A Witty Piece of Logic

Here's a witty piece of logic from "The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (Douglas Adams):

"The Babel fish," said The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe... if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language...

"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

"The argument goes something like this: `I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'

"`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'

"`Oh dear,' says God, `I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.

"`Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

So, how about it then?

In the movie “The Boat That Rocked”, ‘Midnight’ Mark, hardly says anything. He has a night radio show where he just plays music. He’s however hugely successful with women, much to the amazement of his colleagues. At the end of the movie he reveals his secret:
“Say nothing at all, ever, and then, when the tension becomes unbearable you just say: So, how ‘bout it then?”
I might give this a try…

Captain Planet

One of the first animated TV series that we had in Romania after the Revolution was Captain Planet. It’s meant to be both entertaining and educational, dealing mostly with environmental issues and although we didn’t understand all the problems our heroes were solving, we certainly enjoyed watching them.

I’ve seen the intro again recently and I’ve noticed something odd. The five heroes with special powers, come from all the corners of the Earth, each representing a continent (Australia is excluded for some reason). Their nationalities are not revealed: Kwame is from Africa, Wheeler is from North America, Ma-Ti from South America and Gi from Asia. However, we know precisely, where Linka’s from: The Soviet Union. I found this both interesting and amusing, because as a kid I never noticed the oddity: a political message hidden in a show for kids.
I did a bit of research, and it appears that only after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Linka was introduced as coming from Eastern Europe. But I think there’s a good explanation for this. Wikipedia says that Captain Planet was the first of its kind, advocating “The United Nations as an organization, and the concepts of globalism, multiculturalism and environmentalism”. Of course, the producers wanted to target a whole range of markets, even the Eastern Bloc, and what better way of getting the communists on board, than making a young soviet part of Captain Planet’s team and telling everyone about it?
Go Planet!