Everything I need to know I leared in Kindergarden.

The rest I am working very hard at forgetting.

A skewed take:

"Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know."

Assumption that one knows what one doesn't need to know OR what one has been TOLD what one doesn't need to know. One needs to know EVERYTHING one can absorb.

"Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know."

ie: Enhance my ignorance, embellish my intolerance for things I have not yet been exposed to.

"Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about."

That last moment of life when as you lay there you realize you decided not to know EVERYTHING you could have known because of some bogus restriction on 'knowing' you had accepted.


Douglas Adams was an Iconoclast and thus should be read Iconoclastically....to do other wise is to protect yourself from knowing that he specialized in writing nonsense. But nonsense has it's good side...if you Know the knowing.

Incidentally, in the book, right after the philosopher teaches Dent that prayer, he also teaches him something to the effect of "make sure you remember this next part", which consists of something like (from memory) "please please please please please protect me from the consequences of the above prayer."

Hey, I knew that!

:hmm:

If you take cranberries and boil them like applesauce, they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.

Only if wrapped in Bacon...

And slathered, of course, in the Appropriate Ointment

From Mostly Harmless:

Hmmmm...did the man or the pole vanish? Or both? Did Adams credit the maker of the pole, especially since he was addressing the maker of the man?

[quote]On 2006-03-30 15:05, Jonathan Townsend wrote:
From Mostly Harmless:



Was that the prayer at work?

Ignorance is bliss, until you get stabbed in the eye!

Knowledge is Power.

From physics: Power = Work per unit Time or Work / Time.

Therefore, Knowledge = Work / Time.

Time is Money.

Therefore, Knowledge = Work / Money.

This shows that if work is held constant, then the less you know the more money you make! This explains upper management at a lot of companies! (This was going around schools when I was in college).


Actually, I agree with Doug Higley's post.

I've read on here that some magicians view it as a negative trait when some audience members quietly analyze tricks. Without analysis, the audience couldn't realize they were experiencing magic! And those who obsess on analyzing are in their own happy place. It's not a negative place. Leave them there as long as they remain quiet. (Besides, if we're good, they'll usually have no clue anyway).

There is, of course, a type who analyzes with bad intent. That's different.


Finally, these quotes seem sort of on topic. They all relate to knowledge. One is even by Scott Adams.

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep."
-- Scott Adams

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
-- Thomas Alva Edison

"The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."
-- Oscar Wilde

"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense."
-- Tom Clancy

"Imagination is more important than knowledge..."
-- Albert Einstein (He was just imagining this! )

Here's one for magicians who are considering writing a good script.

"It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech."
-- Mark Twain (Of course, a really good script often takes much longer).

"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure."
-- Mark Twain (The question is, was Mark Twain cynical enough? )

"The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause."
-- Mark Twain (So true).

"A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."
-- Mark Twain

"You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance."
-- Ray Bradbury

And finally, one for me!

"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations."
-- Sir Winston Churchill

Thanks for that insightful post Bill.