Paradoxically Speaking
Survival handbooks make a great read if you want to discover some arcane trivia about the woods. In them you can discover, for instance, that cattails are considered the supermarket of the bush as every part of them is edible and/or useful in some way. You'll also likely find out great information about wildlife and other dangers you might run into, like lightning storms. Being in the bush during a heavy storm is not the thing to do if you can avoid it, and a survival manual will likely tell you to get to some form of low clearing like a beaver meadow away from the tall trees, but yet close enough to them that they are the tallest thing around. It will also likely tell you to head for the lowest place you can find in that low clearing and then make yourself as low as possible, by assuming the "child pose" from yoga that places your head and heart as close to the ground as possible leaving your bum as the highest part of you. Presumably your bum has some anti-lightning properties, but the manual I was reading didn't get into that. It also didn't mention how this is going to look from Mount Olympus. Picture Zeus up there with an armload of lightning bolts to hurl to Earth and what does he see but you in a clearing apparently mooning him. But like I say, the manual didn't get into that. What it did get into was how to fish without any equipment. There are various fibres you can use as fishing line, chief amongst them the insanely useful cattail. For a fishing hook the manual suggested a fish bone. And for bait? Fish guts, of course. Now here's the thing. The point of this exercise is to catch yourself a fish, but in order to do so you require a fish. Isn't there some kind of flaw in the logic here?
But this isn't an insurmountable logic problem, as you could conceivably be versed in hillbilly handfishing and are quite capable of getting that initial fish. What is more of a problem to my mind is the fact that a lot of programming languages are paradoxically written in themselves . I never could figure this out.
But the thing that keeps me up most nights are ümlauts. There is no way to spell Ümlaut without ümlauts. There is no way to pronounce Ümlaut without ümlauts. So how did they ever invent them? I can picture how it must have happened, at the medieval think tank where they invented spelling and punctuation a thousand or so years ago:
Hans: Hey Franz, I am going to invent a new punctuation thing to modify the sound of vowels. It will be great.
Franz: What do you call it?
Hans : There is currently no way to pronounce its name.
Franz: Then spell it out for me.
Hans: There is also no way to spell it.
Franz: Well then what sound will it make?
Hans: There is no way to tell in advance, until it is completely invented.
At which point a being from the future pops into existence, tells them it's called an Ümlaut and that it makes a kind of softer vowel sound and then disappears, leaving two little dots on the desk. That's the only way it could have happened.