Thank gods it’s not just me
Feb.14, 2006, filed under Miscellany
I was reading the comments on the BBC site about Dark and Lonely Water (see below) and came across this entry:
I remember when I was a child seeing a public information poster in the street. It proclaimed in large scary letters – ‘DIRTY WINSCREENS CAN BLIND!’ Several days later my mother complained that I was squinting and walking into things. I told her I didn’t want to go blind by looking at the cars. Having it explained was probably the most embarrassing moment of my life.
I had a similar experience with one of the duck jokes:
How do you get down from an elephant?
You don’t. You get down from a duck
It took me about 15 years to get that joke, during which time I assumed it was one of those Da-Da-esque surrealist jokes like: “What’s the difference between a duck? One of its legs is both the same.”
Even now hearing that joke is a bit like looking at that optical illusion that can be seen as either a pair of faces in profile or a vase. I have this near-quantum superposition of interpretations, one of which involves a duck landing on the back of an elephant to give the passenger a lift to the ground; the other, of course, being the plucking of the duck to provide feathers for a duvet.
My brain, despite now understanding the joke, prefers the former option. That’s so sad.
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Singularity
~something that is singular as (a) a separate unit, or (b) unusual or distinctive manner or behavior; PECULIARITY;
~the quality or state of being singular;
~a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists;
~a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole. Sight
