5 responses so far ↓

• 1 Lisa // Feb 14, 2012 at 11:19 pm

  Also, this stereocard presents convincing evidence that children do not require necks to survive in the wild.

• 2 Winston // Feb 17, 2012 at 2:15 am

  On cold nights in Australia, an aboriginal accountant would curl up in a hole with a couple of dingoes and call this a two-dog night. A particularly freezing evening, requiring an additional dose of canine heat, was called a three dog night. Three dogs + 1 human = 4. The term has mystical significance among devotees of yoga.

• 3 Doug // Feb 18, 2012 at 3:37 pm

  This also inspired a band, who, despite their name, left me cold. What’s the yoga significance?

  I’d like to know what the dingoes called those nights.

• 4 Winston // Feb 28, 2012 at 3:18 am

  I wouldn’t want to curl up with that band either. Awful people, as Queen Elizabeth II would say. Three-dog in yoga refers to the position that involves the practicant facing the floor in an arched form with two hands and one foot on the floor, the other leg pointing towards an item on the menu above the counter. This apparently releases many bedbugs.

  But if I could continue the arithmetical theme, I happened to reread Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground last week and having read your doggie note, Doug, I couldn’t help but fixate on passages like these from the first part of said satirical work:

  “In fact, man is a comical creature; there seems to be a kind of jest in it all. But yet mathematical certainty is after all, something insufferable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.”

  And…

  “Though I did lay it down at the beginning that consciousness is the greatest misfortune for man, yet I know man prizes it and would not give it up for any satisfaction. Consciousness, for instance, is infinitely superior to twice two makes four. Once you have mathematical certainty there is nothing left to do or to understand. There will be nothing left but to bottle up your five senses and plunge into contemplation. While if you stick to consciousness, even though the same result is attained, you can at least flog yourself at times, and that will, at any rate, liven you up. Reactionary as it is, corporal punishment is better than nothing.”

  Dostoevsky was not a well man, and not one whose ideology I would embrace, but he was terribly good at fishing out the psychology of the people he met in the streets of St. Petersburg.

• 5 Doug // Feb 28, 2012 at 11:32 am

  I guess Pythagoras — and the idea that consciousness begins with number — is far from the Russian spirit. Poor Dostoevsky! Why couldn’t someone have given him a monochord? Although he probably would have just hit himself with it…