolonged sojourn in an alpine sanitarium. In 1929 the Davenport Clarion-Sun-Telegraph newspaper published both stories. Doubtlessly there would have been a strong public reaction had not the story appeared in the same issue of the paper as the Wall Street stock market crash. In the following week's edition (the last before the Clarion-Sun-Telegraph itself failed) was a strong protest from an apparent resident of Urkhammer, a certain Fatima Morgana (Miss), disputing the apparent nonexistence of the town and relating her life story there as a schoolteacher and Anti-Saloon League activist. But her letter to the editor was lost in the brouhaha of plant closings, stockbroker suicides and the sudden popularity of apple sellers on streetcorners. Urkhammer's own newspaper, the weekly Bugle-Picayune Advertiser, ran the now-classic headline, "Rumors of Our Nonexistence Have Been Greatly Exaggerated," for which they were sued by the estate of the late Samuel Clemens. Urkhammer remained undisturbed throughout 1930 and 1931. Passersby stilled waved at children playing in back yards as they passed on Route #41, although there was little traffic now, and much of it was by horse-drawn wagon as farmers attempted to save their old homesteads by traveling to larger cities to vend their wares. But disaster struck in 1932 when a convoy of Illinois farm families, fleeing the ruins of their Dust Bowl farms for California, decided to spend the night on the outskirts of Urkhammer. Two of these wandering souls pooled the camp's meager store of pennies and nickels and went into the town to purchase necessary supplies. There was always a risk in entering towns, since "Illies," like "Okies," were rumored to be thieves as well as vagabonds, and were not welcomed by townspeople. The men, Paducah Bankforth and "Tribulation" Estonices, plodded to the general store, pausing for a moment to check the gasoline prices on the pumps outside before entering. Imagine their surprise when they were unable to mount the steps leading to the store, their feet each time passing through the lowermost step as through a cloud. Convinced that this was some sort of plot to prevent outsiders from shopping at the store, they attempted to scale the steps using an old board found nearby. Imagine their surprise when their feet passed through both board and steps as easily as a potato passes through the smoke of a campfire! Terrified, the men ran back to their nomadic camp and reported what they had seen, only to be accused of spending the group's hard-gotten money on illegal hooch rather than on beans and bacon. But they displayed the money and challenged others in the camp to try the same experiment. A group of a dozen men, some armed, went back to the general store, and lo! and behold! had the same eerie experience. The caravan covered its fires and decamped with all deliberate speed, but the story quickly circulated, and soon a group of State Police were ordered to investigate the phenomenon. They went to the Urkhammer Sheriff's office to confer, converse and otherwise hobnob with their brother law enforcement officials. The group's leader approached the office of this guardian of the peace and attempted to knock on the door, only to see his had pass through the thick oak as though it were merely painted steam. Their report began the gradual decline of Urkhammer. It became less substantial with every passing day, and passersby noted the absence of children playing and the growing seediness of the houses and barns. Then, on May 7, 1932, Phineas Bumf, a Huguenot immigrant farmer, passed by at dawn with his cargo of produce, and what to his wondering eyes did appear but- nothing! Where the town had stood were only abandoned fields and long-rotted fences. A cast-iron bathtub, used long ago as a watering trough for livestock, sat alone in a field of weeds, the sole relic of human presence. Urkhammer was no more. Many years later a gypsy caravan camped on the site but left abruptly. The Ataman of the group, "Baxtalo," told a Roma-friendly neighboring city councilman that the place was "saturated with the tears of the dispossessed, and with the despair of those who had never borne names." Then he stole a chicken. |
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