A Few of my Favourite Paradoxes

These are transparently stupid problems, made soluble with a little common sense. They exercise the mind, nonetheless.

Buridan's Ass: The ass is a perfectly rational creature. It is placed at an equal distance from two identical bails of hay. Logicians conjecture that the ass will starve because it is unable to choose its prefered bail of hay.

The Ship of Theseus: Theseus's ship encounters many misfortunes on its travels of the sort that we are all used to: sea monsters, angry gods, jilted women, etc. Every time the ship is damaged, Theseus's crew replace the damaged part. Ultimately, the unhappy ship has so many misadventures that every single part of the ship will have been replaced at least once. Far away on some Afric shores, all the original wreckage of Theseus's ship washes up. The industrious locals set to work at once to piece it all together, until they reconstruct the original ship in its entirety. So...which is the real ship of Theseus: the one still afloat, or the newly-built vessel?

Drinker Paradox: I don't really understand this one, but my ribs squeak with delight at the image of everyone in a pub having to follow the lead of one man on a stool propping up the bar.

Ibid.

I was flicking through last week's Times Style magazine while I waited for my shower to warm up, and I noticed a small space-filler where the editiorial staff discussed creating the perfect woman out of various celebs (interestingly the same activity as some of the lewder men's mags get up to: I am not sure which gender this reflects worse on) and one of the component parts of the posited uberdamen was Beth Ditto's 'body confidence'. For those of you who with their fingers less firmly upon the pulse of 'popular culture', Beth Ditto is a large gay singer from indie-punk band The Gossip. Presumably Ms Ditto earned this accolade for her body confidence by daring to go out in public with a big fat arse. Ditto came to fame when NME called her the 'coolest person in rock', on account of her 'unconventionality'. Some people might think it a little controversial to call homosexuality an expression of unconventionality rather than a biological tendency, and anyone who thinks that being overweight is unconventional clearly spends too much time around anorexics and drug addicts (which seems about right for music journalists). According to Wikipedia, Ditto also appeared in the altogether in lesbian smut rag On Our Backs. If appearing in gay porn wins you the respect of the Times itself, perhaps I shouldn't have spent so much money bribing that magazine...

Anyroad - what I'm very slowly getting around to is this: not only have I never heard of The Gossip, but I don't know anyone else who has either, and I severely doubt the writers of the Times Style have them on their CD changers. Despite how 'right on' the NME staff thought themselves, they were merely continuing the tradition of women being judged by their looks, not by their actions, and while the music industry abounds with men who are ugly, gay, or both, to be either as a woman marks you out for attention.

Satire & The Public Domain

The problem with bad parodies is that they serve no purpose. A good parody, like one's shadow at evening, rises to meet its mark, confronts it with a waggish dignity. It need not destroy its target, as Lewis Carroll did Robert Southey - there is room for parody and parodied to co-exist until - like Dennis Thatcher - with the passing of time the original is absorbed into the mimicry. Some parodies completely fail to register on the scale (see Ezra Pound's 'The Poems of Alfred Venison' ); others prove that parody can be generous and genuinely amusing (it usually isn't) - see Hugh Kingsmill's Housman rip-off.

With all of this in mind, I find myself angered by everyone's present infatuation with Uncyclopedia. This noisome dig at Wikipedia is excessively tedious and not very funny. It accompanies the tiresome attitude that Wikipedia is not 100% reliable, and consequently completely redundant. Wikipedia is plainly a marvel: one of the wonders of the internet - perhaps the most useful tool since email. I know for a fact that Hamilton has passed many a sleepless night, lost deeply and intensely within its pages. I have offered a comparison between the two sites by examining their respective treatment of the German electronica group Kraftwerk. Notice that Uncyclopedia - in the feeblest of satirical wet-farts - makes the creative leap from German pop music to Hitler. It pains me to point out - given the nerdiness of the reference - that Viv Stanshall cornered the market in Hitler/band-line-up gags back in the late 60s when he played MC to the Bonzos' big band:

Princess Anne on sousaphone. Mmm!
Looking very relaxed Adolf Hitler on vibes.

It seemed to be a sort of monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive

I've just been confronted by a remarkably unusual sight:

While innocently searching the internet for a new distraction, I turned my head to admire my room's majestic state, then quite suddenly my clothes reared up into one gargantuan form. The creature stared at me (as far as a pile of clothes can stare) and issued an utterance (from where this noise actually emerged I am still uncertain):
"Wash me." It barked
"No." I responded
Flustered by this show of defiance the creature's form quickly dissipated. My recovery from this shock would be most helpfully aided if someone could provide me too with a wet flannel to drape across my brow à la Dogtooth.

More idiocy relating to sport

For the love of Mike! Is there any chance we might employ a touch of perspective when it comes to Freddie Flintoff's banishment to moral Coventry? Duncan Fletcher commented sternly on the 'serious nature of the incident', Flintoff's name is mud, and everywhere his image has been thrown on the not-so-proverbial bonfire of the insanities. English cricket fans are louts. 100%, solid gold, lager-swilling hoodlums. Somehow they can afford expensive tickets for international sports events, so Dogtooth is assuming - perhaps unreasonably - that when they are not making mini Mexican waves with their penises, they hold down normal, burdensome nine-to-five jobs. Furthermore, a fairly considerable proportion of Britons - the people I'm supposed to give a damn about because we are 'united under a common flag' - (myself not excluded) drink insane quantities on a regular basis and still get up in the morning. Andrew Flintoff is onesuch. But wherefore the sudden puritanical moral outrage? Is he obliged to conduct himself decorously because he is 'a role-model to youngsters', or a 'representative of his country abroad'? Somehow when I think of the poor little ten-year-old boy sobbing quietly into his Flintoff-themed pillowcase, my sympathies remain unextended.

So lets cut to the nut: Flintoff's contract probably contains a clause in which it is stated that he must behave in a manner befitting blah-blah-blah when representing his national team etc. Frankly even that is ridiculous. If he can drink tequila shots all night, almost drown in a pedalo-related incident, and still get up in the morning and bowl 8 wickets (and he's probably done it before!) then good on him. Strong effort. Kudos and post-match naked locker-room Cava-drenched towel fights. Nice. I'd have him for the annual rounders game against Hamilton's formidable Squid XI any day.

Update: Further to the point, I came across this article today, courtesy of the ever-grounded Mick Hume. Finger on the pulse, and all that.