Also, to go with my last ill-informed Star Wars poetry, here’s a haiku I came up with on Twitter a few weeks ago:

Their mass destruction

is energy creation.

Let’s make stars, not wars.

It’s really more about nuclear fusion than Star Wars, but what do you expect from someone who hasn’t seen Star Wars? Incidentally, one of the packs of cards I bought in Sweden shows Star Wars characters, so I might use one as an excuse to record a video of the Star Wars poem, or something.

It’s kind of my birthday, depending on which time zone counts. So I’m retrospectively giving myself permission to have fun in Sweden instead of writing something for my blog or working.

Doesn’t matter, it’s occurred:
a change of places most absurd.
A bundle of supposed joy
was startled to be born unfurred;
like bees as birds, and birds as bees,
and hes as hers and hims as shes,
a horse was born as if a boy
and raised in human families.

He voted ‘neigh’ on ‘learn to talk’
and always used his hands to walk
and never to attack a meal
with proper use of knife and fork.
He whinnied for a mother mare,
but human mother, not aware,
assumed his brain would never heal
and placed the boy in foster care.

The horse-boy went from place to place,
exhausting homes at trotting pace
as so-called carers would perceive
a slowpoke of the human race.
They made him food but never kin,
derisive of the horse within,
till one day when he had to leave
a farming couple took him in.

“His heart is good, if not his head,”
his newfound foster parents said.
By day he’d never cease to roam;
by night he spurned his comfy bed.
With love, despite his skittish way
the farmers vowed to let him stay.
At last he’d found a stable home
and slept in there amongst the hay.

Big hearts, big stables, in due course,
the farm took in a crazy horse
and horse-man (for our boy had grown)
was floored by the attractive force.
He saw that she was not a mare,
but human woman stuck in there
And said, in human pheromone,
“Ma’am, you could ride me anywhere.”

They nuzzled, for she liked him too,
more’n any horse or man she knew.
Despite his foreign horsey smarts
he knew what she’d been going through.
They played till they were giddy
up the hills and through the city.
Mixed-up bodies, linked-up hearts
And shared emotions more than pity.

Strange things happen; who knows why?
The wingbeat of a butterfly?
The flutter of a software bug
in programs running Earth and Sky?
Whatever forces took the rein,
this act of horseplay’s not all pain.
It didn’t pull the final plug
and that’s why it may run again.

I’m a little late in publishing this one, since I went to Trogen for the weekend to see The Burning Hell play at Viertel, which is my favourite land-based concert venue, and will probably continue to be until I host a house concert. But to prove my dedication, I am posting this from a train on the way back to Geneva, as you can see from the photo of the playing cards in front of the train window.

The idea for this poem initially came from the Beehive card. The Beehive has people in it instead of bees, which reminded me of the lines ‘bees born as birds, birds born as bees’ from the song ‘Thing Game‘ (from the album ‘The Price‘) by Wax Mannequin, whom I’ve also seen play at Viertel. I wanted to throw in further reference to that song by hypothesising that the programmers of the world simulation we live in ‘pressed the buttons all at once’ but I couldn’t fit it in. If I ever get around to writing an iOS app, I think my first experiment might be an actual game based on Thing Game. You’ll have to press the buttons all at once, all of the time, even when you’re pressing buttons one, two and three, and there will be some lovely animations of bees hatching from eggs and birds flying out of honeycombs. The gameplay will be perplexing and it will be the most confusing explanation of the birds and the bees ever.

The idea of role reversal was further enforced, and turned into a human-horse switch, by the Guinness card of a horse in a cart being pulled by a person, which I also used for a poem on role reversal last cycle.

I had already seen the butterfly cod card and wondered if I could write something about a butterfly god, but it wasn’t until I was writing the beginning of this poem that I realised the butterfly effect could be considered like a god or even as a tool of a more traditional god, influencing the world in mysterious ways.

For the rhymes to work, this poem should be read in a non-rhotic accent that exhibits intervocalic alveolar flapping and does not distinguish groan and grown (sorry, New Zealanders.) I don’t know why I ended up with this rhyme scheme, but it’s a nice coincidence that I ended up writing eight stanzas of eight lines, usually with eight syllables per line. Perhaps I should make up some numerological quackery about the poem’s theme’s relation to the number eight.

This poem could be a metaphor about all sorts of things, or it could just be a lighthearted weird story with a horsey in it. It could be the kind of Disney movie that people who like getting upset about things could see too much in and get upset about. Interpret it in whatever way you prefer.

Once upon a time there were three bears; a mummy bear, a daddy bear and a baby bear. After they had finished their porridge one evening, it was time for Baby Bear to go to bed. So Mummy Bear tucked Baby Bear in and gave him a kiss goodnight, and then Daddy Bear started to tell him a story.

Once upon a time, there were three humans: a mummy human and the two human cubs she’d had the previous winter. One day, while they were out looking for some fruit for the winter, a young bear found their den and went inside. He could smell delicious trash and blackberries, and soon found three piles of it on the floor. He tasted the first one, but it was too trashy. He tasted the second one, but it was too sweet. Then he tasted the third one, and it was just right, so he ate it all up. He looked around and found some fruit, but it was too fermented and didn’t taste good. Then he found a pile of leaves. He was so sleepy after eating so much that he lay down in the pile of leaves and went to sleep.

When the human family came home, they could smell that something was different.

“Somebody’s been eating my garbage!” huffed Mummy Human.

“Somebody’s been eating my garbage too!” moaned Girl Human

“Somebody’s been eating my garbage, and they’ve eaten it all up!” barked Boy Human.

The three humans sniffed around the den, trying to find the culprit.

“The garbage smells like bear!” huffed Mummy Human.

“The fruit smells like bear!” moaned Girl Human.

“The leaves smell like bear, and there’s a bear here!” barked Boy Human.

The excited barking of the human cub woke up the bear, who jumped up and ran away as quickly as he could. And the humans never saw the bear again.

Baby Bear went to sleep, happily clutching his teddy human.

