03 May 2012
“What I tell you three times is true.”
My partner, Dave, just received the most amazing email from a brilliant and delightful friend of ours (emphasis added):
You were in a dream I had last night, and I thought it might amuse you.
You had a couple tables set up in the foyer of a (nonexistent) restaurant specializing in dumplings molded into cube shapes and sold in powers of two, and you were handing out atheist literature and cookies to people waiting to get tables. The cookies were chocolate chip, except the dough had a sort of smoky cherry taste - like a cherry brandy, not like a cherry jolly rancher - and was purple.
There was a sign announcing you would talk to anyone about anything they wanted to talk about, and you were telling someone that they should solve their problem by trying three times to fix it - any way they wanted, as long as all three attempts were different - and then pick which of their attempts came closest to the desired result and ask an expert how to improve on that. They should keep doing this until they ran out of experts, at which point they themselves were the expert.
"That's how I learned to communicate with sea lions!" you said. At which point I suddenly noticed the sea lion in a powered exoskeleton and little square glasses hanging out under one of your tables, happily reading one of the atheist books.
I thought it was amusing. Even though I don't like chocolate chip cookies. :)
I just had to share (with permission, of course), because that's actually pretty great (and very Dave-ish) problem-solving advice!
(The cookies are nice, too. Seeing as how life imitates dreams, Dave got inspired and had to make a batch of smoky cherry chocolate chip cookies for us tonight.)