And strangely, we all found it funny.

I would get me some of this Insurance if only it really worked…

Language deconstrutionists teach that language has only relative meaning. If you say the word “chair” to me, you may mean your comfortable stuffed armchair and I may picture my much less comfortable desk chair. Likewise, no matter how many words you use to make a point, I may understand those words differently and come up with a different point. Thus, the theory goes, it is impossible to ascertain what words mean, and their “meaninging” in the vulgar, functional sense of the word is determined by their opposition or difference (or differance, for those in the know). That is, if you say “chair,” I am not likely to think of a dog or of the planet Neptune.

What they say about language is correct, but not what they say about meaning. After all, no matter how we misunderstand each other, your chair, my chair, and the planet Neptune all exist. The lifeblood of civilization is communication that is functional as a transactions of meaning. None of our language can exhaustively define what we are speaking of; that would require words which create precisely that which they define (there’s the rub). Short of that, we are borrowing a portion of the possible meaning when we communicate, as the moon reflects light. But the light is still real, even if it is reflected; and so the meaning.

Now, that’s a rather tedious way to introduce this video which you can enjoy without considering any of that. But with that introduction, I pose the question: is the customer being naive in failing to grasp the relative meaning of the word “tall,” or is the “nameless” coffee shop being perverse in its attempt to confuse the meaning of the word “tall”?

I’m siding with the customer.

When we were kids, we imagined places like this with cities in the bottom. I didn’t know that such places really existed!

This week’s poem of the week is this parody of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales that serves as an attack on the current archbishop of Canterbury and modern upper middle class mores.

If all product reviews were written with such passion the world would a more entertaining place.

Plumbing the depths has a new post up. Good news is that he has been down because business has been so good he did not have much time. But this lack of time has also caused him to have a little trouble with the powers that be….

The best part, as always, was dealing with the Inland Revenue. In all the huff and puff of plumbing I had forgotten to send in our annual PAYE return. Since we don’t pay PAYE I wasn’t overly concerned and, when I finally I remembered, I popped on-line and sent ‘the-powers-that-be’ a series of zero’s. Three weeks later I received a letter thanking me for sending them nothing but informing me that I had been fined £100 for sending them nothing far too late. Before I could get annoyed with this, I received another letter to tell me that the Revenue was going to pay me £200 for shunning the old paper-based system and not sending them anything ‘on-line’. This was very nice of them, so I rang up and asked if they could just deduct the fine from the reward and send me a cheque for £100. Surprisingly enough they didn’t have a problem with this and two weeks later I received the cheque. Then, just as I was beginning the think that the Inland Revenue wasn’t quite the bureaucratic monster everyone said it was, I received another, rather stroppy letter, pointing out that the Inland Revenue had had to send me a cheque for £100 and telling me to get my act together and make sure I didn’t over pay them again next year!

If you have ever tried this kind of thing, you know that even thinking it up, impossible as that is, does not compare with getting all the fidgety details to actually work.

From the creator of kiwi…