Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2010-02-08:

"You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it." -- Art Buchwald

(submitted to the mailing list by Reddy, Michael)

[Would this count as a corellary of Poe's law?]

Ahh, Wikipedia -- when I have trouble sleeping, you are there to show me how quickly you can take me from looking up a quick question about orbits, to reading about production of palm syrup with a mental note to get back to that article about cooping. (Since I know I've got NASA friends reading this, I'm not going to be suprised if anyone tells me that by the end of the first sentence they'd figured out that the chain of shiny-looking links included "ullage".)

Anyhow, I'm not sure whether this was the cough syrup, the fever, or ... well, my brain being itself ... but yesterday motning while spending a long time drifting through those not-quite-waking states where you're not sure whether to refer to the interesting visuals as dreams or hallucinations, there were two especially vivid segments. The first was a multiply-recurring vision (well, y'know, theme + variations, dreamwise) in which I was looking around the inside of my upper repiratory tract, but there were all these wind direction/speed indicators (green arrows), and isobars (in 3-D), and streams of numbers flying by, all being updated as I inhaled and exhaled, and my innards were shiny and chrome-plated (well, mostly; some parts were brushed aluminum and there was still a little pink), and Neil deGrasse Tyson was there swooping around with downright corny green-screen effects and trying to explain something that I couldn't hear over the sound of my breath, and I just knew that if I had a Masters degree in fluid dynamics all of these data would be crystal clear to me and I would just instantly know exactly how to regulate my breathing and shape my lips, tongue, and soft palate so as to not have each and every breath threaten to tickle my into another coughing fit!

Did I mention the chrome plating?

The other vivid bit was a ... not so much a television commercial as a template for a commercial, with obvious blanks where a corporate logo and a soothing voiceover would go...

Now I'm not sure which elements other folks will find interesting in that (if any!), but one thing that caught my attention when I started thinking about writing it up for here, was that if I were consciously designing this instead of describing a dream, I would've had a mother in there somewhere (either instead of the father, or alongside him), since a big part of the vibe seemed to be "yay for geek girls [and therefore geek women too]!" ... and I probably would've made the internal-combustion toy a four-wheeler, or the child a few years older, or more likely both ... and I certainly would have had her wearing a helmet in the first scene as well.

But it really was a quite vivid dream, and quite clearly formatted to be a 60-second ad that could be edited down to 30-seconds after the long version had gotten enough airplay that most viewers would mentally fill in the missing bits. Now I'm wondering whether I've seen-and-thought-I'd-ignored a commercial with a similar plot and theme that my dreaming-part simply slotted imagery into that was related to the other dream/hallucination in which my respiratory system was modeled like an intake manifold + carburetor.

Hark! The clank-tinkle-clatter --
Dropped mug strikes linoleum floor.
The race is begun in an instant
To see who will soon soak up more
Of the spreading café-au-lait puddle,
Be it paper towels, or (no surprise)
The tongue of a quick little doggie
For whom the race is the prize.

(It was decaf. And no ill effects so far, a few hours later. Very, very determined to beat the paper towels, and the mop, to what was left of her prize though.)