The Origin of Greek Tragic Drama Jokes

[dennis grace]

Mittelwerk riddles:

>you're at the checkout line at Price Chopper, express lane, 5 items or less,
>repeat, you must be checking out 5 items or less.
>
>now, if you have four different 'items,' yet one of these 'items' happens to
>be cat food, of which you are about to purchase 5 cans of said substance,
>
>what do you have?  4 items (with one item in a quantity of 5)?
>
>or,
>
>8 items, effectively disbarring you fom usage of the express lane?

Okay, you lost me.  From the subject line I expected one of those shaggy dog
stories that ends with the tailor-of-uncertain-Mediterranean-ethnicity
telling the apprentice, "'Ey, Euripides pants, Eumenides pants."  Instead we
get what looks like a story problem a la Matt Groening.  

Analytically (i.e., anally)--despite the subject line:  if you have five
cans of cat food and three other items, you have more than five items.  Most
checkers check each can separately, even if they're the same item iterated
any reasonable number of times.  Thus, the checker will have to check each
item separately.  Now, if your five iterated items had been produce, checked
by weight or number, I'd call them one effective item.  BTW, the reason I
said "more than five" rather than "8" is that the other three items could be
three apples being checked at a per pound price.

Curiously--come on, MW, drop the other shoe. You *do* have a punchline that
relates to the subject line, right? a tuna can that sleeps with its mother
and has a twisted foot? a tuna can getting its liver pecked out by a bird?
a tuna can with a smelly foot and a powerful bow? a tuna can who buries
herself alive? tuna cans who violate the protocol inspite of cries of
wrongdoing from one of the other three items?  one of the tuna cans kills
two of the others who were her unsuspecting sons? (It's Greek; it's tragic.
Somebody stop me when this gets funny.)

Socio-realistically--look at the folks stacking stuff on 5-item-or-less
conveyor belts; they obviously have a far broader definition of "5" than I
or any of my former math teachers, apparently assuming "5" is a sort of
universal plural symbol for any value taking less than two placeholders to
write (in any base up to at least hexagessimal--"Hey, you can't be in this
line!  You must have at least--what?--E or F items there!"  "Yeah, well, at
least it's still less than 10.").  

dgg 

_____________________________
Dennis Grace
University of Texas at Austin
English Department
Recovering Medievalist

"Oh God comma I abhor self-consciousness."  --JB