Tuesday, May 6, 2008

six-word short story

I never really loved Hemingway's famous 6-word short story (For sale: baby shoes, never worn) but I do love this... from a collection of shorts comissioned by Wired Magazine. The rest are... well.. kind of a downer.

Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time
- Alan Moore

3 comments:

M M M said...

So I happened upon this blog earlier, via your picture of Buster Keaton. I have, by this point, read nearly all of your entries for 2008 (slow day at work).

I comment on this one because, aside from liking both stories immensely, the time machine story reminds me of something. Looking back through a notebook one day I saw a note in the margins that I had written and long since forgotten about. It said, "If you tried to construct an everyday device, let's say a blender, and inadvertantly invented a time machine instead, would you consider the effort a failure?"

Although my favorite rediscovered note is the inexplicable: "Dirt on Mars tastes like cinnamon."

Meghan Ritchie said...

Stephanie and I were happy to get this comment and to know that someone spent their slow day at work reading our blog. Thanks!

I think if you accidentally invented a time machine, you wouldn't consider yourself a failure. But if you accidentally sent yourself back (or forward) in time with that machine, and then weren't able to get back to your own time to profit from - or even be recognized for - the machine you'd just invented, you might feel like a failure, or at least very small and powerless.

Stephanie said...

i think you wouldn't be a failure if you used your time machine to travel to the future where you could steal a blender and bring it back to the present.

and yes, thank you for reading our blog!