A few days a go a book I bought from someone in the USA on eBay arrived. It was nicely and neatly packaged in a padded envelope and had a home made, but professional looking, label on the front.

I'm glad the contents were enclosed. Maybe I'm missing something here but I thought that was the whole point of envelopes. Still, it's better than having an envelope that tells me the contents aren't enclosed, or even one that tells me that what ever is in it are not its contents. I'm baffled as to what he was trying to say.

Mind you I'm still puzzling over a piece of paper I picked up in the street some 30 years ago (and still have somewhere) that is totally blank apart from the words:

"Please destroy this blank page"

Apart from the paradoxical non-blankness of the page in question. (The words describing its blankess negate the very blankness they attempt to describe*) I still haven't worked out why anyone would go to the trouble of making a page, the sole purpose of which was to be destroyed.

Actually someone did come up with a perfectly logical and satisfactory answer to this question a few years ago, a feat which so annoyed me (because it destroyed the nice cosy corner of mystery I had wrapped around the idea) that I have forgotten both the explanation and who gave it to me.

When I was in LA there was someone putting up notices on power poles and fences that just said

"Ignore this Notice"

I never worked that one out either.




* I'm sure there is a dead posh philosphical or philological word to describe this but I'm buggered if I know what it is. I leave that sort of thing to people who know what 'philology' actually is and can spell it correctly without using a dictionary to look it up like I just had to.