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But Pineapples Don't Have Sleeves!
Sep. 22nd, 2012 10:33 amRushthatspeaks posted today about one of my favourite authors, Daniel Pinkwater, and in checking the internet for Mr. Pinkwater's latest doings I came across this odd news story from April, in which a standardized-testing company used an (altered) version of one of his short stories and utterly confused everyone who took the test. The story came originally from a collection of parody fables and had involved a race between a hare and an eggplant, which was changed to a pineapple for the test, along with an alteration to the story's moral. Either way, it must have been rather like including a Zen koan in a reading-comprehension exam.
Funnily, both versions of the story remind me of nothing so much as a scene in Frederic Brown's Dead Ringer which I also read this week; it's a scene that is not directly connected to the plot (murder's in a mid-century traveling carnival), but perhaps serves to illustrate character. Several carnies are playing cards in a trailer, and one challenges another, the show's magician, to a single hand of poker, for high stakes, with the magician dealing. They stare each other down for a while, and at last the magician, convinced the other guy must have some sort of angle or he wouldn't risk two hundred dollars trying to beat him at his own game, folds. His opponent collects the ante, which was what he was playing for all along (that and the pleasure of out-bluffing the magician). Everyone else is astonished that he'd risked two hundred to win six dollars, but he'd known exactly how to play the guy.
Funnily, both versions of the story remind me of nothing so much as a scene in Frederic Brown's Dead Ringer which I also read this week; it's a scene that is not directly connected to the plot (murder's in a mid-century traveling carnival), but perhaps serves to illustrate character. Several carnies are playing cards in a trailer, and one challenges another, the show's magician, to a single hand of poker, for high stakes, with the magician dealing. They stare each other down for a while, and at last the magician, convinced the other guy must have some sort of angle or he wouldn't risk two hundred dollars trying to beat him at his own game, folds. His opponent collects the ante, which was what he was playing for all along (that and the pleasure of out-bluffing the magician). Everyone else is astonished that he'd risked two hundred to win six dollars, but he'd known exactly how to play the guy.
