Johnny Apple Changer, the character who finds this map, laments the fact that it is made with ASCII characters (asterisks and underscores):
Johnny rejoiced. He felt a little sad that Boster the Basket had made the map with ASCII as that made it a little hard to understand, but he felt very happy about it all.
The asterisk is ASCII character number 42. In "October 3 and 4, and white crows" I quoted part of the author bio in the novel White Crows, my interest being the fact that the author had won an Edgar Allan Poe award. I didn't quote the full sentence -- the first sentence in the book -- but it also includes the number 42:
T. J. MacGregor is the author of 42 novels and in 2003 won the Edgar Allan Poe award for Out of Sight.
Maolsheachlann's latest post, "That's How the Digestive Disintegrates" (June 19), mentions his coining the title phrase as "a humorous substitute for 'that's how the cookie crumbles'." This of course prompted me to try to come up with my own humorous substitute, but I failed. The best I could come up with was "That's how the Mandelbrot fractures" -- Mandelbrot being both a kind of cookie and the name of the most famous fractal ("the fat man in the complex plane") -- but I decided the pun was too roundabout to really land. Anyway, the thought led me to the Wikipedia article on the Mandelbrot set, where I discovered that the first published picture of the set was a piece of ASCII art composed of asterisks:
Since the whole point of the Mandelbrot set is its infinite complexity, this ASCII rendition is just as comically inadequate as the map to Boster the Nose.
3 comments:
42 is, of course, the answer to "the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Can that be considered intentional comical inadequacy?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy
that's how the cracker cracks?
Not bad, Laeth. We Americans don't consider crackers to be cookies, but we're clearly in the global minority.
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