[ExI] "this year the Three Wise Men are comming on a Morotcycle,

spike spike66 at comcast.net
Fri Jul 13 23:43:10 UTC 2007



> -----Original Message-----
> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-
> bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of BillK
...
> Hey! That's weird!.
> Google gives 629 hits for morotcycle.
> And they all seem to be mis-spellings.
> 
> Is this an in-joke?
> Or is it a common brain quirk to scramble the letters like this?
> 
> BillK
> (Thrumming on his rotomcycle)

Ja, I have been known to thrum a morotcycle on occasion.

Regarding morotcycles, here's an interesting experiment in scrambled letters
that went around the internet some time ago.  The website author wanted to
see if this effect works in other languages.  Please, would the multilingual
among us comment?

http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/

I was surprised to be able to read the scrambled text almost as quickly as I
did the straight version.  At the time I attributed it to my love of
crossword puzzles.  But today I asked a noncruciverbalist to read the text.
She was perfectly adept too.

Regarding the three wise men in the title, perhaps this is a reference to
the nativity of whats-his-name, the church guy from Nazareth.  If one
examines the account in Matthew chapter 1, it nowhere actually specifies
that there were three of them, only that their gifts were gold, frankincense
and that mysterious and suspicious sounding gift, myrrh.

Furthermore the original Greek version does not actually specify that they
were all men, or even that they were necessarily wise.  Reasonable
assumptions were made however, and it has come down in the English
translations as wise men.  

Freely I will admit, it does irreparable violence to the poems and songs if
one hits control H and universally replaces "three wise men" with the phrase
"unknown quantities of apparently humanoid lifeforms with indeterminate
levels of intelligence."

spike











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