He Sees the Fnords

The human brain is a fucking mystery, and nowhere is this more apparent than when observing children. How can Son take such fantastic shortcuts along a chain of deductive reasoning, such dizzying leaps of logic, yet still not remember to don't put things in your mouth goddamit I've told you a thousand times!

Last night, I surfed over to the excellent BoingBoing, where all my best plagiarism comes from. The first item on the site was something about Bob Shea, the second banana of the Illuminatus! meme. To compliment the article, there was a cover-shot of the actual trilogy, thus:


Not being all that interested in more Fnord-related Church-of-the-SubGenius, Malaclypse-The-Younger absurdity, I quickly scrolled down to see what other meaty nuggets might be available in today's BoingBoing stew, so this image was on-screen for maybe one second.

Son jumped off my lap and pointed excitedly at the bookshelf next to my desk. "Daddy! Daddy! It's right there!". I didn't immediately realize what he was talking about, so he grabbed the mouse and scrolled back up to the picture on the website.

Of course, he had instantly located my copy of the Illuminatus! trilogy, the spine of which is decorated with a similar dolphins-leaping-over-eye-of-providence image. So, in less than a second, he saw a picture on the screen, realized he'd seen that image somewhere before, and located the exact book, among a wall full of books, displaying that picture.

Now maybe it's just the proud parent talking, but holy shit, my kid's some kind of genius!

Later on, while getting ready for bed, I had to remind him for the zillionth time not to eat whatever it was he had just excavated from his nostril.

So instead, he wiped it on my shirt.

A fucking genius, I'm telling you.