A few weeks later, when the family came home from their walk and Baby Bear found a human girl in his bed, Baby Bear decided to let it sleep there for the rest of the winter and maybe have babies. He didn’t tell his parents, and went to find some fermented fruit to put next to the bed. When he came back, he tripped and fell, and the human woke up, screamed, jumped out the window and ran away. Baby Bear cried and cried and cried. His parents heard his crying, and scolded him for trying to keep the human a secret. They explained that real humans weren’t like the ones in the story, and they had guns that could kill baby bears like him, so he should never try to be friends with one.

Baby Bear cried and cried and cried and cried.

This card reminded me of a magnificent tree down the road from where my sister used to live, which you can see above. It’s on the side of the road near some downward-sloping driveways, and it is surrounded by the letterboxes of the houses at the ends of the driveways. From a certain angle, it looks as if the letterboxes belong to the tree. I always imagined families of anthropomorphic squirrels and other fairy tale creatures living in the tree. So this week, I thought about writing about anthropomorphic squirrels, and then I wondered about the stories they would tell their children — surely about ‘sciuriomorphised’ humans, sciuriomorpha being the suborder containing squirrels. I figured such a story would be fun to write, and looked about for a well-known story about anthropomorphised squirrels I could model it on.

In the end, I settled for bears, and the well-known tale of Golidilocks, which has an interesting history, as it turns out. Why bears that are themselves anthropomorphised would ‘ursomorphise’ the humans in their fairy tales, I’m not sure, but I had to anthropomorphise the bears to have them telling a bedtime story at all, and I thought this might enhance the contrast. The bear in the inner story, though, is more like a real bear (it smells the food rather than seeing it, though for some reason he doesn’t like the fermented fruit) so that both species act similarly.

I found out a bit about bear habitat and behaviour, and essentially tried to tell the Goldilocks story as a bear might imagine it about humans, if they assumed humans did things the way they did. I hope I replaced every obvious instance of anthropomorphism in the original story with the appropriate ursomorphism. The three piles of garbage are a bit of a stretch; bears will eat whatever comes their way, and would be most likely to assume humans eat garbage, since that’s the food humans most often stash near their dwellings, but I don’t know where the bears would get the idea it would be left in three piles. I couldn’t think of an equivalent of the chairs either, nor of separate beds.

Probably the most interesting thing I found out, or perhaps was reminded of, is that bears give birth while hibernating (or as close as bears come to hibernating) during the winter, and then go back to sleep while the cubs drink their milk for three months. Motherhood comes easy to some.

The unhappy ending might be influenced by the Very Grimm Fairy Tales I’ve been reading lately. Or it might just be sound advice. Don’t try to make friends with bears, no matter how much you love your teddy bear. They don’t usually attack unprovoked, but I don’t think they’d enjoy a tight hug as much as you might think. Be bear wise.

Which way do you see things first? (Click the poems for pdf versions you can enlarge and copy the text from.)

This nine of spades from a deck of optical illusions cards that my nemesis sent me. I like this card. I see the arrows pointing upward first. That’s probably because they’re a darker colour and they’re not cut off by the edges of the square, but you may choose to interpret it as meaning I’m an optimist, because I am. Unfortunately, if you read these poems upward-first, you’ll end on a bit of a downer.

In case it’s not obvious, in each poem, the two arrows have the same lines in reverse order, with the upward-pointing one saying something generally uplifting and the downward-pointing one saying something more downcast. They’re a bit like ambigrams. The titles of the poems are the first and last words, in whichever order makes sense. They were surprisingly easy to write, but I suspect they’d be very difficult to perfect. I did not perfect them.

I thought about writing one which could be read directly across both arrows, perhaps as a dialogue between up-arrow person and down-arrow person, but didn’t end up thinking of any, and when I eventually typed them into the arrow shapes, I realised there was enough room between them that people would be unlikely to read straight across by accident.

“Come to the dark side.”

“Why? You’re not the boss of me.”

“I am your father.”

The person who suggested writing haiku wanted me to give a title for it, but I can’t decide on one. Maybe something like ‘Star Family Feud’ or ‘Daddy knows best’ or ‘Zo Vader, zo zoon’ (which is Dutch for ‘Like father, like son’.) or ‘Van Vader op Zoon’ (‘From father to son’) Any ideas?

Here is a poem containing most of the things I know about Star Wars that I could think of in the 10 hours or so since I came up with the idea. It amuses me, mainly because it rhymes, but it will probably amuse you more, since you know exactly how wrong it is. I don’t mind if you laugh with me or just at me. I think I’ll just call this one ‘I have not seen Star Wars, so I wrote some poetry about it.’

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away,
there was light, there was dark, there were no shades of gray.
And a war was beginning, and stars were being made,
though I don’t know their names or the roles that they played.
I know some were ewoks, Storm Troopers and wookiees
And Jedi Knights, padawans, masters and rookies,
Darth Vader, and C3P0, R2D2,
but Einstein couldn’t name them, so don’t expect me to.

There were Chewie, and Yoda (the OSV talker)
Han Solo, and Leia, of course, Luke Skywalker.
There were Pod Racers, Falcons, and starships deluxe
and cruisers, and Land Speeders (that and five bucks
will get you a Death Star; it looks like a moon
but it’s some kind of space station dealing out doom.
You would think it would wipe out the good guys, but nup!
For some reason, this one’s a cinch to blow up.)

I digress. There’s a thing called the Force Luke must use,
for the good side or bad? He’s the one who must choose.
(Side note: midi-chlorians, what the Force goes on
are Force mitochondria, some kind of boson.)
So may it be with you, it’s stronger in this
one, whose lack of faith hints that there’s something amiss,
but I think Obi-Wan puts him on the right track.
(That’s a guess. I don’t know who he is. Don’t attack!)

I’m a little unclear how the plot goes from there,
but it’s not like I’m bumbling around unaware.
I know what a mind trick or lightsaber’s for
and I know that they’re not the droids I’m looking for.
If they sleep in a tauntaun, then someone won’t freeze
and for Palpatine’s sake, wookiee’s spelt with two ‘e’s.
And it’s Han that shot first, not… uh… Guido? No, Gweebo!
He couldn’t shoot first at a wounded gazebo.

So this guy named Darth Vader, who breathes through a mask,
his wardrobe’s all dark side, you don’t need to ask.
Well he tried to convince the young Luke to turn bad,
and then (spoiler alert!) he said, ‘Hey, I’m your dad!’
And the princess was somehow Luke Skywalker’s sister,
but nobody talked about how he once kissed ‘er.
He vanquished his father, who, looking quite gaunt,
while wheezing could still somehow scream ‘Do not want!’

