TheBanyanTree: The Theory of Lost Things

[Peter Macinnis]

Has anyone else noticed that it always seems to be that when  you finally
admit publically that you've lost/can't do something, whatever it is turns
up and you needn't have looked such a twit in the first place!  "Have you
seen my . . . never mind!" ius a common cry in our house, and I got to
wondering about this.

If you, too, have ever wondered about this effect, let me assure you that
it is by no means new, and was familiar, some 20,000 years ago in the area
of Les Eyzies in France, where the Lascaux Cave paintings reveal an early
recounting of this notion. The painter was about to add a caption that
would have made the theory of lost things clear, but he ran outside and was
trampled by a passing mammoth which was whistling an early version of "J'ai
perdu le doh de ma claret", which made the painter's family see red.

The theory surfaced again just as the Dark Ages had finally turned the
Visigoths off bright clothing so they had become the Invisigoths, but they
were thus of a gloomy disposition and what they had usually lost was the
axe they desperately needed to defend themselves, so their last words,
roughly translated were generally along the lines of "Ah, here's the axe I
was grrrkhhhh . . ."  It is sad that there are no more Invisigoths, but it
was mainly because so many of them found they had a hard axe to follow.

King Richard III also had the same problem, and when he bellowed "A horse,
a horse, my kingdom for a horse!", he was immediately trampled to death by
a herd of willing horses, two social climbing donkeys, three
hard-of-hearing mules and an equal-opportunity zebra.  Two things passed
through his mind in quick succession: the theory of lost things and a
Clydesdale hoof.  Shakespeare suppressed this incident when he wrote the
play as he found that people kept nicking the horse suits so they could
masquerade as Sydney baggage-handlers.

Beethoven worked the same theory out when people threw small coins every
time he played "Rage Over a Lost Penny", but he lost his hearing and nobody
could find that.  On a family-values list, I cannot reveal Arthur
Sullivan's discoveries after he wrote the Lost Chord. Get a CD of
Sullivan's savoy Overtures and play the music sideways to find out what it
was.  Sullivan's work did, however, contribute to Lost String theory and
shed some interesting light on the missing dark matter, but it never went
anywhere.

That blasted poet who kept shooting his arrows in the air has some
explaining to do, because he really DID know where they landed, but that
matter was closed on the orders of higher authority. I note only that he
used a grassy knoll for the purpose.

Finally, the theory of lost things was unearthed by Hairy Padraig, an
itinerant Irish intermittently partially unclad philosopher of the late
19th century. Known from his hirsute pelt as Fur-mat, he was clothed on the
occasion that this notion struck him. Wiping the blood off, he wrote the
details down on his slightly grubby cuff, then ordered a pint of Guinness
to celebrate, but a wandering zebra (it was looking for King Richard III)
lashed out with its tail and spilt the drink.  Some say Padraig the Fur-mat
put his head down and cried, but his friends maintained later that he was
no fool, and he was just lapping up the Guinness. Either way, he
accidentally washed away the notes, leaving us with the legend of Fur-mat's
lost theorem.

Given the evil fate that has befallen previous codifications of the notion,
I hope that I have not doomed this list by discussing the theory of lost
things here.

cheers


  _--|\    Peter Macinnis        petermacinnis at ozemail.com.au
 /     \   Chair of Remote Linguini Sensing and Interior Demography,
 \.--._*   Coach, Australian Non-invasive Taxonomy Olympic Squad.
      v    http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/index.htm