June 21, 2005
You Will Marvel at the Presticogitation of Mentalo, Master Logician
by JeremyThis post is a link to a new blog, but first a few subjective references and impressions...
I was listening to the Classic Radio channel on my Sirius Satellite radio this morning and I was enjoying the fairly well written crime drama, "Night Beat." Today's episode told the story of an 'answer man' who toured the country astounding audiences with his knowledge of all subjects. His stage name was Mentalo. All you worldly readers will want to pronounce that as if it were an Italian name or a Marvel Comics Villain, namely with the emphasis on the second syllable. But they pronounced it like this: Mental-O, with the emphasis on the first syllable. The drama was somewhat diluted by my idiot internal monologuist infinitely repeating, "Barry Mentalo, Barry Mentalo, Barry Mentalo..." in my head.
The other thing here is that I've always thought it nifty that a person who does clever tricks that play on our shared desire to believe in magic can be referred to as a magician and a person who might purport to despise that sort of hocus pocus, preferring instead to play upon another shared human propensity to engage in the empirical mapping of the world as it really, truly is, can be called a logician. The fact that those are two similar words is just a lexical wink since if you think enough about it you'll realize that the two types I describe in this paragraph are exactly the same type of person except that one is celebrating the clarity, precision, and power of human thought as served by perception (logician) while the other (magician) is celebrating how easily and delightfully human cognition can be persuaded to take an evening off so that perception might have a couple of hours to itself to toss popcorn into its mouth and clap its hands like a little girl.
Anyway, this guy is a logician worth reading. He describes himself as a guy trying to make a career in Hollywood. I take the title of his blog both as an indication that he has a sense of humor about how he comes across to people and as fair warning to not let his seemingly unassailable logic actually convince you of anything. He's the type of writer who can make stuff compelling to read even if the rabbits, hats, saws, canes and handkerchieves of his subject matter might not normally grab you. Strangely, though, the site is not accessible as I write this. Does it really exist?
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