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I think (Tommy's) cousin Kevin may be Hucke Vinn, Tom's best friend...but I'm not certain. Also you forgot to say : "O, The Who; Gods of the Windmills, I salute you !"

Anyways : "O, The Who; Gods of the Windmills, I salute you !"

I remember that the name Mock Twice was borrowed from some kind of riverboat slang. Was it ever returned ?
 
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plover said:
Given that this thread has already passed from one PF incarnation to another, is it possible that some threshold has been reached and that the thread has become an e-envolute?
i am more concerned with the fact, that even though this thread is becoming larger and larger, the amplitude of response is not deteriorating... this does not comply with the quantum mechanical nature of a system...
is this the beginning of the end? is the universe about to collapse into this very thread? and notice how thin it is! (look at your screen from a side angle) the entire universe can definitely not fit into this tiny space! :surprise:
 
Gokul43201 said:
I remember that the name Mock Twice was borrowed from some kind of riverboat slang. Was it ever returned ?
No. Riverboating had to do without that usefulpiece of jargon from the time Schmoomuel Klempet decided he needed a catchier nome de guerrilla forth. "Mock" was, of course a unit of measurement. One "mock" was the equivalent of the average house take from any four naive Riverboat gamblers. "Mock once!" was the cry of the passenger counter to the Game Master when he observed four such rubes come aboard. "Mock twice!" when four more arrived, and so forth. After Klempet "borrowed" the term, the counter was reduced to counting the second group by awkwardly crying out "Mock once, all over again!", from which he could proceed to "Mock thrice!" for the next group.

It just occurred to me that Fecky Ratcher, the girl of Tom's dreams, was taken into the rock opera in the form of Th Acid Queen, "guarranteed, to tear his soul apart." The more I look at it, the more subleties I see. Can anyone really think of a more clever adaptation of a novel into a rock opera than was perpetrated by The Who?
 
zoobyshoe said:
It just occurred to me that Fecky Ratcher, the girl of Tom's dreams, was taken into the rock opera in the form of Th Acid Queen, "guarranteed, to tear his soul apart." The more I look at it, the more subleties I see. Can anyone really think of a more clever adaptation of a novel into a rock opera than was perpetrated by The Who?


How about This is Spinal Tap ? :smile:

If opera becomes popular, will it be called popera?
 
jimmy p said:
If opera becomes popular, will it be called popera?
It will, yes, by anyone who wishes to do so. Fortunately,
almost no one will want to do this.

How can I be so sure almost no one will want to do this?
 
If you believe Descartes, how can you be sure of anything? After all, you might just be dreaming this post along with all the weird purple jellyfish that inhabit it.

If a computer programming skunk accidentally sprays itself, is that an example of tail recursion?
 
I think Chaos theory covers the posts in the forum quite nicely.

If everything leads to entropy (I'm sure I heard that somewhere) why were the planets formed - surely establishing order requires energy, but energy must have been conserved in the "closed system" of our solar system.

To me, creating huge spheres out of interstellar dust counts as order to me, but perhaps not to others.

Just a thought.

SpaceInvader
 
SpaceInvader said:
If everything leads to entropy (I'm sure I heard that somewhere) why were the planets formed

I used to wonder the same thing looking at the spherical formations of dust bunnies under my bed.

Well, tell me this then, smarty pants: If everything leads to entropy, then why am I able to finish this sente...
 
Some people were just crazy from the start.

Why don't ants cross chalk lines?
 
photon said:
Some people were just crazy from the start.

Why don't ants cross chalk lines?


Would you cross a chalk line if your mouth was that close to the ground? That stuff tastes bad.


why wouldn't the ants eat the chopped habanero peppers that i left out right next to the cookie?
 