The End (and I don’t care what anyone thinks;
this poem may suck, but it beats Jar Jar Binks.)

There are a few references to other things in there. OSV refers to Object Subject Verb, the word order Yoda tends to use. Wil Wheaton once traded his Death Star for a Land Speeder and five bucks, which is the only reason I know Land Speeders exist. Gazebos are very hard to wound, but they don’t attack much. And I know Darth Vader screamed ‘Nooooooo!’ rather than ‘do not want‘, but I’m not too sure when or why.

This is not part of the Writing Cards and Letters (have you noticed I’ve been ignoring the letters this time?) project. I’m still planning on publishing a nine of spades by Sunday noon. It will be short and sweet and sour.

May the Fourth be with you, if it still is in your time zone.

Well, I’ve been wondering whether it could work the other way.

• Could grapheme-colour synaesthetes learn to look at a sequence of colours that correspond to letters in their synaesthesia, and read a word?
• Could this be used to send code messages that only a single synaesthete can easily read?
• Could colours be used to help grapheme-colour synaesthetes learn to read a new alphabet, either one constructed for the purposes of secret communication, or a real script they will be able to use for something?
• What would be the difference in learning time for a grapheme-colour synaesthete using their own colours for the replacement graphemes, a grapheme-colour synaesthete using random colours, and a non-synaesthete?

I know that for me, there are quite a few letters with similar colours, and a few that are black or white, so reading a novel code wouldn’t be infallible, but I suspect I would be able to learn a new alphabet a little more easily or read it more naturally if it were presented in the ‘right’ colours. I wonder whether the reason the Japanese symbol for ‘ka’ seemed so natural and right to me was that it seemed to be the same colour as the letter k.

It occurred to me that, as a programmer and a grapheme-colour synaesthete, I could test these ideas, or at least come up with some tools that scientists working in this area could use to test them. So I wrote a little Mac program called Synaesthetist. You can download it from here. In it, you choose the colours that you associate with different letters (or just make up some if you don’t have grapheme-colour synaesthesia and you want to know what it’s like) and save them to a file.

Then you can type in some text, and you’ll see the text with the letters in the right colours, like so:

But even though this sample is using the ‘right’ colours for the letters, it still looks all wrong to me. When I think of a word, usually the colour of the word is dominated by the first letter. So I added another view with a slider, where you can choose how much the first letter of a word influences the colours of the rest of the letters in the word.

This shows reasonably well what words are like for me, but sometimes the mix of colours doesn’t really resemble either original colour. It occurred to me that an even better representation would be to have the letters in their own colours, but outlined in the colour of the first letter. So I added that:

Okay, so that gives you some idea of what the words look like in my head. And maybe feeding text through this could help me to memorise it. Here’s an rtf file of the lyrics to Mike Phirman‘s song ‘Chicken Monkey Duck‘ in ‘my’ colours, with initial letter outline. I’ll study these and let you know it it helps me to memorise them. To be scientific about it, I really should recruit another synaesthete (who would have different colours from my own, and so might be hindered by my colours) and a non-synaesthete to try it as well, and define exactly how much it should be studied and how to measure success. But I’m writing a blog, not running a study, so if you want to try it, download the file. (I’d love it if somebody did run a study to answer some of my questions, though. I’d add whatever features were necessary to the app.)

But these functions don’t go too far in answering the questions I asked earlier. How about reading a code? Well, I figured I’d be more likely to intuit letters from coloured things if they looked a little bit like letters: squiggles rather than blobs. So first I added a view that simply distorts the letters randomly by an amount that you can control with the slider. I did this fairly quickly, so there are no spaces or word-wrapping yet.

I can’t read it when it gets too distorted, but perhaps it’s easier to read at low-distortion than it would be if the letters were all black. Maybe I’d be able to learn to ‘read’ the distorted squiggles based on colour alone, but I doubt it. This randomly distorts the letters every time you change the distortion amount of change the text, and it doesn’t keep the same form for each occurrence of the same letter. Maybe if it did, I’d be able to learn and read the new graphemes more easily than a non-synaesthete would. Okay, how about just switching to a font that uses a fictional alphabet? Here’s some text in a Klingon font I found:

I know that Klingon is its own language, and you can’t just write English words in Klingon symbols and call it Klingon. But the Futurama alien language fonts I found didn’t work, and Interlac is too hollow to show much colour.

Anyhow, maybe with practice I’ll be able to read that ‘Klingon’ easily. I certainly can’t read it fluently, but even having never looked at a table showing the correspondence between letters and symbols, I can figure out some words if I think about it, even when I copy some random text without looking. I intend to add a button to fetch random text from the web, and hide the plain text version, to allow testing of reading things that the synaesthete has never seen before, but I didn’t have time for that.

Another thing I’ll probably do is add a display of the Japanese kana syllabaries using the consonant colour as the outline and the vowel colour as the fill.

Here’s a screenshot of the whole app:

As I mentioned, you can download it and try it for yourself. It works on Mac OS X 10.7, and maybe earlier versions too. To use it, either open my own colour file (which is included with the download) or create a new document and add some characters and colours in the top left. Then enter some text on the bottom left, and it will appear in all the boxes on the right side. If you change the font in the bottom left, say to a Klingon font, it will change in all the other displays except the distorted one.

This is something I’ve coded fairly hastily on the occasional train trip or weekend, usually forgetting what I was doing between stints, so there are many improvements that could be made, and several features already halfway developed. It could do with an icon and some in-app help, too. I’m still working on this, so if you have any ideas for it, I’m all ears.

They each made a face, for they’d each made a point.
Was dying or living the upper adjoint?
The Galois connection was hard to ignore;
he’d dueled over shapely wee solids before,
and though he was shot, we can’t name his opponent,
while Galois’ last writings became a component
of fields (and of groups) of mathematics that show
among other things, what these two solids should know:
That Cube and its friend Octahedron are dual,
and no four-faced loner should cause them to duel.

