Hello Nick,
"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.
Venison makes really bad beef. And as long as you expect it to tates like
beef it will taste bad. Same goes for most anything, if you think it's something
it's not, you'll think it's a bad example of what it's not.
--
... <IXOYE><