An aversion to habañero peppers is the first symptom in ants of an infection by the fungus Cordyceps griboyedov (named for noted Soviet mycologist Yozh Murav'yevich Griboyedov who, in the 1920's, after many years studying fungi in the Brazilian rain forest where he had been so isolated that he had not heard about the Bolshevik revolution, was pleased to find on returning to Russia that life was just as surreal at home as it had been in South America despite his no longer having access to certain rainforest mushrooms that he had become fond of). A few days after they start avoiding the peppers the ants become attracted to objects overhead that travel in linear paths. These they follow until they reach an airport at which point the ants stow away in rolls of film and one-use cameras. At least a few ants will reach their destination which is those parts of South-East Asia where the durian fruit grows. After escaping from various bits of tourist luggage, the ants make their way to the jungle and find a durian flower and wait. Durian flowers are pollinated by the fruit bat Eonycteris spelaea (also known as the Dawn Bat and Dobson's Long-Tongued Fruit Bat) so eventually one of these bats will happen along, smoosh its face into the flower and slurp up the ant along with the tasty nectar. The Cordyceps-infected bat, after a few weeks, stops its usual rounds of nectar slurping and flies out to sea in search of an albatross. Scientists were puzzled as to how the bat could find an albatross in the vast open ocean until it was discovered recently that the infected bats gave off a strong odor of a particular kind of cinnamon bun that albatrosses have a special weakness for. Once the cinnamon-crazed albatross approaches close enough, the bat will land on its back, sink its teeth into the birds neck, and then fall into a coma. The fungus from the bat's saliva works very quickly in the albatross bloodstream, and the bird, slowly recovering its senses as the smell of cinnamon fades (though feeling a bit cheated and depressed) sets out across the ocean homing in on the location of the original ant colony. Upon reaching the origin of this fungal odyssey, the albatross lands, usually within a meter or two of the original ant nest, shrugs the bat from its back and flies off. The poor bat dies at this point and soon decomposes into a mat of bluish grey fuzz, the only point in the C. griboyedov lifecycle where it exists outside of a host. The fungal mat soon attracts the attention of another ant colony, and the whole journey is started anew. Alas, it is feared that the advent of digital photography will soon cause Cordyceps griboyedov to become endangered.

When anthropologists later visited the parts of the rain forest where Yozh Murav'yevich Griboyedov had been working, what stories did they hear about him from the local shamans?
 
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plover said:
When anthropologists later visited the parts of the rain forest where Yozh Murav'yevich Griboyedov had been working, what stories did they hear about him from the local shamans?
He was unpopular among the locals for two reasons: 1.) he kept asking them to serve as hosts for his experiments, and 2.) He was frequently heard to mutter: "My choice, my cure, is mycelex," which none of them could understand.


As everyone knows a Gedanken Thread is a thread that doesn't (and can't) actually exist but which is proposed in order explore the ramifications of isolated elements of threads that do exist. One such Gedanken Thread is: "Ask the gedanken wrong stoopid quention, get the gedanken wrong stoopid anster." What other Gedanken Threads can you imagine?
 
zoobyshoe said:
As everyone knows a Gedanken Thread is a thread that doesn't (and can't) actually exist but which is proposed in order explore the ramifications of isolated elements of threads that do exist. One such Gedanken Thread is: "Ask the gedanken wrong stoopid quention, get the gedanken wrong stoopid anster." What other Gedanken Threads can you imagine?

"Logical hero bones the telescope."

When does a semi-logical un-hero become a semi-logical not-un-hero and subsequently morph into a logical hero?
 
I have a stupid question. Why are you so stupid? :-p
 
cytokinesis said:
When does a semi-logical un-hero become a semi-logical not-un-hero and subsequently morph into a logical hero?

I used to have some of those toys. Transformers, I think they called them. More than meets the eye.

There are some people out there who believe that the building blocks of the universe are actually really teeny tiny Legos. Should I try to convince them otherwise, or should I just not bother posting in Theory Development at all?
 
Math Is Hard said:
There are some people out there who believe that the building blocks of the universe are actually really teeny tiny Legos. Should I try to convince them otherwise, or should I just not bother posting in Theory Development at all?

Bah, such arrogance ! You think you know everything about the Universe, but you really know nothing. You are insignificant in comparison to the Creator. Your mind is incapable of comprehending the ultimate reality of existence. Do you think all things just happened out of luck ? And don't even try to tell me about probability and chance, until you can show me log of wood evolving into a bookshelf. God does not play dice, but He does play LEGO. So there !

Are gedanken donuts really real, and if so, how many dimensions do they exist in ?
 
