Inanities with Elon

I dreamed that I was for some reason spending the day with Elon Musk. We stopped by a field where ridiculously low-tech “rockets” were being tested, and my impression was that all of his employees were weird, grossly incompetent, and just not very smart. Elon went to elaborate lengths to play not-very-funny practical jokes, often involving the cooperation of dozens of his employees, and I wondered how they ever got anything accomplished. When Elon wondered aloud why his crew hadn’t yet reached the level of NASA in its heyday, I tactfully declined to comment.

In my conversation with Elon, we both pretended to be acquainted with former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, even though Elon got his name wrong and referred to him as Doug Christie or something like that until I corrected him. We both held forth at some length about Mr. Christie's character and told unflattering (and completely made-up) anecdotes about him. I characterized him as a blowhard, while Elon criticized his habit of trying to seduce every woman he met with an extremely stupid pickup line which I unfortunately no longer remember. I think we both knew we were both talking complete bullshit, but I just accepted that this was the way small talk was done in Elon's circle.

Later I was with Elon and about 40 of his goofy employees on some form of transportation, perhaps a bus or a boat. As soon as everyone had taken a seat, each person was given a photocopied worksheet in a plastic sheet protector. In order that the transportation time not be wasted, everyone was to spend the journey completing the worksheet as a way of keeping the old cognitive apparatus limber. Elon had to do one, too, to show that he was just one of the lads, nor was I as a guest exempt.

Some of the exercises on the worksheet were so extremely easy that I did a double take. I remember one of these was just the word rectangle with a couple of the letters omitted, and you had to fill in the blanks to complete the word.

Pointing to the rectangle exercise, I said, "Uh, Elon, what exactly is the point of this?"

He answered with a single word of Chinese: 循例. This is not actually part of my productive vocabulary, but I can understand it in context. Without context, I had to look it up after the dream. It means something like following rules or conventions, sometimes with the connotation of a meaningless perfunctory performance. As he said the second syllable, I had a mental image of the homophonous character 力, which means force or power. 循力 isn't normal Chinese, but it might be understood to mean "following power," with the same syntactic ambiguity as in English. I had the idea in the dream that he might actually have meant 流力, which is not pronounced the same and is also not standard Chinese, but which I understood to mean the "power" of acting quickly and automatically, without engaging conscious thought. In other words, the value of this sort of exercise was just that it was extremely easy and could thus be done quickly without thinking.

(Side note: According to my post-dream research, Elon Musk does in fact speak fluent Chinese. I hadn't known that before.)

Some of the other exercises were newspaper comic strips (mostly Calvin and Hobbes, I think) with some of the speech balloons blanked out, and you had to fill in appropriate things for the characters to say in the context given. Some of these were badly photocopied so that the top part of the strip was cut off by the edge of the page. I found these perplexing and didn't know what to write.

Others were complete one-panel comics that didn't make any sense. You were supposed to read them and try to "get" them, and if you couldn't, you could look down at a footnote that explained the joke. One of these showed a man walking through the woods with a smartphone, being confronted by an angry anthropomorphic deer. The deer said, "Hey, who said you could use my Wi-Fi?" to which the man replied, "Why don't you read your own sign?*" If you looked down at the asterisk at the bottom of the page, it said: "No hu-nt-in-g witho-u-t [i.e., you have] a pass" -- printed just like that, with the boldface, italics, and brackets as I have reproduced them. The joke -- and it's a real knee-slapper! -- was that the deer had put up a sign (not pictured in the comic) that said "No hunting without a pass," but in the man's clever interpretation, the string ntin meant "Net in" and referred to getting "in" to the Internet, while the letter u in the word without implied that "without a pass" actually meant "you have a pass." Thus the deer had unwittingly put up a sign that meant "You have permission to use my Wi-Fi to access the Internet." Haha, hoist on his own petard!

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My first thought upon waking was that this dream had made me stupider.

My second thought was that it symbolized some of the pitfalls of religion: talking confidently about Christ when you've never actually met him; doing easy mindless things and calling it "the power of obedience"; looking at fragments of text in isolation and extracting meanings completely unrelated to anything the author intended.

Let him who is without any of these sins cast the first stone.