MY DEMENTED DIARY

Oh by the way, folks,
oldest entries are deleted
to keep the total entry
count at 666 because
that number is sure to
rile up somebody who
sorely needs it.

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My more serious diary:
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Today we celebrate the birthday of Robert Southey, born in 1774. He's some dude I never heard of. His name just came up on my Magic Random Celebrity Selector.

Sorry about no entry yesterday. Couldn't get into the DiaryLand entry page.

But anyhow, for the answer to Monday's conundrum, the Grand Wizard instructed the executioner to execute the doorkeeper for letting in the visitor who had not provided a logically meaningful statement as to why he was visiting the castle.

However, as a coupla Loyal Readers have suggested, there's a much better solution. I'm sure the king musta had a well-stocked bar in his castle and coulda resolved the whole situation just by treating the whole crowd to a round of drinks.

These logical paradoxes have a long and venerable tradition. In the fourth century Emperor Theodosius simply decreed that anybody who uses logic for anything must be executed by torture.

Then in 1781 some dude named Immanual Kant (who perhaps Kouldn't and apparently didn't, rumor has it that he was still a virgin on his deathbed) wrote up an enormously ponderous tome entitled Critique Of Pure Reason, where he lamented long and loud that logic isn't everything, or something like that. Or make of it what you will, if you've got the patience to wade through it.

Then in 1879 another dude named Gottlob Frege wrote up an even more enormously ponderous tome whose German title is customarily translated Fundamentals Of Arithmetic wherein he showed that the principles of logic, alone, could serve as premises for deriving a whole lotta stuff. This gave mathematicians the fond but futile hope that someday all knowledge of everything could be derived from pure logic.

Then in 1931 Kurt Godel blew these hopes off the campus with his world-famous Incompleteness Theorem.

Now, the sad end of this story is that he mistakenly believed that he had proved that God does not exist, which bothered him horribly because he was a devout Christian. So he spent much of the rest of his life trying to find flaws in his own proof, which he never found, and nobody else has ever found either. So he became very paranoid and thought God was trying to poison him, so he became more and more afraid to eat, and he starved to death.

So the moral of the story is, when logic fails, let's all go out for a round of drinks.

And on that note, I think it's time to see if Gordon the Garden has anything for me to pick before it starts raining.

Happy Wednesday!

OrneryPest