Monday
3/10/04
Wagon Wheels and Ellipses
Just like any other elaborate collection of ideas that undergoes change with the interpretation and handling of people, both the Bible and the Internet are, as best I can tell, rather like a vast game of "telephone’. Or the Torah or Koran or whatever.
But, since I don’t feel quite up to musing about the fluid nature of Bible study today, I’ll just wonder about the fluid nature of the Internet. In short, I’m just mildly curious about one minor thing: there’s been some buzz about Steve Martin’s ‘Passion’ script notes piece in the New Yorker for the last few days, and although it took me a day or so, I’ve found that there are at least two slightly different versions circulating.
In the first, studio guy "Stan" wonders if instead of a cross it would be feasible to use a copyrightable shape like a wagon wheel, and in another version he wonders if it could be an ellipse. Of course there’s nothing remarkable about intellectual or physical content either morphing into something new or incrementally gathering errors like a fifth generation cassette tape of the Dead at Sacramento, but the difference between a wagon wheel and an ellipse seems inexplicable.
So, I guess I’m just looking for any thoughts on this, or if anybody knows if there’s even anything worth knowing about that difference in the first place.
Now then, if I could just figure out the incremental communication errors that make my kids interpret "Go to bed" as "Run around the house like maniacs…"
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Wagon Wheels and Ellipses
Just like any other elaborate collection of ideas that undergoes change with the interpretation and handling of people, both the Bible and the Internet are, as best I can tell, rather like a vast game of "telephone’. Or the Torah or Koran or whatever.
But, since I don’t feel quite up to musing about the fluid nature of Bible study today, I’ll just wonder about the fluid nature of the Internet. In short, I’m just mildly curious about one minor thing: there’s been some buzz about Steve Martin’s ‘Passion’ script notes piece in the New Yorker for the last few days, and although it took me a day or so, I’ve found that there are at least two slightly different versions circulating.
In the first, studio guy "Stan" wonders if instead of a cross it would be feasible to use a copyrightable shape like a wagon wheel, and in another version he wonders if it could be an ellipse. Of course there’s nothing remarkable about intellectual or physical content either morphing into something new or incrementally gathering errors like a fifth generation cassette tape of the Dead at Sacramento, but the difference between a wagon wheel and an ellipse seems inexplicable.
So, I guess I’m just looking for any thoughts on this, or if anybody knows if there’s even anything worth knowing about that difference in the first place.
Now then, if I could just figure out the incremental communication errors that make my kids interpret "Go to bed" as "Run around the house like maniacs…"
