RII 2006-01-07 Meet the Characters
Happy New Year! A new cartoon has been posted! Hopefully this will remain a trend that will continue for some time. In other news:
Noted 14th century English logician, Franciscan friar, and generally all around great guy William of Ockham (Occam), once postulated that in situations where one is faced with a myriad of solutions to a problem or quandary, the simplest solution is usually correct. This is usually known as Occam’s Razor, of the Principle of Parsimony. For example, your mother-in-law gives you a really hideous lamp that your husband despises, and it somehow end up broken, with one of his personalized golf balls sitting in the broken fragments. Also, you know for a fact that he has been practicing his golf game in the house, despite you telling him not to. It’s pretty obvious how the lamp came to be broken. It doesn’t take an exhaustive investigation to determine that it was probably poltergeist. To believe anything else would involve what Occam called additional (and potentially erroneous) assumptions.
The problem is that most people are notoriously bad at determining what the simplest solution is. In fact, most people (and here I am basing this observation on a random sampling of hundreds of fast food service professionals) couldn’t make change without a graphing calculator and a phone call to the staff of NASA if their life depended on it. We therefore have far too many accounts of people seeing UFOs, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, el Chupacabra (the Mexican goat eater), etc. It is far less likely that UFOs are alien invaders, than beta versions of U.S. spy planes, for example. Bigfoot can be explained away as a hairy, drunken college kid running around the woods grunting, the Loch Ness Monster is more likely the periscope of a secret Polish spy plane, and el Chupacabra is probably not an alien at all, but merely a mutant, reptilian, bat-creature with giant fangs, and goat-bloodsucking power (although how one would tell the difference I have no idea).
The point of all this is the following: Don’t believe people, because, in general, they are stupid. Find the simplest solution, and go from there. Think people!!! As your first assignment, find out exactly how one becomes a Franciscan friar. And let me know too, would you?
This week’s top movie line, and while we’re at it, horoscope: “You better pray to the god of skinny punks that this wind doesn't pick up, 'cause if it does, I'm gonna sail over there and jam an oar up your ass ” – Tommy Boy. Your lucky number: theta. Remember, a New Cartoon has been posted.
RII 2006-01-13
Do you want to hear something interesting? There’s a new cartoon posted. But that’s not the interesting thing that I wanted to tell you. No, what I wanted to tell you was a story. A tale, actually, about a plucky young lad (me) and a recent adventure I had (in rhyme?). I went to Best Buy the other day (motto: You come here because you have no choice), and there right in the first aisle was a bin of movies four foot tall if it were an inch (said in a pirate voice for some reason) full of DVDs priced $5-6.99. That’s not the interesting part either. In the bin were several very good movies, such as Hot Shots, Hot Shots part deux, the Wedding Singer, etc. Also in the bin were about 200 copies of Harlem Nights starring Eddie Murphy. (Trivia break: in this film, the “F word” is said 133 times. There is also a gangster making a reference to a “pinky toe”.)
Just for fun I started pulling out copies of this DVD to see how many there really were. I also joked to a friend of mine how funny it would be to buy every copy, pick a random person’s name out of the phone book, and mail them a copy of Harlem Nights every week for the next several years. Unfortunately this would have cost roughly $1,000, and I didn’t have that much money in that particular pair of pants. So anyway, I’m pulling out copies by the handful, and stacking them on the rim of the bin, when a Best Buy employee walks over. I jokingly asked, “Is there a limit to the number of copies of Harlem Nights I can purchase at one time”. There was a pause, and he replied that he actually couldn’t sell them to me, because he needed them. He grabbed the stack from me. It turns out that they were about to start running a promotion where when you bought Hustle and Flow, you got a copy of Harlem Nights for free. He said, “I thought you were just digging them out to be nice”.
Needless to say, I’ve never had a better (or stranger) time at Best Buy. To that end, your horoscope for this week is: “I'm warnin' ya, put that razor away, or I'm gonna shoot your pinky toe off!” Your lucky number: 14.523
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