Anecdotes

Last updated September 27, 2000

Stories I often tell that struck me as worth writing down.

• Irresistable straight lines
• Odd quotes
• The awards ceremony story
• Fishbone analysis
• Does my Pilot think?
• Why God didn't invent vowels
• Pilpul
• The crowbar story

If your favorite story of mine isn't here, remind me. (If you're Elizabeth, tell me how it goes, too.)
If I got it wrong, correct me.

Sometimes the universe provides irresistable straight lines:

• A friend of mine was telling me about the travel plans of a mutual friend, Brad Rhodes, who was going all over the country inspecting possible job opportunities.
  I commented "I guess it's true what they say then: all Rhodes roam for leads."

• Walking with me through Boston, my mom looked up at a building and said "My! What large windows that building has!"
  Oddly, she didn't expect the reply "All the better to see you with, my dear!"

• Preparing for a dinner party, I put four ducklings side-by-side in a pan and rubbed the top of each with spices, turned it on its end, stuffed it, turned it over, and rubbed the other side with spices. Watching this, a friend commented on how efficient and methodical I was being.
  "Yes," I replied, "it really helps to have all your ducks neatly lined up in a row."

• A coworker returning from an extended stay in Beijing was describing the massive hydroelectric projects going on near the main rivers in China. An officemate replied "Yeah, they did a musical about that, didn't they?"
  After a puzzled moment, he added helpfully: "'Dammed Yangtze'?"

• When a friend commented on the amount of domestic violence police have to deal with, I replied "Domestic violence is what police are for! International violence is handled by the military." (Of course, the National Guard is the military's domestic violence unit.)

Odd things, heard or read:

• From the American Heritage Dictionary:
  "Such phrases [as "the Sierra Mountains"] are used because to a non-Spanish speaker "sierra" does not necessarily have a meaning, unless one is familiar with the English word "sierra"."
  Presumably this distinguishes "sierra" from those other English words that necessarily have meanings, whether one is familiar with them or not. Glad we cleared that up.

• From the TV news:
  "Four out of five rape suspects are now in custody in (some town)."
  I wouldn't have thought there would be room.

• From a user manual:
  "Unless you have a reason for doing so, leave this box checked."
  (Blink... blink... blink? I had to read this several times to discern its meaning.)

• From a "Bargain" placard in a supermarket:
  Price with Membership Card: $1.69
  Regular Price: $1.69
  Savings: $0.00
  (Well, it was honest at least.)

• From the August 24 Bay Windows, a sentence containing the following fragment:
  "...the man who led the fight against repealing Britain's law that prohibits the promotion of..."
  (Like they taught us in school, three negatives and two positives make a negative...)

• Overheard in a supermarket:
  Mom (irritated): "OK, that's it, I'm counting to three!"
  Child (panicked): "No, no, no! Don't count to three!"
  (Were it my child, I'd have a hard time deciding if s/he was being sarcastic.)

From the New Ways to Come Out to your Coworkers department: During a rather silly awards ceremony, one of those MCs who likes to tease people who come to the mike gets more than expected...

(Long exchange about hometowns, education, etc. deleted.)
MC: "Married or single?"
Me: "Single."
MC: "So, are you in the market?"
Me: "No."
MC: "Well, that certainly sounded definitive... not interested? Why not?"
Me: "Long-term boyfriend."
MC: (pause, blinks) "Oh. Um, how long?"
Me: (not saying "about six inches, how about you?", or even "that's rather a personal question, don't you think?" because they didn't occur to me) "A little under ten years." (audience cheers)
MC: "Wow... what's the secret of your success? I've been married several times and my longest has only been eight."
Me: "Well, I guess my first secret is not being you."
MC: (drops mike)

From a document I'm reviewing:

"Possible methods to map this data [high frequency errors and root causes] involve fishbone analysis."

Which I quoted, adding the note:

"Entrail analysis is generally more accurate, although admittedly messier and more expensive. I've also gotten good results from runestones."

A coworker replied:

"There is a mathematical function known as a Poisson distribution. Perhaps that is what the writer had in mind."

In response to the following:

my pilot thinks you and i are having dinner at christophers at 6:30. (and paulo) does your head (or your pilot) think the same thing?

Came the following:

My pilot doesn't think at all (as far as I can tell), but my head (upon looking at my pilot's data) thinks the same thing.

Well, it thinks something analogous, at least. It's a tricky problem, actually -- the proposition "you and I are having dinner" could be said to mean one thing when you say it ("Dave and Robin are having dinner") and a different thing when I say it ("Robin and Dave are having dinner"). But possibly those are really the same thing, since they describe the same event -- it's not like "my brother and I are having dinner" which could be true of me and false of you or vice-versa. On the other hand, the connotations are different... the propositions "X and Y are having dinner", "Y and X are having dinner", "X is having dinner with Y", and "Y is having dinner with X" seem to reflect subtly different assumptions about the relative importance of X and Y to the speaker (at least at the time of utterance). So in some sense they don't *mean* the same thing, though they describe the same state of the world, because they describe (or at least reflect) a different state of the observer. On a third hand (or is that fourth?), our respective usages of "you and I" might simply reflect the fact that both of us have embedded the superficial grammatical rule that "I" comes last in structures of that sort, in which case we might both have the same thought and (coincidentally) be expressing it the same way, by means of the two transpositions reversing each other. Or we might both be expressing the internalized belief that the other has contextual primacy -- that is, we might both have the belief "you are more important in the phrase 'you and I are having dinner' than I am", or more properly (avoiding the use-mention problem), "the thing 'you' refers to in the phrase 'you and I are having dinner' is more important in the context of that phrase than the thing 'I' refers to." Which simply compounds the problem of reference.