At once, the two shook off their anthropomorphism,
and saw from their faces to points, isomorphism.
“You cannot kill me,” they each said to the other,
“For if I am a martyr, then so are you, brother,
and even though I’d be like Évariste too,
I’d rather not share such an honour with you.”
So they and their seconds proposed to their bride
that four eager suitors could each pick a side.
The pyramid’s answer was sweet but ironic:
“Of course you can share, but my love is Platonic.”

Why this week’s picture is of a Müller-Lyer illusion card next to some Dynkin diagrams in the Princeton Companion to Mathematics is a long story related to one of the many false starts before I eventually started writing this poem about a duel between dual Platonic solids a few hours before the deadline which I subsequently missed. The long story, which I will spare you, includes procrastination and despair involving not having time to perfect something I’ve wanted to do for years which happens to be in the cards this week, followed by a random walk that wandered past sestinas, change ringing, permutation groups and Lie groups on the way to Platonic solids and Galois. The highlight of it was a sestina about the mathematics of sestinas by Caleb Emmons, which seems to have been taken down from where his website used to be, but can still be found copied on other blogs.

So here’s a brief explanation of the poem itself. The five ‘Platonic’ solids are the tetrahedron (four-sided pyramid), the cube, the octahedron, the dodecahedron and the icosahedron; the only five solids where every face is an identical regular polygon. Plato associated them with the four classical elements, fire (tetrahedron), air (octahedron), water (icosahedron) and Earth (the cube. I wonder if Plato comes from Bizarro World.) For each of these you can define a ‘dual’ by replacing each vertex with a face and vice versa. If you do this with a cube, you get an octahedron, and if you do it with an octahedron you get the cube again. The same is true of icosahedrons and dodecahedrons. But if you do this with a tetrahedron, you just get a tetrahedron again. So at first I thought the tetrahedron would be lonely, or very self-sufficient. But it turns out the other duals misunderstood what they were, and dueled over the tetrahedron’s attentions.

If two shapes are dual, then they have all the same symmetries, which can be described by a symmetry group. Group theory is pretty awesome but I don’t have time to explain it all here. One guy who did explain a whole lot of it in a short time was Évariste Galois, who, according to legend and the song ‘Stefanie (the Ballad of Galois)’ by The Klein Four Group, stayed up all night writing down everything he’d figured out about group theory and other things before getting killed in a duel (allegedly over a lady named Stéphanie-Félicie Poterin du Motel) the next morning. One of the things he wrote about was the Galois connection, which I haven’t actually had time to read and understand fully, so I’m just hoping that upper adjoints are a suitable metaphor in this poem. This is very much a draft.

If two people duel, they usually elect ‘seconds’ to decide on a place, make sure the duelers have equal weapons, and may also duel each other. So dodecahedron and icosahedron get bit parts. I like the fact that the tetrahedron has one face for each of the other Platonic solids, so they can each pick a side. I wonder what a tetrahedron with another Platonic solid stuck on each face would look like, and how big those other solids could get relative to the tetrahedron before they started to obstruct each other.

He just imagined that in front of him, there was a giant requirement to do what he had committed himself to do. Taylor ran from the insipid story ideas that came to him, squatting in trashy distractions until he thought the ideas had left. But as soon as he stopped distracting himself, they came back. He had 18 hours to write something, and this would have to be it. He still ran, until the interruption of a pleasant procrastinatory conversation with a friend gave him a door, and he ran inside.

On the shelf was a DVD of the movie ‘The Neverending Story’. A story of a boy who saves Fantasia, the world of human fantasy, right when people were beginning to lose their hope, to forget their dreams. What if Fantasia were being destroyed again? What if that’s why there were no good story ideas left? If only he could get to Fantasia, and get a child to give the Childlike Empress a new name, he would be able to restore his hope and the wealth of fantastic story ideas he’d once had. He poured himself a frozen lemonade with vodka and sat down with his laptop to write.

He just imagined that in front of him, there was a giant Apollo White Room, where he could prepare to enter his craft and travel to unknown worlds. He’d had the training, read a summary of the book, watched the movie, and he knew exactly what he had to do. He would journey to the Moonchild.

It would be easier for him than for Atreyu. He just had to keep his chin up as he crossed the deadly Swamps of Sadness, keep his grip when speaking to Morla, find a luckdragon, keep his self-esteem up as he walked through the Sphinx gate, keep his cool as he saw his true reflection in the mirror of true selves, feign surprise when the Southern Oracle told him the Empress needed a new name, and hope he’d written the story well enough to capture a child’s attention.

Taylor stopped to take a sip of his drink, check his email, and try to forget how unlikely it was that a child would read his story and give Empress Moonchild the new name she needed. He’d cross that bridge when he came to it.

Ahead of him, the Nothing had already devoured the landscape. To the left and right was more nothingness. Behind him, he could see the Ivory Tower glowing in the distance. Andy, his Andalusian horse, had no problem galloping over the featureless landscape. When they arrived at the Ivory Tower, Taylor approached the bearded man.

“I’m sorry. But this is not the time and the place for adults. Adults do not have the imagination required for this quest. I must ask you to leave.”

“If you don’t want me here, you shouldn’t have sent for me.” Taylor had his lines memorized.

“It was not you we sent for,” said the man. “We wanted Taylor.”

“I am Taylor,” he said.

“Not Taylor the worn-out adult! Taylor the child!”

That is not what they’d said to Atreyu. “I’m the only Taylor you’ve got,” said Taylor. “I’m old enough to know what to do. But if you want, I’ll go back and write advertising copy.” Taylor turned away and pretended to leave.

“No, wait, come back, please,” said the man. Taylor turned back.

“If you really are the Taylor we sent for, you would be willing to go on a quest?”

“Yes, of course.” This was the script Taylor was used to. “What kind of a quest?”

The man gave the usual spiel about finding a cure for the Empress, to save Fantasia. It would be very dangerous and important, and he had to go alone, weaponless. Taylor feigned bravery as he accepted the challenge, knowing that having already seen the movie, he would be in no real danger. He did not need to feign awe as he was given Auryn, the amulet which would guide and protect him.

Taylor rode off into the sunset, knowing that the creature of darkness which would be tracking him down would be an easy kill. After riding for hours, they stopped and decided it was time to eat.

Taylor looked up from his laptop, suddenly aware that his stomach was growling. He topped up his frozen lemonade and made some toast. “Not too much,” he said after the first few bites. “We still have a long way to go.”

