Friday, October 27, 2006

Bye Bye Birdie

I was watching a crappy policey type movie the other day and there was an exchange of dialogue that went something like this:

Dumb cop: "My gut tells me this was just a robbery that went bad and ended up getting this guy killed."

Kiefer Sutherland: "You know why I don't go with my gut? Because once you let your gut make up your mind about something, you're only gonna see the evidence that supports your gut. This was no robbery. It was... an assassination."

(Kiefer ended up being right!)


For a long time now, I've been making the same mistake as that dumb cop. When I was little I decided that the Blue jay was my favorite bird. That decision made sense: they're pretty cool looking, they're not too small, they're cool enough that they get chosen as the mascot for sports teams, and most importantly they're easy to identify. If I had said that the house wren was my favorite bird, I would have set myself up for some embarrassment:

"Hey look, my favorite bird! The House Wren!"

"Um, that's actually the Carolina Wren. I think you'll notice the subtly different markings on its back and wings. Unless of course, you're not even that familiar with the house wren... but that's impossible, because you just told me it was your favorite bird."

"Totally."

So I think I was justified in choosing the Blue jay as my favorite bird. But since then, I've learned a thing or two about birds (although not as much as the hypothetical bird expert I was hanging out with above). And what I've learned is that the Blue jay is basically the hugest jackass of the bird kingdom. They're loud and they just fly around and harass other birds. They're like the entertainment news reporters of the animal kingdom.

And I learned these things about the Blue jay, but I ignored them, because it was my favorite bird.

But people, that was wrong. It's as wrong as trying to say that something was a botched robbery when there are apparently assassination clues all over the place.

And so maybe it's time for all of us to rethink some of our preconceptions and make sure that we're not keeping ourself blind to the information/assassination clues that are all around us.

And I'm gonna pick a new favorite bird.

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Anyone want some free milk?

I have some free time.

One thing that I'd like to do is to purchase a cow. I'd also like to purchase the equipment required for pasteurizing and homogenizing milk. Then I would take some time to learn how to milk a cow, and how to use that equipment to make delicious drinkable milk.

After doing that, I would like to find someone who likes milk, someone who drinks milk every day. And I would like to enter into a longstanding agreement with them whereby every day I would give them fresh, delicious milk for free. I would make it clear that nothing was expected in return, that I merely wanted to give them free milk every day from my cow.

Then after several months or even a couple of years pass by, I would offer to sell them the cow. I would offer to sell the cow at a reasonable price, but I would make sure that the person knew that this was the same cow from which that person had received free milk all of that time. And I would make sure that they knew that if they didn't buy the cow, they would still receive the milk for free.

I'd be interested to see what they'd do.

Question: Is an analogy really valid if the comparable situation has never really existed? Like, I'm sure at some point someone actually counted their eggs before they were hatched. Is anyone else asking these sorts of questions?

Maybe I have too much free time. But I have an inkling that there's at least a chance that my free-milk-receiver will buy my cow.