As I say, it's a tricky problem.

In any case, I'll see you at Christopher's at 6:30.

The Hebrew name of God is written as a tetragrammaton of yud-hey-vuv-hey, four vowel-less letters generally transliterated into English as YHVH and variously rendered as "Jove," "Jehovah," "Yahweh," etc.

I rather sympathize with God in this respect... nobody ever got my name right either when I was growing up, and for the same reason. I was a Cuban student in an Orthodox Yeshiva, and nobody quite knew what to do with "Policar". Rendered into Hebrew without diacritic marks it becomes pay-lamed-kuf-resh, or FLKR.

In third grade I won a contest, and they announced to an auditorium full of students that "Dovid Felker" had won. Everyone (including me) looked around muttering "Who? Never heard of him. Who is this guy? I thought the contest was just for students?" and so forth, until someone finally twigged.

Luckilly, nobody has ever tried to worship me under any of my variant names, so the effects are relatively mild.

At a previous job, my boss and I would often comment that one argument or another was fundamentally pilpul. In response to a coworker's request for a translation came:

"Pilpul" refers to the classic Hebrew legal tradition of interpreting the Bible to answer legislative questions. This involves elaborate and somewhat surreal argumentation from various rabbis... along the lines of:

In chapter X, verse Y of portion Z of the Talmud, it is written that if your ox breaks through your fence and gores your neighbor, and your neighbor survives but is injured, and the injury is not permanent, but rather heals with time, then you are liable for the price of your neighbor's lost work.

Rabbi Gamliel of Barova asks, what if your fence was in poor repair?

Rabbi Moshi says, then you are liable for three times the cost of his lost work, for it is written (chapter M, verse N): "And if ye shall forget your duty, the punishment shall be thricefold upon ye."

But Rabbi Gimli says, you are liable for one-and-a-half times the cost of his work, for it is also written (chapter A, verse B): "A boundary between nations is shared; let thee and thy neighbor share the fence between ye. If the fence shall break, ye shall mend it, both thee and thy neighbor; thou shalt not leave the work, saying 'It is his fence, and no part of mine.'".

Rev Mozer-Tov of Detroit quotes the sages, who say: "If two men conspire to kill a third, each shall be punished with death. Thou shalt not say to them, since their crime was shared, that they shall each bear half the punishment, rather each shall be punished with a full punishment." Thus, he argues, you are liable for three times the cost of his work, as Rabbi Moshi says, but your neighbor also shall be fined, for the negligence in the matter of the fence was his, as well as yours.

What is the amount of the penalty imposed on your neighbor, if he is gored by your ox, and your fence is in poor repair?

Rabbi Fishnetstocking of Hamburg says...

My first community service project in college was renovating a recently closed juvenile detention facility for use as a battered women's shelter. Due to the vastly different architectural assumptions of these two institutions, much existing construction was slated for disposal.

First we knocked a 200-pound metal door off its hinges and tossed it in the yard (BOOM!), then I tackled the thick metal supporting trim, riveted to a cement doorframe. Screwdriver in one hand, crowbar in another, hammer in... well, I'm not sure where the hammer was, actually... I tapped, banged, and pried until the crowbar was firmly seated between trim and doorframe, then grasped the other end firmly and pulled.
   Nothing happened.

Braced against the wall with my other hand, took a deep breath and heaved.
   No effect.

Planted my right foot against the wall and heaved.
   Nothing. Well, the trim may have giggled a bit, but I wouldn't swear to it.

Gripped the bar with both hands... planted both feet against the wall... straightened out. Well, tried to. The crowbar, trim, and I quickly reached a stable state. The question was which would give out first -- me or the trim? Minutes pass; I growl and heave, wondering.

Something smacks me hard on the back of the head. Huh? What? My back's against a wall... huh? The door trim is intact, but... across the room? With a piece of metal stuck in it. Huh? Man, my head hurts. Stand up, dazed... how did I end up across the room? There's a piece of metal in my hand... crowbar? No, too small.

Looks just like the piece of metal embedded in the trim, though.

Whirr... whirr... click. It's half a crowbar. Half in my hand. Half in the trim. The crowbar broke.

Huh? The crowbar broke? That's not supposed to happen.

Wander up to the lady running the show, still a bit befuddled. "Where can I get another one of these?" I ask her, holding up my hand, still keeping the grip of death around half a crowbar. "Hardware store around the corner," she replies, unfazed.

Wander up to the guy at the hardware store. "I need another one of these." From him, I get an odd look. "Aisle 4."

Sure enough, aisle 4 is full of crowbars. I bought a new one. But... I dunno... they all look kinda flimsy now, don't you think?

Anyway, I never did take down that trim. For all I know, it's still there to this day, telling all its fellow architectural elements about the day it broke some stupid freshman's crowbar...