The Principles of Theory: Brown Bag Lunch Seminar

The following is an excerpt of correspondence between Carlton Farthington and a colleague whose name has since been redacted by request. These notes formed the basis for Carlton Farthington's now notorious book The Principles of Theory: A Systematic Approach to Ideas.  

Since his "accident," Carlton Farthington has spoken entirely with the aid of a text-to-speech reader. These excerpts were recently delivered as "speeches" to Cape Fear Community College students at the Union Station auditorium.  Go Sea Devils!




Text:

In the next five weeks, I’m going to arrange a series of five brown-bag lunch seminars at which we will have various experts from the community to talk about the hazards of the workplace.  I’ve already lined up Officer Morales to give a speech about the myriad of dangers that beset both patrons and employees in a library environment.  I told him that your students at the Natural Science Museum might find especially useful and interesting a section on the perils that sharp Tyrannosaurus Rex teeth can present in the maintenance and day-to-day upkeep of these razor-sharp relics of prehistory!  Maybe you could enlist the help of some of your students to build huge, life-sized papier mâché dinosaurs—the point being to show the magnitude and power of these creatures as they were when they roamed the earth many years ago.  Perhaps a huge, life-sized brontosaurus (propelled by twenty or so students) could be tackled and devoured by several veloceraptors.  Or a hapless T-Rex could be thrice-impaled on the deadly crest of a powerful triceratops.  Realistic, dramatic scenes from history would only serve to underscore Morales’s speech.  These types of things are something that students can really get into and can instill a new respect for the tall, bony monsters of yore that tower over them daily. Finally, Officer Morales will explain how dinosaurs could actually exist today and that the great white shark is in fact an ancient cousin of the Tyrannosaurus that grew fins and set off to patrol the mighty deep with it’s “gory mouth a-gape” (“The Sea Gorgon” by Shelley).  This is where Morales starts running after me or you or the both of us yelling that he’s a great white shark.  This will only drive home the point of how in Australia one in twenty people in the water is a great white shark.  Maybe at this point, all the dinosaurs could run outside and tackle each other and the shark and this would be a good time to really get all those feelings of aggression out in the open.  And Officer Morales will give a short closing speech about how far we have progressed since the dinosaurs.  That our brains are actually smaller than the dinosaurs and the shark, but that their brains have large parts of it devoted to senseless and random hunger.  The torn up dinosaur costumes scattered around us will only serve to put this profound truth in high relief.  Anyway, let me know what you think.  Interesting?  I’m off my rocker?  All of the above?  Let me know if you have any students who would like to spearhead this.