Two Short Pieces

Ray’s Big Trip to the End Point

A ray is a straight line with a start point but extends to infinity on the other side… so they are impossible to balance on your index finger. On one side, the ray just keeps going and going regardless of the fact that it looks like it could really use a good night’s sleep. On the other side, an end point… maybe with a few triangles to see it off. One wonders, as the rays moves towards the unbounded, if the ray just passes by without a sound or, if there is trouble, stops and fixes things like David Banner in The Incredible Hulk. “Who WAS that helpful geometric construct?”, asks a point on the number line. Another answers, “That was Ray. He had to move on”. “God bless him, he saved us all… although he DOES look as if he could use a good night’s sleep”. The ray continues on, like a long-haul trucker, looking neither to the left nor to the right because he’s FOCUSED… and because a ray only has two dimensions, so there is no left nor right. He knows he’s getting close to infinity when he spots Achilles racing a tortoise… although Achilles never passes the tortoise… but, he’s sure he can pass it before they get to infinity. Points sit around cross-legged and divide by zero… and NO ONE STOPS THEM. It wishes it had attended community college because then he might be a convergent function. But, it is a straight line: y = mx + b. It can’t converge any more than Ang Lee can make a movie without doves and idiots with guns somersaulting around and flopping around like discarded trout. With infinity in sight, the ray realizes that it has learned nothing. But, it sees another ray coming towards him from the opposite direction. “Odd”, says the ray, “Infinity is in both directions?”. Just before the two rays collide, Ray notices the look of surprise on the face of the other ray. The other ray is identical… same surprised look. Before the impact, which causes a white hole and the sudden construction of a new universe, it realizes that the universe had been a hypersphere all along; and, its last thought is that it wishes it had gotten a good night’s sleep…

A riddle is a statement that is intentionally vague delivered with a maximum amount of smugness. The earliest known riddle, like almost everything else, was Mesopotamian. It was “A house you enter blind but leave with sight”, the answer, of course, is “school” and NOT “the nearest convenient laser surgery center”. Maybe you think a Jewish comedian would deliver a riddle better. Like when Samson, at his wedding feast, offered this riddle: “Out of the eater comes something to eat; out of the strong comes something sweet”. The Philistines ignored the most obvious answer, “a bee hive built inside the corpse of a lion”. When they finally figured it out and won the bet, Samson good-naturedly killed thirty random Philistines and used their clothes to pay them. Buddy Hackett he was not. You might’ve noticed the the above two riddles are firmly part of the real world. We’ve all seen a school and most of us have encountered lion bee hives. Leave it to the Greeks to introduce complex metaphor to the process and ruin it for us all. “What walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon and three at night?”. Your first response would be, “Nothing. A responsible God would never allow such an abomination to exist”; but, if you allow abstract metaphor, or two DUELING metaphors, you can rationalize ANY answer. In this case, the answer is “man” because some children crawl and some old people use canes. The first time a student hears that bullshit answer and listens to the explanation, he loses most of his faith in the wisdom of the previous two hundred or so generations. Frankly, after ruining the riddle, I’m certain the Sphinx didn’t kill herself. More likely she was grabbed, beaten and thrown off a cliff by disgruntled riddle-solvers. Worse than that were the riddles that you couldn’t possibly solve because information is left out… like the caskets in
The Merchant of Venice
. Of the gold, silver and lead caskets, it was the lead that held the prize (Portia’s hand in marriage)… but, it could’ve been just as easily gold or silver. Really, though, none of it mattered because Portia was probably getting arrested, soon, for impersonating a judge. Finally, leave it to James Joyce to come up with an anti-riddle. From Ulysses:
“The cock crew/The sky was blue:/The bells in heaven/Were striking eleven./‘Tis time for this poor soul/To go to heaven.”. The answer to this one is simple and pretty obvious: “The fox burying his grandmother under a holly bush.”… DUH!