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Aug 31, 2009 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column
One of the chores that I most enjoy in this phase of my life is putting my children to sleep. Initially, my wife and I alternated nights – one night Zubin, the other Jasmine. Increasingly, and because of our mutual love for cricket, Zubin has to put up with me and I have to answer questions about who is my favourite cricketer, whether Sobers was the best of all time, and who is the better bowler, Jeff Thompson or Mitchell Johnson?
I always refer him to the statistics. He has a love for mathematics and now knows what would be considered trivia- Joel Garner’s bowling average, why Malcolm Marshall was the best, what Deryck Murray achieved as a schoolboy cricketer and which West Indian has the most wickets in a Test Match.
He can tell you about the strange case where someone’s middle stump was knocked out of the ground and could not be given out because the bails remained intact. It was a hot day, the varnish had melted and the bails were glued together.
Zubin also knows that while statistics can tell you about performance, they cannot really give you the story of potential and talent. I also told him the old Mark Twain observation that statistics are like a lamp-post to a drunk. He uses it for support rather than for illumination.
In between the cricket, and if I remain awake long enough (having been known to fall asleep before Zubin) there are the jokes. Every one of my children has learnt that to be with me for any length of time means to be exposed to old jokes and puns. Marsha and George, my two oldest children, try extremely hard to ignore me. The two young ones are not as blasé or as good at pretending they are not amused. From the podium of age, I argue, any joke I make is a wisecrack.
A few nights ago we ended up with police-related puns. I adapted the one about the thief who broke into the drug store and stole all the hair and contraceptive products -police are looking for a bald-headed Roman Catholic- to the thief taking all the hair and deodorants – meaning that the thief was bald and had bad body odour. Created quite a stink too. Zubin then told me about the burglar who fell into a cement mixer. Now he’s a hardened criminal. I mentioned the pair of escapees from the jail – one 6 feet 9 inches and the other 4 feet 5 inches tall. The police are searching high and low for them.
In passing I reported the mysterious theft of the police station toilet. The police had nothing to go on. Then there is the George Carlin line, “If the police arrest a mime, do they tell him he has the right to remain silent?” I followed that up by asking him, “If you were a recruit in the police force and you found out that you had to arrest your own mother what would you do?”
However, Zubin has the capacity to fall asleep in the middle of a sentence and wisely did so before he could answer. The best answer to this is, “Send for backup!” I am sure he would have nodded wisely and answer, “Maybe call in the army as well.”
So I was not surprised when after hanging out after swimming with a group of older kids, he burst into the car and said excitedly, “Daddy, I have one for you that I bet you cannot answer.” “OK, what is it?” I asked, noticing that Jasmine too had that “Aha! We got him at last,” look.
“Daddy, what came first, the chicken or the egg?” The question took me back in time to when I, like my children, first discovered the power of the paradox. I can’t remember if it was the chicken and egg paradox which came first or the one George Orwell uses in “1984”.
Essentially, it is that to bring about the perfect revolution you have to educate the masses. However, to educate the masses you must have a perfect revolution. To deal with Zubin’s paradox, I answered, “If the egg you’re asking about is fried or boiled, then definitely the chicken came first.”
Then I explained about the age of that particular question and the fact that there is no real answer. However, if you believe in Genesis, the birds or chickens came first – “And God created the great sea-monsters, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kinds, and every winged fowl after its kind: and God saw that it was good.”
What I could not tell the children is the sad tale of the disappointed egg. A chicken and an egg were lying in bed. The chicken was leaning against the headboard smoking a cigarette, with a satisfied smile on its face. The egg, looking extremely upset, angrily grabbed the sheet, rolled over in disgust and said, “Well, I guess we finally answered THAT question.”
A very simple-seeming paradox which has not really been solved satisfactorily is the “Unexpected Hanging” paradox. There are many versions using scenarios like examinations or fire drills, but this is the original. “A prisoner is told that he will be hanged on some day between Monday and Friday, but that he will not know on which day the hanging will occur before it happens. He cannot be hanged on Friday, because if he were still alive on Thursday, he would know that the hanging will occur on Friday, but he has been told he will not know the day of his hanging in advance.
“He cannot be hanged Thursday for the same reason, and the same argument shows that he cannot be hanged on any other day. Nevertheless, the executioner unexpectedly arrives on some day other than Friday, surprising the prisoner.”
This is essentially the dilemma of young female South African athlete Caster Semenya. The paradox here is “When is a woman not a woman?” She beat the rest of the runners so badly in her event that one can only conclude that it is not just a matter of gender, it is a matter of race.
*Tony Deyal was last seen talking about the boy who, although badly hurt, survived a car crash in which his father was killed. The surgeon seeing the boy on the operating table said, “I can’t do this. He is my son.” (The answer will be in next week’s column).
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