If they are real, they exist in the same number of dimensions that they are eaten in.

The question is... What eats them?
 
Daggath said:
If they are real, they exist in the same number of dimensions that they are eaten in.

The question is... What eats them?


One answer is possible. The logical hero.

What the hell am I on?
 
cytokinesis said:
What the hell am I on?
You've ingested gedankenfungus. It only grows on gedanken doughnuts. Very powerful hallucinogen. Non-Newtonian: once up, you never come down.


Hows the weather up there?
 
zoobyshoe said:
Hows the weather up there?
Most interpretations do not, strictly speaking, allow for descriptions of the weather up there. The overall effect of gedankenfungus is to induce the perception of a large increase in Planck's constant. Thus any attempt to ascertain what the weather is like at a certain moment insures that the weather at the next moment is completely indeterminate.

Since they can no longer speak of the weather, what do strangers meeting up there talk about?
 
plover said:
Since they can no longer speak of the weather, what do strangers meeting up there talk about?
A favorite topic is porta-potties. I have never been able to figure out why, but they have mastered the art of incessant, inane chit-chat about every concievable aspect of porta-potties. They can drive this subject into the ground and out the other side of the earth. It's astonishing.


Recently, at an outdoor café in the small burg of Madison, Ky, USA, a man was overheard to remark to a companion:" She certainly is a 23 digit redial at 3 PM, that one is. Yep. I would bet that one keeps 4 true Lincoln pennies under her pillow at all times, I would. Yep. That one still has every fence post that came with the property, she does. Yep. If you ask me, she could write upside down with a thirty dollar bill from now till the sandbar petrifies and no one would complain. Nope." I wonder if he was talking about 1.) a woman, 2.) a horse, 3.) a boat, 4.) a car, or 5.) other?
 
She's a woman, and an ugly one at that. She lies about her age, has several large tattoos under her bosom, has noticeable saddlebags, and isn't very smart.

Speaking of women, it was rumored that twin cousins Alfred and Albert Einstein once had a knock-down drag-out brawl over a female. Who was this woman and what did she do that caused the rift between the two geniuses, who were once as thick as theives?
 
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Math Is Hard said:
Speaking of women, it was rumored that twin cousins Alfred and Albert Einstein once had a knock-down drag-out brawl over a female. Who was this woman and what did she do that caused the rift between the two geniuses, who were once as thick as theives?
You're speaking of the lovely Miss Sally O'Malley, cigarette vendor and 1920's "flapper" who stole their hearts, wallets, and fountain pens. It was Sally who taught them the meaning of VA VA VOOOOOOOOM! It was Sally who introduced them to "floy-floy", and taught them both to use a "heater". It was Sally who drove the getaway car. It was Sally who said "jump" and A & A who asked "Into what inertial reference frame?" It was Sally who taught the twins to begin the Beguine, to do the Varsity Drag without drooling, to cry "Boola boola!", to know when to hold 'em, fold em, spindle and mutilate 'em, when to walk, run, and loiter. What a gal!

Anyway, she once remarked on her way out she thought the moustache looked a little better on Alfred than Albert. When she returned an hour later they were throwing punches and plates and other rigid euclidian bodies at each other at speeds close to the limiting velocity.


Sally later became the serial consort of several self-styled religious leaders, most notably, Bod Dob, Palindrome Boy, and Manifest Incarnation Of The Recently Retired Elders Latterly Elevated To Pre-Sainthood Pending Approval. Whatever happened to Bod Dob?
 
Whatever happened to Bod Dob?

For a long time, Bod Dob, after denouncing religion, stood in front of his mirror and wondered if this thing about lateral inversion was really just a myth. You see, Bod Dob and his image, Bod Dob, were identical to each other, unlike the regular Tom, Dick and Harry (whose image was obviously Yrrah dna Kcid, Mot).

Anyways, long story short, Bod Dob got together with a Group consisting of Mom, Pop, Dad, Sis, a Toyota, a Santa deified at Nasa, Dr Awkward, Lon Nol, Anuta Catuna, Ordelafo Faledro, gnu dung, lion oil, lonely tylenol, regal lager, solo gigolos, and the leader of the Group, who went by the name "Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?". The Group itself was named 'We Few' and toured the world trying to overthrow Group Theory, because of its 'obviously' mistaken results in the area of symmetry operations.

