My Grown-Up Counting Book (1-10)

Inspired by Anno

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

My grown up counting book numbers one through ten inspired by Anno's children's book. Number one, the famous or infamous one percenters, the engine drivers of Howard Zinn's military industrial complex. Most note most don't give a fit figgy pudding for the poor, the hungry, and the downtrodden, or perceived government interference in their affairs. They live in a variety of tax shelters all over the world, subscribing to the Scrooge ideology thus. Are there no prisons and the Union workhouses? Are they still in operation? two countries that are divided against themselves. Ireland comes immediately to mind. Scotland too, both countries have had centuries of practice. Then there are a host of wannabes drawn all over the Middle East, should have Matthew chapter ten, verse thirty six tattooed on their flags in large print. three Once upon a very good time there were only three musketeers. That was the world order of things, as ordained by Alexandre Dumas, the greatest French storyteller of all times. Not even Victor Hugo could hold a candle to him. Then Wemo Along came a Gascon, upstart with a highly pretentious name D'Artagnan, and the grand order of things, everything in threes, changed forever. No longer could three young idealistic boys get together for a pickup street game of the three musketeers. Alas. Number four. As in four square, a children's game designed to teach you to free yourself from boxes of your own making. Most adults unfortunately get stuck in one or more of the four squares, consigning these same adults to live their lives as adults in you guessed it, boxes of their own making, sometimes called thinking inside the box, and oftentimes reaches epidemic proportions. five, magically the Queen of Hearts has been and becoming five. How did that happen? As Dee Dee once said in another world, was I asleep while the others suffered? Perhaps I missed a meeting. Oh well. If five is anything like four of the world and Jack Frost had better look out. Number six. The six blind men and the elephant, the greatest philosophy story ever written, defying the analytic philosophers and all the other schools of thought that would shrink the world of ideas to one blindness that no one can understand. Blind men that can actually see is the key paradox to understanding all paradoxes. Eat your heart out, mister Young. seven magnificent, especially in Westerns and folklore and mythology. Can be borderline biblical too as in the seven days of Genesis or the Seven Seals of Revelation. The six fingered man and the Princess Bride, a master torturer by trade, secretly wished to have seven fingers, or so it was foretold by the dread pirate Roberts. Oh maybe the villain of all villains, Captain Barboso. I suppose we'll never know, so I'll push on to the next number. Number eight, not a standalone number, but it connects in a snapping finger way to five, six, seven, eight. To be intoned with rhythm, I learned that from Little Buddha and Emily the Dancer, who know about these mystical things. Apparently in dance parlance there are no numbers before the number six. I imagine they were banished to a Greek island for the rest of their numeric lives, having outlived their binary usefulness or numbers to that effect. Number nine, the Beatles, number nine from the White Album. In the drug induced era that passed for the seventies, you could play it on continuous feed when you were bored with Pink Floyd, and the listeners, usually supine, would actually think there was a song playing somewhere in their heads. Number nine, number nine, number nine. Number ten. The number of letters permissible in the Scrabble Meister's vastly improved version of Scrabble. No winners, no counting points. Onerous, very onerous indeed. As Jean Birdie once opined in another time and place, for those who like that sort of thing, winning, counting, that's the sort of thing they like. Try it sometime. It will free your game playing soul.