Taylor and Andy had searched the Silver Mountains, the Desert of Discarded Drafts, the Crystal Heads and the Sadness Swamp without success. He saw there was only one chance left. To find Melpolia, the ancient muse, whose home was in the deadly Forests of Disbelief.

Taylor led his horse off a cliff, and into the treetops which appeared ahead of them and disappeared behind them as they walked. Everyone knew that whoever stopped believing in the forest would fall to the bottom of the ravine. Taylor kept himself aloft by describing the feeling of branches underfoot to himself as he went, but the horse soon began to fall. “Andy! Can’t you feel the branches poking into your hooves? Can’t you hear the twigs cracking? Andy, please!”

As the horse fell into the void, Taylor could see just how impossible the forest was. He fell, but instinctively reached out and grabbed a branch that his muscles still knew was there. Of course it was there. If he could write it well enough, it was there. Taylor climbed back to the top and ran with his eyes closed, letting out shrieks of delight as he realised what a marvelous reality he had created. When he got bored with that, he just imagined that in front of him there was a giant red tabby, and then he collided with something soft.

Taylor rolled his chair back from his laptop and sighed loudly. This was a ridiculous idea. A giant cat? A giant cat was the best he could think of as a muse? Well, it would have to do. It was dark out. He was running out of time.

The wind seemed to sigh as Taylor looked up at Melpolia the giant red tabby.

“Oh, no. Not an adult,” the cat hissed. “Adults are no fun.”

Taylor sniffled a little, remembering his cat allergy. “Look, if you would just help me in my quest to save the Childlike Empress… I have a deadline, you know.” He grabbed Melpolia’s fur as the treetop beneath him threatened to give way.

“Oh, we know the Empress is sick, but it doesn’t matter.” Melpolia turned away and started licking itself.

Taylor sneezed violently, and fell a metre or so when he forgot to believe. He climbed back up.

“Do you even care?” Taylor remembered this line from the movie.

“You don’t really care whether or not I care,” said Melpolia.

Taylor started to protest, but realised Melpolia was right. He didn’t care. He just wanted to get through the story, get some readers, and save Fantasia so he would have ideas to write other stories and keep food on the table.

Food. Taylor finished a piece of toast. Why wouldn’t the characters ever just do what he wanted them to? He only had eleven hours left. He took a last gulp of frozen lemonade and slammed the cup down angrily on the table. Fine. If he wasn’t going to save the Empress, he may as well have fun.

Taylor sneezed again, and his tree swayed with him. “You know how I can help save the Empress, don’t you?”

“Not that it matters, but yes,” said Melpolia while it licked its left side.

“It does matter!” screamed Taylor. “If I don’t save her, the Childlike Empress will die, and I always wanted to meet her!”

“It’s really not important. I have some preening to do, you know.” insisted Melpolia.

“If you don’t tell me, Fantasia will disappear, right when I’m starting to enjoy it!” yelled Taylor.

“Oh, alright,” said the giant red tabby. “The truth is, I don’t know. Maybe you could ask the Southern Oracle…”

“Right, 10 000 miles away?” Taylor had forgotten that from the movie. The only point of going to see Melpolia was attracting a luckdragon to take him to the Southern Oracle.

“Yes, as it happens.”

“Great. You wouldn’t happen to know where I could find a luckdragon, would you?”

“A what? Luckdragons don’t exist. They were just made up for a book.”

Taylor started to fall. Melpolia found a patch of fur near its right front paw that hadn’t been preened for a while, and went to work on it.

The falling sure felt real. Taylor closed his eyes and waited to hit the ground.

Taylor poured himself another frozen lemonade, without vodka this time, the way he’d always loved it as a kid. He’d had so much of it one summer that his friends had started calling him Frozen Lemonade. They still did, sometimes, but it embarrassed him more now. He’d started adding vodka in his mid-twenties. The vodka made it taste terrible, but what self-respecting adult drinks virgin frozen lemonade?

Taylor woke up next to some kind of giant goat. “Are you a luckdragon?”

“Goodness, no. I’m a deus ex machamois.”

Taylor giggled. “A deus ex machamois? And let me guess, you can fly, and you caught me when I fell from the nonexistent treetops?”

“That’s right. A giant flying squirrel would have made more sense, but I guess you panicked. Panic is sometimes good for creativity.”

“You mean… I just made you up to save my life? And you’re really here?”

Taylor could picture it in his head. A giant chamois, flailing through the air, always looking for footholds in the clouds. Eat your heart out, Rudolph! He laughed so hard he almost peed himself. On the way back from the toilet, he spotted the bag of sour miniature easter egg candies he’d bought for his nephews, and opened it. Forget the waistline; a little sugar once in a while couldn’t harm him.

“I’m here, alright. You passed out before I even caught you; you’re not used to landing on giant flying goats any more. My name’s Rudolph.”

Taylor laughed. “So… how far away is the Southern Oracle?”

“Why, it’s just around the corner!”

Taylor grinned. ”Do I have to go visit that gnome couple and drink eye of newt to make me healthy, now?”

“Only if you want to.”

Taylor secretly wanted to know what the potion would taste like. He found the gnomes’ home, where Urgl hurried to make him a healing potion. “This one will do you good. It has eye of newt in it. And wing of cat, hair of tortoise, face of gnat, eyelash of porpoise.”

Taylor gulped it down in delighted disgust, feeling the eyes slide down his throat and the wings try to flap their way back up, chewing the eyelashes so they wouldn’t tickle.

“This one’s eye of newt,” said Taylor as he put a sour egg into his mouth. He grimaced as the sour taste electrified his tongue.

Then it was Engywook the scientist’s turn to tell him about the Sphinx Gate he would have to pass. “The sphinxes’ eyes stay closed until someone who does not feel his own worth tries to pass by. They can see straight into your heart.”

Taylor did not stay to watch a hesitant traveller get shot by the Sphinxes’ eyes. “Thanks for the newt eyes!” he yelled as he ran down to the gate.

Taylor approached the Sphinx gate with confidence.

Taylor couldn’t think of anything good enough to write. All his ideas seemed stupid again. He decided to write as quickly as he could whatever came to his head, whether he liked it or not.

