ANOTHER FINE MESS by Steve Nadis
An MIT professor (I won’t name names) has just won a big award. Not the Nobel Prize, which many people think he’ll eventually get, but a more exclusive honor: winner of the messiest office in Boston. I’ve visited his office many times, and the level of disarray is indeed impressive. However, I should point out that the term “messy” is subjective. Several times during our talks, a paper or report will come up, and he’ll reach down into the piles that cover his floor and pull out the document within seconds. I doubt people who pride themselves on their neat filing systems could do any better.
On a superficial level, I suppose, he deserves the award. But a mess, like many other abstractions, lies in the eyes of the beholder. Where others see pure chaos, this distinguished scholar sees perfect order. It’s all a matter of perspective.
Posted by
at
15:15:35
Still not laughing.
That’s because this isn’t supposed to be funny; it’s philosophy.
See, Burt, it would be funny if Snake hadn’t left out a lot of important details. For example, the MIT professor in question turns out to be Alan Lightman, and his office is not messy in the traditional Newtonian sense, but in the Einsteinian sense. That is to say, his office exixts in a parallel universe where all objects are composed of paper instead of molecules. Those stacks of papers are, in fact, students, waiting to be lectured, except time in this "messy universe" moves at the pace of a 1984 dot-matrix printer, so several of the stacks of student-paper lifeforms have gotten bored and are amusing themselves by interleaving their pages. If you lived in that universe, you would think this is the funniest quasi-sexual slapstick you’ve ever seen, and it turns out, in fact, that Alan Lightman spends a lot of time watching the papers in his office and chuckling to himself. But, of course, you’re not as brilliant as he is, and you obviously don’t have a lot of big stacks of paper in your office if you do all your reading via the Web, so that’s why you don’t get it. Got it? Good.
I agree, gatemouth, this could be funnier. But it is not Lightman to which I refer. By the way, how’d you ever choose the name "gatemouth"?
Yo Snark,
It is customary in the blog o’sphere to include a link to the item being discussed.
Here it is:
http://www.boston.com/realestate/galleries/springsweep/13.htm
Oh. Never mind.
P.S. "Doormouth" and "Windowmouth" were taken. So it was either "gatemouth" or "passagewaymouth". I didn’t want people to think I was either a D&D fanatic or a porn webmaster, so….
Thanks gatemouth, that makes perfect sense. And thanks to you too LRRU for posting vital information I neglected to include (for my own reasons, however wrongheaded). One other thing: Please don’t call me Snark.