Archive for the 'Memories' Category

The Book With All the Answers

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 29, 2010
in Memories, Musings and Progress
. 11 Comments

bunnyDo you remember Mister Bunny Rabbit?. He was a friend of Captain Kangaroo. One day long ago, when I still measured my age in single digits, Mister Bunny Rabbit announced that he owned a book containing the answer to every possible question. I was skeptical about that book, and so was the Captain, who scoffed mightily at the notion. By way of a test, he looked up the question “Where is Mister Green Jeans right now?”. The book’s answer was “In the attic”, which the Captain knew (I forget how) could not possibly be right. While the Captain was still gloating, Mister Green Jeans ambled in and mentioned that he’d just come from the attic.

The Captain was amazed, and so was I. Long into adulthood, I pondered how that book could possibly have known where Mister Green Jeans was. The best answer I ever got was from the journalist Chris Suellentrop, who speculated that it was probably one of those quantum mechanical things where the act of asking the question caused both the book and Mister Green Jeans to settle down from a cloud of possibilities into mutually compatible states. Others—not so very long ago—speculated that perhaps the book was controlled by a satellite operating a surveillance camera.

Nowadays, of course, we can all carry that book in our pockets. I wonder if today’s children would find anything particularly magical about a reference work that has the answers to pretty much everything, and updates them on the fly.

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NOW I Get It!

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 29, 2010
in Books and Memories
. 7 Comments

ctcoverFor some decades now, at more or less random times and in more or less random places, I’ve been asking people “Why would you care if your baby’s name reads the same upside down as rightside up?”. I have never gotten an answer that rang true.

One of the various unsatisfactory answers I keep getting is something like: “Umm. You wouldn’t care.” But I know that’s wrong, because I’ve read Clown Town.

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Moral Education

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 19, 2010
in Ethics and Memories
. 57 Comments

tower-of-babelWhen I was a child, my parents spoke to me frequently about the evils of racism. Some people, they said, judge others by the color of their skin, but we don’t do that, and you mustn’t either. And when you meet the people who make those judgments—and you will, they told me—you must never ever ever give them an ounce of credence because we’re right and they’re wrong. There were many discussions of this topic, but in my memory they all ended with the same refrain. We’re right and they’re wrong.

I’m not sure how old I was at the time, but I must have been very young because I already knew the refrain by heart when my father first told me about foreign languages. In other countries, people use different words than we do. We say “cat”, but in Spain they say “gato” and in Russia they say “koschka”.

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