Taylor ran between the sphinxes as he saw the eyes beginning to open. The sphinx eyes fired a blue laser of self-doubt at him, but he could jump over and under the laser beams like a character in a bad science fiction movie. He leapt over the last one and rolled along the ground giggling on the other side, almost wanting to go back for another go. There were plenty of other roll marks in the sand. He wondered if anyone was really confident enough to keep the eyes closed, or if the survivors were just the ones who ran through anyway.

And now for the mirror of true selves. When he started the quest, he would have been afraid to look at it, but he wasn’t afraid any more. The mirror showed him as a young boy, enthusiastically writing into his notebook. And then a middle-aged man, typing into his laptop just as excitedly.

Finally, he arrived at the Southern Oracle. As expected, it told him that in order to save Fantasia, the Empress needed to be given a new name by a human child.

Taylor swore and wished he’d put more vodka in his frozen lemonade. He’d forgotten to think of a solution to the ‘human child’ problem. In the movie, the human child is the reader of the book, but who would ever read this one? He hadn’t even made the deadline. He made some more toast and settled down to write an unhappy ending.

Taylor rode Rudolph back in the direction he’d come, trying to enjoy the ride even though he knew he’d failed in his quest. Fragments of Fantasia floated around the void like stars. They flew toward the brightest: the Ivory Tower.

The Childlike Empress was beautiful. She reminded Taylor of his first crush.

“I have failed you, Empress.”

“No. You haven’t. You brought him with you.”

“Who?”

“The child. The one who can save us all.”

“No I didn’t. Nobody is going to publish this. No child is going to read this.”

“Yes, you did,” said the Empress with conviction. ”He has suffered with you. He went through everything you went through. And now, he has come here. With you. He is very close. Listening to every word we say.”

Taylor could barely believe what he was writing. He popped another sour egg into his mouth.

“Where is he? If he’s so close, why doesn’t he arrive?” A piece of ivory fell from the ceiling and narrowly missed Taylor’s head.

“He doesn’t realise he’s already a part of the story.”

“But it’s just me!” Taylor protested. “I know I’m in the story. I know I’m writing the story. I know no kid is reading this story.”

“The child began to share your adventure as soon as you let him. As soon as you started believing the story.”

“But there’s nobody here but me!” Taylor said.

He was right.

Taylor almost choked on a sour egg. “No way!” he said aloud.

“He’s been a part of you all along, but you slowly stopped listening to him, when you thought you had to keep you feet on the ground. He’s still inside you. You just need to let him call out my new name. He has already chosen it.”

“This isn’t real. I’m just writing this. This isn’t real.” said Taylor under his breath. He could make them say something else if he wanted. He could make the Empress look up a name in a baby name book herself.

“What will happen if he doesn’t appear?”

“Then our world will disappear, and so will I,” said Empress Moonchild.

“How could he let that happen?”

“He doesn’t understand that he’s the one that has the power to stop it. He simply can’t imagine that something he’s writing can be so important.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know what he has to do!”

No baby name book. The characters wouldn’t let him. But he didn’t know what to write next. “What do I have to do?” Taylor wondered aloud.

“He has to give me a new name. He just has to call it out,” said the Empress.

All Taylor called out was “But it’s only a story. It’s not real!”

“Taylor! Why don’t you do what you dream, Taylor? Why don’t you live the fantasy life you created?”

“But I can’t, I have to keep my feet on the ground! I’m a grown man!” Taylor was already yelling loud enough for his neighbours to think he was a nutcase. What harm would there be in yelling a name as well?

“Call my name! Taylor, please! Save us!”

Taylor was confused. “Me? My horse died, I almost died falling off trees, I swallowed porpose eyelashes, and I could have just come straight here and given you a name myself?”

“Not you. The Taylor who’s writing the story. You needed to go on the adventure so he could find the child in him.”

“Alright! I’ll do it! I’ll save you. I will do what I dream!” Taylor grabbed his cup and held it up in the air triumphantly. “Frozen Lemonade!” he screamed.

And then it was dark. “Really? A power cut, now?!” he said in frustration, wondering when he’d last saved his writing. Taylor jumped as a beautiful voice responded.

“In the beginning, it is always dark.”

“What the…”

Taylor saw a tiny glow, and watched it grow to reveal the face of the Childlike Empress. “Seriously? You can’t tell me this was all real! I was just making excuses for my lack of ideas! There is no Fantasia.”

Taylor felt the floor beneath him tremble. It was not the floor of his apartment.

“Not any more,” said the empress. “But now that you have named me Frozen Lemonade, you can begin to rebuild.”

“Wait, I have to rebuild?

Frozen Lemonade showed Taylor the glowing object she’d been holding. A pencil. “Give me your hand.”

Taylor held out his hand, and Frozen Lemonade placed the pencil between his fingers. “Now what are you going to write about?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then there will be no Fantasia any more.”

“How much can I write with one pencil?”

“As much as you want. You don’t even need to use this pencil. The more you write, the more magnificent Fantasia will become.”

“Really?”

“Try it.”

So he started writing. He barely noticed when he was transported back to his apartment and the pencil became a glowing laptop screen. He and his laptop had many other amazing adventures, but they are other stories.

*

There were two interesting card combinations in the sixes of spades. The first thing I noticed was that both of the decks I’d bought last time I visited my family in New Zealand showed the same lighthouse in Cape Reinga, New Zealand’s northernmost point. I thought maybe I could write about somebody approaching the lighthouse with trepidation and eventually going further North to have some kind of fantastic adventure, or drown. But I couldn’t think of a good story.

I looked at the ’52 ways to say I love you’ deck, which almost never disappoints. Its instruction to ‘invent a cocktail and name it after them’ was a clear indication that this was my chance to use the Drink Recipes deck I picked up on Grand Cayman during the first JoCo Cruise Crazy. I wrote down some metaphors comparing a loved one to a frozen lemonade. Seeing a colleague squeeze lemon juice on his fish gave me an idea for a somewhat vague, sweet and sour love story involving lemons, so I started writing that. It lacked substance, but it seemed worth doing anyway.

I was still planning to go ahead with this until Friday night, when a Skype voice conversation with a friend got cut off mid-sentence. What I’d heard of the sentence was ‘He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant…’ This seemed like a great opening line for a story, so I looked through all the cards and tried out each one of them as the end of the sentence. I’ll put a list of them at the end of this post, in case you want to try writing something using one of them.

