Over a cup of coffee or two at 9.30am today, my team leader and I had a conversation about Hugh Laurie...
Hugh Laurie ... looking dangerous, because he is
It all started after I watched “Later with Jools Holland” last night and saw him, playing the piano with Jools. When I got into work I felt the need to discuss this with my boss (who also likes Boogie/swing/jazz piano). During this conversation I made the observation that Hugh Laurie, was an amazing comedic actor, a brilliant serious actor and that he seemed pretty bloody good at piano too (three observations I will vehemently stand by).
And then I casually posed the question that sparked it all off:
“Is there nothing he can’t do?”
… There was a few seconds silence as I pondered whether I had just asked a stupid question and whether or not that stupid, potentially illogical, question had included a double negative.
Clearly, my boss had been thinking the same thing, she turned and stated that she wasn’t really sure whether that counted as a double negative or not. We discussed this in vague terms for a minute or so before deciding that it was going to need some real thought… and so we decided to put some real thinking into it.
We established that:
“something” is the opposite of “nothing” because surely, “nothing” or “no thing” is the lack of “something” … as such:
nothing = not something
This, in itself, means that:
“nothing he can’t do” = “not something he can’t do”
However, if:
“nothing he can’t do” = “he can’t do nothing”
And:
“doing nothing” = “resting”
Then:
Hugh Laurie can’t rest
On the face of things, we had just established that Hugh Laurie had some kind of super-human ability to survive without rest…. However, there was a further problem; What if “resting” is something? It certainly seems like a something in its own right. We thought….
If:
“resting” = “something”
And if there’s:
“nothing he can’t do”
Then:
He can rest because there’s “nothing he can’t do”, but similarly he can’t rest because resting is doing nothing and we know that “he can’t do nothing”
There was consensus that this turns Hugh Laurie into a human paradox. After some discussion on the potential consequences of a human paradox, it was agreed that no one would be able to survive being a paradox, it would just be an impossibility and as such Hugh Laurie would simply cease to exist within reality.
However, what further effects would this have? Surely you cannot simply erase one person from reality as we know it without further, wider reaching side-effects … thus, reality unravels and logic crumbles out of existence, ending everything.
… THE END
