The wisdom and stories of D. Klencke

Albert had a trick that none of us could figure out. He would take from his pocket a string on the end of which was attached a little blue ball, about the size of a marble. Then he would take a glass of water, suspend the ball in about the middle, and shake the glass with a circular motion so the water would begin to spill over the top. Suddenly he would let the glass fall to the floor, and the water, to our amazement, would remain suspended about the ball in a cylindrical shape as though the glass were still there. It would continue to spill off the top and eventually its level would reach the ball, at which point the rest would fall to the floor. SPLASH!


And at the second bell he flew like a hornet from its burning nest, right smack into the gigantic jelly-bean which had accumulated during the night in the corner of his room.


I will always remember the time a friend told me about his encounter with P. Michael Young, an avid John Bircher who believed fully that communism is spreading rapidly to every facet of American life and has already penetrated our public schools where it is corrupting the minds of our most able students by filling them with nonsense. Take for instance physics, he said to my friend. They tell you that when a horse pulls on a cart, the cart pulls back on the horse with an equal but opposite force. This as everyone knows (he was telling my friend in case he didn’t know) is absurd. If it were true then the horse and cart wouldn’t move. So my friend tried to explain to him that there was no contradiction because the force due to the horse was acting on a different body than the force due to the cart, and one must distinguish between internal and external forces when applying Newton’s laws of motion. As I listened to my friend repeat his elaborate explanation (which of course only perplexed P. Michael Young all the more) I began to realize that I too was confused. When my friend finished his tale, it occurred to me that he was missing a very essential point. In reality, the horse and cart do not move.

Aphorisms

It is true that many trees are older than the people who chop them down, but this has nothng to do with the axes they use. You can't make it rain, and I can't make it rain. But when it does rain we can at least go out in it and get wet. When autumn roles around, the leaves do not change colors; they merely lose the stuff that makes them look green.
The hair on a camel will come off if you pull hard enough, but this does not mean the camel is bald. A huge rock is much heavier than a pebble. Just because most flowers are green doesn't mean you can wash your dirty clothes with Tide.
All whole numbers are interesting. (If this were not true, then the nonempty set of uninteresting whole numbers would have a least element, which is a contradiction. Has this something to do with Zorn's Lemon?) There is at least one absolute truth. (If there weren't any, then then "there are no absolute truths" would be an absolute truth.) People don't kill guns; guns kill people (and animals, and other things like that).

Almost every time my alarm-clock goes off, it happens when I am asleep. This, however, is not mere coincidence.


I once read somewhere a statement which, I suppose, was intended to be profound; it said you can’t clap unless you use two hands. In all my experiences at concerts and such, I have never seen anyone clap with fewer than two hands, so indeed there is statistical evidence to support that statement. If someone is clapping, that person is probably using two hands. But certainly I have no reason to believe he or she must be using two hands. In view of the nature of percussive things, it wouldn’t surprise me that a person clapping with one hand would sound different than a person clapping with two, but this does not mean he has to use two hands in order to clap.
D.T. Suzuki told a story about a young monk who confronted his Zen master with the question, "what is the Buddah?" The master replied, "the Buddah is in the hallway by the entrance." The young monk was surprised, but went to the hallway and then returned to his master, somewhat annoyed. "That is not the Buddah. It is just a large clay statue of the Buddah," he said. "Yes, that is true," replied the master. "But what is the Buddah?" asked the monk again. The master replied, "the Buddah is in the hallway by the entrance."

One fine morning when I was walking on a beach I discovered some large, slimy things. That evening, I went to an Indian restaurant and ate some palak.


A funny thing happened on my way to work the other morning. A man got on the bus with a pelican. The funny thing is I wasn't on the bus. Or the train, for that matter. I was driving to work.
A few moments ago I scratched my hair. As I was doing so, I noticed that little white flakey things were falling all around me. I suddenly realized I was losing part of my head.

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