Thursday, April 27, 2006

This is John Cheese speaking

I just finished the best book I've read since Cryptonomicon - John Dies at the End. I feel kind of bad that I'm getting something this good for free. It's sort of an action... horror... romance... comedy. It's a romactiohorridy. Here's how the book opens:

In the course of solving the following riddle, you will either reveal the terrifying secret at the very core of existence, or go utterly mad in the attempt.

Let's say you have an ax. The kind that you could use, in a pinch, to hack a man's head off. And let's say that very situation comes up and for some very solid reasons you behead a man. On the follow-through, though, the handle of the ax snaps in half in a spray of splinters. So the next day you take it to the ax store down the block and get a new handle, fabricating a story for the guy behind the counter and explaining away the reddish dark stains as barbecue sauce.

Now, that next spring you find in your garage a creature that looks like a cross-bred badger and anaconda. A badgerconda. And so you grab your trusty ax and chop off one of the beast's heads, but in the process the blade of the ax strikes the concrete floor and shatters.

This means another trip to McMillan & Sons Ax Mart. As soon as you get home with your newly-headed ax, though, you meet the reanimated body of the guy you beheaded last year. He's also got a new head attached and it's wearing that unique expression of "you're the man who killed me last Spring" resentment that one so rarely encounters in everyday life.

You brandish your ax. He takes a long look at the weapon with his squishy, rotting eyes and in a gargly voice he screams, "that's the same ax that slayed me!"

Is he right?

1 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

The answer is no. Every time you replace a major component of the ax, it's a new ax made from parts of the old ax. Before the anacondger, the ax is 50% "the ax that killed [person]", so the statement "That's the ax that killed me!" would be 50% correct. After the anacondger, the ax no longer contains any fragment of the ax that beheaded the person, so it's not at all the same ax.

4/28/2006 07:50:00 PM  

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