As I looked through the cards again to do this, I noticed the lighthouse cards again. If someone were approaching the lighthouse, what giant thing could they imagine was in front of them? Well, if they had an important mission to complete in the lighthouse, they might imagine it to be like the Apollo white room pictures in my NASA 50 Years deck; the place where astronauts prepared to board a spacecraft and leave everything they knew. What could be at the top of the lighthouse to bring an adventurer such fear and determination? And what about naming a drink after someone? That’s when it all came together. The lighthouse looked a little like the Ivory Tower from The Neverending Story, where the Childlike Empress could be saved by being given a new name. Is our hero (or villain) racing Atreyu to get there first, to somehow benefit from being the first to name the Empress? How does he know what he has to do? I quite enjoy rewriting known fairy tales from the perspective of different characters, so I figured I could write the original story from a minor character’s point of view, or make up a new character to write the perspective of. I happened to have the movie of The Neverending Story on DVD, so I watched it to refresh my memory. I copied some fairly large portions of the dialogue at the end word-for-word, and inserted a few other quotes earlier in the story.

I haven’t read the book of The Neverending Story, though I have the original German version which I intend to read once my German is a bit better. My apologies to author Michael Ende for disregarding the book version, and to director Wolfgang Petersen for mutilating the movie storyline and copying the dialogue.

I really did have toast at various points during the story, including at noon on Sunday when the deadline struck. Who cares about deadlines and responsibilities? Let’s be kids again! While I didn’t have the ingredients for frozen lemonade, I had some lemon sorbet mixed with carbonated water, which is my favourite drink on hot days. When I got a bit tired and discouraged, I decided to write the ending. I figured by that time he would be doing things his inner child wanted to, so I had him stuffing a gummy worm into his mouth. Then I remembered I had some sour easter egg lollies, so I opened them. They sustained me through the rest of the draft. For what it’s worth, if I ever make a frozen lemonade according to the recipe on the card, I will call it a Moonchild.

A song which I kept thinking of while writing this is Rich Fantasy Lives, by Rob Balder, which you can listen to for free as a duet with Tom Smith, or get on Rob Balder’s CD. Don’t forget to live yours.

Here are the story starters from the sixes of spades. I used two and a half of them. Let me know if you write any stories using these; I bet they’ll be interesting.

He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant 3-handcuff underwater escape.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant ringed brown snake.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant six of clubs.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant statue of an Austrian boy urinating.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant common carp.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant Apollo White Room.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant naked woman unsuccessfully trying to drink water from a bottle.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant Compact Muon Solenoid.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant ship transporting chocolate.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant Command Module.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant beauty salon.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant red tabby.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant Scottish terrier.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant bay laurel.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant Dutch neighbourhood.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant black-eyed Susan.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant aniseed toadstool.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant ramsons plant.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant statue of a fraternity member in blue scrubs and a ceremonial robe urinating.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant chamois.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant Ducal Palace.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant Avimimus.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant Gila monster.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant piece of carbon.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant piece of cerium.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant Small Heath butterfly.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant dunnock.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant goat willow.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant Vallot alpine refuge.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant rufous hummingbird.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant fountain of the Dominican Order.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant Dunegal.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant French Compact Muon Solenoid.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant man staring at him quizzically while the car receded on the country road behind him.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant impossible triangle.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant Haliburton.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant Swiss municipality.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant ruinous butt, whoreson, indistinguishable cur.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant centaurea.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant crescent-tail bigeye.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant Andalusian horse.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant Northern pintail.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant Dutch lighthouse.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant black spotted cow.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant pocket pistol.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant Saint Bavo cathedral.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant multitasking orgy.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant Valaisan village.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant cable from the Golden Gate bridge, weighing 11000 tons.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant George Taylor.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant Parisian square.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant New Zealand lighthouse.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant faraway New Zealand lighthouse.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant space station.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant frozen lemonade.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant cocktail named after the one he loved.
He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant requirement to do whatever he was told to do.

And of course:

He just imagined that in front of him there was a giant.

Note: This is a song-like thing. Here is an mp3 of my Mac singing it to approximately the right tune, just so you can get the same tune in your head that I had in mine when I wrote it. Feel free to make your own recording of it with human vocals and actual music if you wish. I make no claim of being musical, and I probably accidentally copied the tune from something. Sosumi.

If I can’t have this, then I’ll have that
If I can’t have a dog, I’ll have a cat
If I don’t like today there’s always tomorrow
If I can’t be Superman, I’m Bizarro
If I can’t have coffee I’ll have tea
If I can’t have a pool I’ll have the sea
If I can’t have chocolate, I’ll have cakes
If I can’t have cities, I’ll have lakes
But if I can’t have you there are no good fakes
So I’ll be very sad.

Well you can’t always get what you think that you want
But you can get something that’s just as nice
It is not very likely the thing that you crave
Will be the only thing that will suffice

If I can’t have Mars I’ll take the moon
If I can’t be first I’ll be there soon
If I can’t have shuttles, I’ll have Soyuz
If I can’t fly from you I’ll fly for youse
If I can’t have Skylab I’ll have Mir
If I can’t leave Earth then I’ll stay here
If there’s no zigazig I want all your base
If there’s no E.T. I’ll take the human race
But if I can’t have you there’s an empty space
And I’ll be very sad.

