If I need a break from an desk-bound activity (say, grading exams), I sometimes hop on over to Youtube’s homepage just to see what they have featured. Within a minute or two I can usually find a video that is interesting enough to feel satisfied that I’ve relaxed and can go back to work. The feature tonight was Rube Goldberg machines:
Rube Goldberg was a genius, if only for the simple reason that he was clever enough to get his name attached to machines that would appear so clever as to forever link their designers with Rube Goldberg, in that the machine is genius enough to be associated with those genius machines Rube Goldberg created, or at least was clever enough to get his name forever attached to machines that would appear so clever as to forever… Feel free to repeat ad nauseam. Especially to friends who will think you clever for being able to rattle off such a gordian logic knot. Though I should warn you that if you try such a trick you very well might lose your friends unless a) your friends are actually amused, which would make them just the sort of person who would befriend a person who would read such a riddle and consider it something worth memorizing despite a rather snarky adjudication against the types of people who would memorize such a thing.
Of course, in that you ignore the warning, you exonerate its rather impolite perspective. A perspective which depends heavily on specification and generalization, to name a few, of the types of people who do certain things like read this blog. Or blogs in general, as a blog in specific is little more than a noted blog in general, as are its readers. Much like a reader of a book. An author, of course, certainly considers and crafts his creation to suit his audience, which is rather odd if you are writing a transformative self-help book. Forgive me—all books are intended to help selves, though which self is not necessarily publicly proclaimed and probably privately self referential and absurd. Which is a second reference in recent posts to such terminology (shameless self-promotion [pulled that out of the trite bloggy bag {like that? |yet another overused bloggerism—the direct appeal for comments ~though some of the blogging greats use such tactics ^shoutout!^~|}]). I think I just created a new emoticon.
…in a Rube Goldberg machine knockoff.