Before you get into reading this article, take a moment to place yourself in an imaginary situation. Take a look around the room you're in, right now. Go ahead, I'll wait. Finished? Okay, so as you're reading this text you notice, out of the corner of your eye, that there is a small puzzle piece buried under all of the crap on your desk. Remember, you're imagining stuff right now, so play along. You weren't looking for the puzzle piece... it just so happened that your eyes stumbled upon it. Okay, so you study the piece very closely and you come to the conclusion there are probably many more like it in this very room. You call some of your friends and have them come over to help you look for them. They call some of their friends to come over as well. The fact that all of you are looking for these puzzle pieces stirs others, people whom you would have never met, to also come over to your house and help with the search. Meanwhile, a group of people who think the puzzle is just a part of Milton Bradley's Master Plan is, at this time anyway, endorsing the search, claiming it is something that Mr. Bradley and his cohorts don't mind you discovering. Anyway, you keep finding pieces of this puzzle. Over time you start finding pieces that oddly fit together, and slowly but surely you begin connecting the pieces to create one single unified picture.
Okay, so a long period of time has gone by, and you have finally assembled a giant puzzle of, oh, let's say 99,999 puzzle pieces. That's a lot of pieces, right? now that the puzzle is practically entirely assembled, just shy of one missing piece, you suddenly see a beautiful picture of a barn, a tree, a cornfield and a handful of cows. In your eyes it's a masterpiece, and you start showing it off to other people. Sure, it's missing one little block of the picture, but you can still look at the rest of the assembled picture and figure out that this is obviously a barn, right?
Milton Bradley employees are mad now. They don't want you to see the picture. They believe Milton Bradley painted the picture in 1999, even though the small copyrights on most of the puzzle pieces date back to, I dunno, let's say 1612. So what do they do? They start attacking you, critisizing you for even finding them in the first place, or insisting that the puzzle pieces, when collaborated, make the picture of the farm area. Everyone starts debating now, and Milton Bradley's spokespeople tell you that you're not allowed to teach students of the mystery of how this puzzle came to be. If you do, you won't be allowed to play Monopoly or use any other Milton Bradley products ever again, and nor will the people who are siding with you. They want you to believe Milton painted it himself. After all, someone wrote his biography in 1995, and the biography clearly states he painted it. Hell, it only took him six days to do it, to create this masterpiece with 100,000 pieces and unprecedented perfection, detail. And if you don't believe he painted it, if you believe in this "puzzle" nonsense, well then my friend, well, let's just say you won't be passing Go, collecting $200... or going to church. Make sense? Read it again and again until it does. Sometimes you need to do that in order to wrap your hands around the meaning of something. If that doesn't work, try having an intelligent person explain it to you in terms you can understand. I'm sorry that Milton Bradley didn't paint that puzzle, just like God didn't create every little being on the planet. maybe God created the first animals, and he made some of them furry and cute... I can give you that. See? You religious nuts still have something to praise and all that. And please, don't accuse me of herecy or any of that. I believe in a god, too. My god is just better than your god because my god believes in Evolution. He doesn't lie to me like your god. He's not all like "ooh, I'm god, ball of fi-ah, white lightnin'! I'm a hottie, I'm cool! Ooh! Pray to me biatch!" And you know what, getting off subject a little bit, your religion has badmouthed everyone else for so long I figured I could say that and get away with it. Okay. Phew. I'm done with this one.
-Matt Rock |