Well you can’t always get what you think that you want
But you can always want what you’ve got
It is not very likely the thing that you crave
Will be the only thing to hit the spot

If I can’t have ATLAS there’s CMS
If I can’t find the Higgs I’ll make another guess
If I can’t prove that, I’ll become a believer
If I can’t go to PAX I won’t be a reaver
If I can’t write songs then I’ll still write Things
and if my voice sounds bad my computer sings
If I can’t have Hexley, I’ll have Tux
If I can’t have a princess, I’ll have ducks
But if I can’t have you then that just sucks
And I’ll be very sad

Well you can’t always get what you think that you want
But you can always rehypothesise
It is not very likely the answer you seek
Is the only one that satisfies

If I can’t have some things I’ll have others
If I can’t have sisters I’ll have brothers
If I can’t have rhythm I’ll have rhyme
If I can’t have space then I’ll have time
If I can’t have proof then I’ll have trust
If I can’t make love then I’ll take lust
If I can’t have lovers, I’ll have nudes
And if I can’t have ladies, I’ll have dudes
But I can’t have you so we’ll have feuds
’cause I am very sad

Well you can’t always get with the person you like
but you can always find someone new
It is not very likely the one that you want
Will be the only one that’s meant for you

Well, they say there are plenty more fish in the sea
Though I don’t think they mean that literally
And while I can’t seem to stop the overfishing
I always can be careful what I’m wishing

‘Cause if I can’t be linked then I’ll be free
If I can’t have you there’s another three
And if I can’t have them then I’ll have me
And you’ll be very sad.
But you can deal with that:
Just find another lad.

Options. If you’re in a species numerous enough that you have a reasonable hope of meeting another member of it to possibly mate with, and if you have enough clean water and food to live, and if you can read and write and access the huge repository of knowledge and misinformation and pussycat pictures that is the internet, you probably have some.

I got the idea for this last week, while discussing with a guy who can’t be Superman why I don’t bother pirating things that are difficult or impossible to get by means condoned by their creators. But even though I had the idea and the tune a week in advance, and Friday was a holiday due to Easter, I still didn’t deal the cards and really start writing this until Friday evening. I wanted to add in some instrumentation using various source tracks I have from actual musicians, but in the end I didn’t even have time to perfect the timing of my robot choir‘s singing of it. I did add in some noises from the rainstick I bought in Aruba during JoCo Cruise Crazy II, though, so despite not being a musician, I can proudly claim that all instrumentation is by me.

I should probably have used a male voice for this, since it does say ‘find another lad’ at the end, but I just think Victoria is better at singing. I did discover while recording this that Mac OS X Lion has a whole lot of new voices, which can speak in different accents and different languages, so I’ll have to see if I can get the French ones to sing Les Éléments.

Most of the things in this song were inspired by the cards, or by rhymes with the cards. A few might need explaining, or at least I should introduce you to some new decks. The one with a beach and a pool on it is a Lingo Pix deck, which I’m not sure whether to put with my collection of playing cards or my collection of dictionaries. Each card has a picture on it of something you might want to gesture hilariously about wherever you don’t speak the local language.

You probably can’t read the caption on the lake below that, but it’s Emerald Lakes, Mt. Tongariro. It’s in a land much nicer than Oz, where you can go instead of Emerald City. Next to that is Buzz Aldrin stepping onto the Moon. He wasn’t the first, but he stepped on the moon soon after Neil Armstrong. That’s from the Kennedy Space Center cards I got when I visited Kennedy Space Center before JoCo Cruise Crazy. Below that are cards from other decks I got there; Space Shuttle Columbia before its first launch, and Skylab, from the Space Shuttles and NASA 50 Years decks respectively. Next to Skylab is the ATLAS card, which I also used last time. Below ATLAS is a nude lady, from a deck of cards I found while looking for novelty panties to throw at Paul and Storm.

Apart from obvious card-inspired things, there are a few other references. The line ‘If there’s no zigazig I want all your base’ refers to the zigazig-ha, which is what the Spice Girls really really want, and the zigs you should move when all your base are belong to us. The line ‘If I can’t go to PAX I won’t be a reaver’ refers to the fact that many of my JoCo Cruise Crazy friends are at PAX East this weekend. It also refers to the origin of reavers in the Firefly universe.

Hexley is the mascot for DarwinOS, which forms the core of Mac OS X. Tux is the mascot for Linux, which I suppose I would grudgingly move to if I couldn’t have Mac OS X for some reason. I mainly put those in to rhyme with ‘ducks’, from a playing card. ‘If I can’t have a princess, I’ll have ducks’ refers to a line I enjoy discussing from the science fiction story ‘You Pretty Thing‘: a lifetime of ducks is better than an evening of princesses.

By the way, Bizarro (as seen in the picture linked above) is also writing a small thing a week, which you should check out. The last thing he did was a translation of Clément Marot’s ‘À une demoiselle malade’, as suggested in Douglas R. Hofstadter’s book, ‘Le ton beau de Marot’. I wrote my own translation of that once, translated not to English but into a half-French, half-English poem about a sick Macintosh. Select the text of the message to see some extra notes written in white.

In case you want more of my inept attempts at music, I teamed up with some other non-musicians on the cruise who had bought instruments in Aruba, to form the Souvenir Quartet. Here is our début performance:

As an improv exercise, this would probably work best in pairs. One person starts with a sentence beginning with ‘[Name] knew that…’ or ‘[Name] did not know that…’ and the other continues the story with a sentence beginning with ‘That’s why…’ This continues until they finish the story and/or reach a predetermined time limit or number of exchanges, or one of the players makes a mistake. After that, they either switch roles or replace one or both players to start a new story.

Note that the ‘that’ after the ‘X knew/did not know’ is important. This allows statements such as ‘X did not know that Y was his father’ or ‘X knew that the ice-cream salesman wanted to kill him’ but not general ‘X did/did not know…’ statements such as ‘X did not know where/what/who s/he was’ or ‘X knew why the ice-cream salesman wanted to kill him’. The latter kind of statement just delays the story; it doesn’t provide any new information, and pushes that responsibility onto the next player. Since I was able to edit what I’d written, and plan ahead a bit, I did not always follow this rule for What Jane Knew, but I think it would be important in improv.

I haven’t tried this, since I only just made it up and the CERN improv group dissolved a while ago. I’m also not an expert at improv by any means, so I can’t claim that any exercise I invent will be perfect. If you are in an improv group, or you’re looking for something fun to do at a party, feel free to try this and let me know how it goes. To practise the acting side of things, you could also try pausing after each ‘that’s why…’ to allow other people to act out the story, much like Typewriter.

I imagine that in an improv troupe made up of logicians, this would quickly degenerate into solutions to hat puzzles, but this would still entertain an audience of logicians. If you have an improv troupe made up of logicians, please record some of your performances and put them online, because I’d love to see that. I would probably give it a single golf clap.