Happy Labor Day, crayon fans! As you (hopefully) relax on your day off, why not catch up on some reading? But given the nature of the holiday, comprehending what’s going on in part three of The Absolute Strangest Christmas Story Ever Told might be too much work. After all, how does one make sense of nonsense? That is arguably an existential question.
I think my favorite passage in this part is the bit with the library spiders. 🙂
By the way, for those of you who’ve taken an interest in paper crafts following last time’s Dalek piece and have some skill with 3D modeling programs, this Pepakura Designer program might be of interest. You’d want your models to be fairly simple, though.
You might also want to try your hand at making a simple optical illusion dragon. The reality doesn’t fool me at all (though it is a cool model), but the interesting thing is that when I filmed it with my digicam, the illusion totally works in the video. But then, I can’t see magic eye puzzles either. Note that while this page attempts to provide an explanation — not for this particular problem, but for Spy Kids 3D and 3D-type stuff in general — that the illusion works when viewed by the camera’s monocular lense seems to debunk it. It’s also worth noting that the illusion failed for me even when I wore my glasses. Strange!
But not as strange as today’s fictional installment. 🙂
Okay, further investigation has led me to conclude that the illusion is actually facilitated by monocular vision, as the capacity to percieve the depth of the head cavity ruins the image. With one eye closed — whether I’m wearing my glasses or not — the dragons appear to eye me eerily. However, it doesn’t work at first if I’m looking directly at them when I close the eye — it’s like the image has to refresh or something for the illusion to take hold. Again, strange! 🙂