"Walter Bright" <newshou...@digitalmars.com> wrote in message news:i5pa6s$316...@digitalmars.com... > Andrei Alexandrescu wrote: >> The scene was of the main character driving on a busy highway into a >> crowded metropolis. The meaning was to question the veracity and meaning >> of perception, existence, and human interaction - all of which are >> central themes in the movie. > > But if I showed you 15 minutes of me driving around on the freeway, you'd > think I was torturing you. > > It's like that unauthenticated Pollock painting. If it is authenticated, > it's a masterpiece. If not, it's just paint dribbled on canvas. The > painting is the same in either case.
Context does change things - sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for questionable reasons. Someone recently brought up the book Atlanta Nights ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Nights ). If I had come across that in a library a week ago, I likely would have thought "What a horrid book! Terrible waste of paper." But now that I know the story behind it (it was *deliberately* bad), I find it hilarious. Another example: Back when the "Jerry Maguire" movie came out sometime in the 90's, one song on its soundtrack started getting played everywhere: "I would walk 10,000 miles" or something like that. I *hated* that song. So irritating. A few years later I found out that song was originally released in the 80's (not the 90's), made it big in Europe, but got ignored in the US until Jerry Maguire popularized it. But see, I'm a huge 80's nut. I swear, the very next time I heard the song, it didn't bother me anymore, and I actually started to like it. All that even though I knew perfectly well it was the exact same song I had hated and that the *only* thing that had changed was my knowledge of what decade it was made. It *is* an incredibly stupid phenomenon, no doubt. But it is a normal human thing, for better or worse.
