John Connolly - The Gates

[10]A deity, pronounced “day-it-tee” is a kind of god. There are good deities, and bad deities. Nurd was a bad deity, but in general none of them are to be trusted. The playwright William Shakespeare wrote, in King Lear, that “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.” Nasty lot, deities. Don’t say that you haven’t learned something new by reading this page.

[11]There was a demon for that feeling too: Ulp, the Demon of Things That Go Round for Slightly Too Long, with additional responsibility for the Smell of Cotton Candy When you’re Not Feeling Yourself, and the Lingering Odor of Small Children Being Unwell.

[12]It is a curious fact that small boys are more terrified of their babysitters than small girls are. In part, this is because small girls and babysitters, who are usually slightly larger girls, belong to the same species, and therefore understand each other. Small boys, on the other hand, do not understand girls, and therefore being looked after by one is a little like a hamster being looked after by a shark. If you are a small boy, it may be some consolation to you to know that even large boys do not understand girls, and girls, by and large, do not understand boys. This makes adult life very interesting.

[13]It is not possible to flush someone to China. Or Australia. Well, not unless they’re already there. It is not a good idea, though, to point this out to someone who is threatening to flush you to China or Australia, as there is a good chance that they will try it anyway just to prove you wrong.

[14]As you can see from his picture, Einstein didn’t take himself too seriously, at least not all of the time. In general, it’s a good idea to avoid people who take themselves too seriously. As individuals, we have only so much seriousness to go round, and people who take themselves very seriously don’t have enough seriousness left over to take other people seriously. Instead they tend to look down on them, and are secretly pleased when they get stuff wrong, because they just prove to the too-serious types that they were right not to take them seriously to begin with.

[15]In Alice Through the Looking Glass, the book by Lewis Carroll, the looking glass is, in effect, a wormhole. Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson, was a mathematician, and was aware of the theory of wormholes. He liked injecting puzzles into his math classes. One of his most famous goes as follows: A cup contains 50 spoonfuls of brandy, and another contains 50 spoonfuls of water. A spoonful of brandy is taken from the first cup and added to the second cup. Then a spoonful of that mixture is taken from the second cup and mixed into the first. Is there more or less brandy in the second cup than there is water in the first cup? If you’d like to know the answer-and, I warn you, it will make your head ache more than drinking all of the brandy would-it’s at the end of this chapter…

Okay, back to Lewis Carroll’s brandy and water problem. Mathematically speaking, the answer is that there will be just as much brandy in the water as there is water in the brandy, so both mixtures will be the same. But-and this is where your head may start to ache-when equal quantities of water and alcohol are mixed, the sum of them is more compact than their parts because the brandy penetrates the spaces between the water molecules, and the water penetrates the spaces between the brandy molecules, a bit like the way two matching pieces of a jigsaw puzzle fit together so that they occupy less space than if you just laid the same pieces side by side. In other words, the mixture becomes more concentrated, so if you add 50 spoonfuls of water and 50 spoonfuls of brandy, you actually end up with about 98 spoonfuls of the mixture in total. Adding a spoonful of brandy to 50 spoonfuls of water will give you less than 51 spoonfuls of the mixture, because, like we said earlier, it’s more concentrated. If you take a spoonful from that mixture, it will leave less than 50 spoonfuls in the cup. Then, if you add that spoonful from the concentrated mixture to the cup of brandy, it means that there’s more brandy in the brandy cup than there is more water in the water cup. I warned you…

[16]The artist Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome between 1508 and 1512. He had to use scaffolding to do it, but because the ceiling was so high he couldn’t build the scaffolding from the floor up, so instead he made a special flat wooden platform that hung from bolts beside the windows. Painting the ceiling was a very uncomfortable business, as you can probably imagine, but it’s a myth that Michelangelo had to lie flat on his back to do it. Instead he stood upright, with his head bent back, for four years. By the end of it, he was so sore that he wrote a poem about the experience:

I’VE grown a goiter by dwelling in this den-

As cats from stagnant streams in Lombardy,

Or in what other land they hap to be-

Which drives the belly close beneath the chin:

My beard turns up to heaven; my nape falls in

Fixed on my spine: my breastbone visibly

Grows like a harp: a rich embroidery

Bedews my face from brush drips, thick and thin…

And so it goes on for a few more verses, which can be summarized basically as “Owww…”

[17]The Divine Comedy is not funny, but it’s not supposed to be, despite its name. In Dante’s time, a comedy meant a work that reflected a belief in an ordered universe. Also, serious books were written in Latin, and Dante wrote in a new language: Italian. Some of Shakespeare’s comedies are funny, though, but not if you’re being forced to study them in school. In school, everything Shakespeare wrote starts to seem like a tragedy, even the ones that aren’t tragedies, which is a bit unfortunate, but that’s just because of the way they’re taught. Stick with them. In later life, people will be impressed that you can quote Shakespeare, and you will sound very intelligent. It’s harder to quote trigonometry, or quadratic equations, and not half as romantic.

[18]Adults say lots of things that they don’t quite mean, usually just to be polite, which is no bad thing. They also say things that are exactly the opposite of what they appear to mean, such as:

1. “To be perfectly honest…,” which means, “I am lying through my teeth.”

2. “I hear what you’re saying…,” which means, “I hear it, but I’m not really listening, and I don’t agree with you anyway.”

and

3. “I don’t mean to be rude…,” which means, “I mean to be rude.”

There are some people who use phrases like this more often than anyone else, and who become very good at using them to avoid answering questions or telling the entire truth. These people are known as “politicians.”

[19]“Nefarious” means very wicked indeed, in a cunning way. If you plan on being nefarious, it pays to look the part: dress in black; wear a hat, preferably one with a wide brim and no flowers; and perhaps grow a mustache that you can twirl. It also helps to have a deep and sinister laugh, to indicate when you’re being nefarious. You know the kind: “BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HA!” That kind.

[20]If that sounds confusing, it isn’t really. The equivalent effect can be found on Earth, such as when you haven’t studied for a test in school and, the more you want that test to be put off, the faster the time for the test seems to arrive. The same is true for painful dental appointments, visiting that aunt you don’t like at Christmas, and waiting for your mum to come home while you try to stick back together her favorite vase that you’ve just broken. The opposite occurs for events to which you’re rather looking forward, like Christmas, your birthday, or the first snows of winter. Someday, a very bright child will create an equation for all this in order to explain it, and other, even brighter, children will look at him in a funny way and wonder why he bothered, since everyone instinctively understood it anyway.