But the rest of the world, steeped as they were in Group Think, shunned the Group, extolled the Theory (some just said "huh ?"), and went back to a dinner of smoked grouper with snub buns and sniff 'um muffins (fresh from Yreka Bakery).

The house where Bod Dob lived and died is believed to be haunted because of the strange voices heard in the dead of the night. People say it's the ghost of Bod Dob, also called Bodless Dob.

Do you know what the ghost says, every night at exactly 12:21 am ?
 
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Gokul43201 said:
Do you know what the ghost says, every night at exactly 12:21 am ?
Every night, at exactly 12:21 am, there is heard a loud voice saying: "You're trouble is you don't know your overhead conversion tactics. You learn your overhead conversion tactics, and you'll be skipping mudpuppies over the self service counter!"
This, for obvious reasons, is quite frightening to hear.

Dr. Awkward did not die. He and Anuta Catuna, they say, are residents of the same senior's community somewhere outside Pasadena, California, USA. They knit, play pea-knuckle (not pinochle) munch stuff, if it tastes good, meet occasionally in prayer to Santa Nasa, soak in the jacuzzi, read this thread, walk barefoot on the grass, grow grass on their bare feet, sweep the halls, soak in the halls, pray to the halls, walk barefoot in the halls, grow grass in the halls, smoke grass in their rooms, pray to the grass, knit the grass, walk barefoot over Santa Nasa, smoke Santa Nasa, grow grass on Santa Nasa, munch Santa Nasa. Oh, there's lots to do.

Say, how do you play pea-knuckle, and why does the voice say: "You're trouble..."?
 
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zoobyshoe said:
Every night, at exactly 12:21 am, there is heard a loud voice saying: "You're trouble is you don't know your overhead conversion tactics. You learn your overhead conversion tactics, and you'll be skipping mudpuppies over the self service counter!"
...

Say, how do you play pea-knuckle, and why does the voice say: "You're trouble..."?

To play pea-knuckle, invite over 3, 4 or 5 peas over- aged 8 and above. The oldest pea from the bod, I mean pod, starts by asking the pea to his/her left any pea-trivia quetion. If the quetioned pea fails to correctly anser the quetion of the quetioning pea, the quetioning pea gets to give the quetioned pea a knuckle sandwich. The game ends when all the players become black-eyed peas.

And clearly, Bod Dob didn't pay much attention during English class at school.

What religion do ghosts follow ?
 
Gokul43201 said:
What religion do ghosts follow ?

Materialism. And the nonbelievers among them ask:

Is there life before death?
 
Well, sure. It is entirely possible that at this moment you are just a ghost having an I.B.E.

The other day when I was reading a thread by a particularly incoherent poster, I attempted to prove to him that I was capable of being even more incoherent that he was. But he didn't understand my reply. I flew into a rage becoming increasingly more and more incoherent with each post but my point was still not taken. What more could I have done to get through to this person?
 
Math Is Hard said:
What more could I have done to get through to this person?

Here's a simple explanation that will get through to any person (I'm quoting another forum member here, without his permission...so admins, please delete this if it's against forum rules) :

"What is nothing? if Nothing is chaos, what does all of pi explain?, an unperfect circle for it cannot reach a whole. what is nothing to stop logic? nothing blocks pi from reaching a whole, a limit to something is nothing, and it can be as forcefull as the logic itself. their for,

inf. n=1->

N = inf. distance & inf. closeness
0 = inf. # of N note: inf. means any number until a point of something is created
N = (0^n) (0/1^n) note: 0 represents a # of N
nothing = N0N
something = N0N/N0N and the reduction to the least common denominator and nothing
something within time = the continual providance of such an act/ repetition of the reduction in ever changing complexity to order (multi - fractals).
but can you believe that we are random? if not their is always the super complex making of a desicion (god)?"


Sometimes, when all else fails, I try telepathy, but that never seems to get through.

Does the other person need something like a modem to receive my telepathic message ?
 
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