We Don't Have a Babel Fish
"The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the universe." In Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it's an animal that functions as a universal translator. If you stick it in your ear, you can understand not only any foreign language, but any alien language as well.[br /]
Here is our problem: we don't have a babel fish.[br /]
We need to communicate with our voters. In their own language. When we communicate with our voters -- whether by mail, or by telephone, or by a knock at the door -- we have to do it in their language.[br /]
Most of our voters speak English. A number of them speak Spanish. We have to know which are which.[br /]
So, starting with the Democrats, we are contacting the voters in our district, and finding out what language they speak.[br /]
That costs money. Specifically, $5000.[br /]
There may be any number of reasons why you want to see us win in November. But whatever the reason, you want to see us win in November. This is one step, and it's an important one.[br /]
So please help. Please contribute to our Babel Fish Fund. Or, if you prefer, por favor contribuya a nuestro Fondo de Babel Fish. And in either case, thank you. [br /]
Courage,[br /]
Alan Grayson[br /]
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could evolve purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:[br /]
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing".[br /]
"But," says man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It proves you exist and so therefore you don't. QED."[br /]
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. [br /]
"Oh, that was easy," says man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white, and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.[br /]
Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978).
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“Man has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much...the wheel, New York, wars and so on...while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man...for precisely the same reason.”
