Waiting for the Apocalypse: perfectly acceptable logic

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Logic In Its Purest Form

(Okay, as it turns out, I had to delay this next post for quite a while. So what? It’s not like you’re doing anything that great. Look at you, staring at a computer screen when you could be designing a skyscraper or giving CPR to a puppy or making a sandwich or something. Everybody knows that every moment not spent making a sandwich is a moment wasted.)

An actual conversation that I recently had with my brother:

Brother: So, anyway, I’m going to watch Killers on my Netflix account…

Me: Wait, what?

Brother: What?

Me: That’s a romantic comedy!

Brother: No it’s not. Netflix says that it’s an action-comedy.

Me: Of course it says that. That’s how you know it’s a bad romantic comedy, because it tries to disguise itself as something else. The good ones are at least up front about being drivel. If it says it’s not a romantic comedy, that means it’s a really bad one.

Brother: Or, it could mean that it isn’t a romantic comedy.

Me: Ridiculous. Every movie that tries to market itself as something other than a romantic comedy is obviously just denying its true nature.

Brother: And the ones that do market themselves as romantic comedies?

Me: Are romantic comedies, obviously.

Brother: So every movie is a romantic comedy?

Me: Exactly.

Brother: So, if the only good romantic comedies are the ones that market themselves as romantic comedies, and every movie is a romantic comedy, then the only good movies are the ones that say they’re romantic comedies?

Me: I didn’t say we lived in an ideal world.

Brother: I’m not sure I buy this theory. Are you saying that 2001: A Space Odyssey is a romantic comedy?

Me: An unconventional one, but yes. Are you saying you detected no romantic tension between Dr. Floyd and the monolith? Between Dave and HAL? Between that Australopithecus and its stick?

Brother: (Audible silence. I’m not quite sure how he managed to do that, actually.)

Me: What?

Brother: …Okay, what about Pirates of the Caribbean?

Me: A torrid romance between a sailor and his love, the sea, who can never be together because one of them is from a low social standing and the other is 70% of the world’s surface.

Brother: Thor?

Me: You look at the way he grips that hammer and tell me you don’t notice any chemistry.

Brother: The Other Guys?

Me: Of course. That’s a bromance, which is “romance” with a “B”. So according to the United States educational system, a bromance is just a romance that has passed with a minimum of 83%

Brother: Passed what?

Me: I’m not quite sure. You can’t expect me to figure everything out for you.

For the person who has inadvertently stumbled across this blog:

Before you go any further, read the first post. It'll save you a lot of confusion. Well, some.

This is a series of short, schizophrenic rants that I update twice a week. Supposedly it's updated every Wednesday and Saturday, but I've never found conclusive evidence in support of that theory. I'll just say that it'll be updated whenever I can take time out of my busy schedule of trying to find a plausible explanation to why birds refuse to fly directly over me.

I consistently have no idea what to make the focus of the next rant, so I'm instituting a new policy: if you leave a good idea in the comments section, I'll stop stalking you. That's right: Starting right now, I will not leave you alone, under any circumstances, until you tell me what to write about.

Think I'm bluffing? I'm not. The very fact that I'm keeping a blog proves that I have no better way to spend my time. And I know that the number of people who come across my blog is limited enough that I'll only have to keep tabs on one at a time. On the off chance that more than one person visits this site, I can easily keep them all in a single location for monitoring.

That means that if you wake up to find yourself locked inside a dirty motel room with two strangers, start shouting out web addresses of things that are worthy of being mocked, or just random bits of asinine information. If the door unlocks, it's me. If a sinister voice tells you that none of you may leave until all three of you successfully grow a bean sprout in a coffee cup, that's Carl. Tell him Hal sent you, and he'll even give you a coffee cup.