emmanuelg

20 March 2022

 

The Definitive Universal Fountain Of Unusual Smartness

 

Sometimes, you only begin to understand what you were doing after it is all done.  

It is tempting, afterwards, to claim you planned it that way from the beginning...

 

A year ago, the manager of the store where I work found a better job, and decided to take it.  I used to give her gag gifts from time to time.  What better time for a gag gift than on the occasion of leaving?

 

I went to the garage and found a scrap of plywood that I had used for test-drilling holes, and as a backstop for cutting things with an exacto knife.  It was not quite rectangular.  In short, an ugly piece of scrap about 6 x 8 inches.

 

On its best side, I drew a circle with an ink pen, divided it into 12 segments with a ruler, marked the segments on the edge with the numbers 1 through 12, and wrote in pen (in lines that were almost straight)

 

Definitive Universal Fountain

Of Unusual Smartness

 

I drilled a hole through the center of an old popsicle stick, drew an arrow on it with a pen, and attached it to the middle of the circle with a screw and a washer.  It took me about an hour, but I had made a wooden spinner like the ones you sometimes see in board games, except mine didn’t spin that well.  And it was homely.

 

 

Then, I made the directions:

“The Definitive Universal Fountain Of Unusual Smartness (D.U.F.O.U.S.)  will give you answers to the most difficult questions you will face in your new job.  Ask the Dufous a question, then flick one end of the spinner.  The arrow will point to a number.  

 

Remove the Dufous Update Management Bulletin (D.U.M.B.) from the back of the Dufous.  It contains 12 answers, previously gathered from the Wisdom of the Universe.  The number indicates your answer.” 

 

 

 

My boss tried it first.  “Should we keep wearing masks at the workplace?”

The DUFOUS said, “You already know the answer.”

My boss looked up at me quizzically.

“Scary, isn’t it?” I said.

But I thought to myself, “It’s obviously a gag gift.  Why does it seem to work?”

 

My co-worker took the DUFOUS with her, and I thought no more about it for a while.  I heard that she kept it on her desk at the new workplace.  Several months later, oddly, she came back to work at our shop.  The new workplace didn’t work out, so she came back.  

 

She would never say whether she tried out the DUFOUS.  A couple of weeks later, she brought it into my area of the shop.  “Here’s the DUFOUS,” she said, “Maybe you and the girls here can have some fun with it.”  

 

The rules specify that the 12 DUFOUS answers have to be re-generated every three-and-a-half months.  “Without thinking about it, write down the first 12 random answers that come to mind.”  I did about half of them, and got the girls at work to contribute the other half. 

 

The girls tried a couple of questions on their break.  Again, the DUFOUS seemed to be giving good answers.  What was going on?  And for that matter, why did I take the time and trouble to make the DUFOUS in the first place?

 

I have been learning about various divination methods for a number of years.  No one has a good explanation for how they work, but they do work, often astonishingly well.  I had wondered at times though, ‘Where is the control group?’

 

One way to see if a new drug actually works is to divide a group of test volunteers into two sections.  One section gets the real drug, and the other section gets a placebo.  If the test volunteers do not know which drug they got, and if the actual drug lowers blood pressure better than the placebo (for instance), then you know the drug actually works.  

 

But how could we do a control group with divination?  Today I realized that the DUFOUS is an attempt at making a placebo divination method.  The DUFOUS was never meant to be a divinatory method.  From the beginning, it was only meant to be a gag gift, and no one saw it as anything other than a joke– until they tried it, and it kept giving good answers.  But why is it giving good answers?  Could it be that it is not possible to make a divination system that does not work?

 

“I’ll ask the DUFOUS,” I said to myself this morning.  

“DUFOUS, is it possible for me to make a non-working Divination system?”

 

I spun the spinner.  The arrow stopped just at the edge of “4,” almost in “5" but not quite.  

I unfolded the paper to read #4.  

It said, “The Simpsons on Netflix.”

#5 said, “Maybe.”

 

 

“Well, that didn’t work,” I said to myself.  “Maybe the answer is ‘Maybe–‘ or maybe not...”

 

Then, it hit me.  The internet is full of postings about episodes of ‘The Simpsons’ predicting one or another of world events.  Of course, the difficult part would be to recognize the future event and its significance while watching ‘The Simpsons,’ in advance of the event!  

 

The writers of ‘The Simpsons’ did not intend for it to be a divination tool, and yet people have identified synchronicities between  episodes of ‘The Simpsons’ and major events in real life.  ‘The Simpsons’ is a parody of modern life.

 

In a way, the DUFOUS was meant to be a parody of a divination system– And yet it works anyway.  

 

If this is a rabbit hole, then the rabbit hole goes deeper than I thought at first.  A ‘dufus’ is someone who has little knowledge or experience.  It is an amusing name, used mostly in fun among friends, but with the potential for cruelty.   “DUFOUS” (or DUFOOS) is a dufus way to spell ‘Dufus.’  No one would really ask advice from a ‘dufus’ about anything.  Yet the divination system is designed to make a person ‘ask the DUFOUS.’

 

The name ‘DUFOUS’ is almost French; “Du” is a French contraction of “de le,” roughly meaning “of the.”   In French, a “fou” is a madman, or an enthusiast, as in “Je suis fou de hockey (I am mad for hockey).”  So, “du fou” would translate as “of the enthusiast/madman.”  

“Du fous,” on the other hand, does not mean ‘of the enthusiasts.’  That would be ‘des fous.’   However, the phrase “Nous sommes du fous sportifs,” means “We are sports freaks.”   If you shoe-horn it right, ‘Du Fous’ would mean “of the freakishly enthusiastic.”  Would you ask a question of a person who was freakishly enthusiastic.  Hmmm,... Yes, you might, and it might be a very good answer if it is something they care deeply about.

 

So MY question is answered – again it works– to say that synchronicities abound in a thoroughly interconnected universe such as ours.  You just have to have eyes to see them, as do some of the folks who watch ‘The Simpsons.’  

Thinking back on it, I created a divinatory device in a way that was much like a magical working.  The rules for using it are laid out in a magical fashion.  If someone participates in this magical system by agreeing to ask the DUFOUS a question, it will surprise no one who has experience with divinatory methods that a good answer comes out.   Without meaning to, I have created a functional divination system.  Yes, it works.

 

 

The spinner landed at the edge of #5 (Maybe), yet it did not point to ‘Maybe.’  My initial meditation on it was that it “Maybe not” landed on #5.  So in answer to the question, “Can I myself create a non-working Divination System?”  The answer is, “Maybe not.”

 

Indeed, I made a better effort at creating a non-working Divination System than I could have done, if I had consciously set out to do it.  As it turned out, the test conditions were so good that I myself was (in the language of statistical testing) a blind participant in the very test that I was creating!  I could not have come up with a way to do this on purpose.

 

It gives me a glimpse into how divinations work:  

If I understand this rightly, you set up a divinatory system–maybe it could be anything.

You ask the question.

You get an answer.

You meditate on the answer–And perhaps it helps you think outside the box, consider a third alternative, ponder an answer that you could not find before.