Who Would Win in a Fight – a Minotaur Armed with a Trident or a Centaur Armed with a Crossbow?
Who among us hasn’t asked ourselves the age-old question: Who Would Win in a Fight – a Minotaur Armed with a Trident or a Centaur Armed with a Crossbow? We all have our own answers and reasons, but what do the celebrities think?
I saw this site over the weekend, and it cracked me up to no end. The artwork alone is hysterical, to say nothing of the little sound effects they have as a pre-roller, for each interview. In particular, I’m fond of Tom Hanks’ response, which is so immediate in a “why it’s obvious, of course” kind of way.
I’m in awe that the folks behind this carried the joke, as it were, as long as they did. It’s an impressive list of people they interviewed, and each with the exact same question. I kept thinking that they squandered their access to these famous people… and wasted a question.
But looking back, I’m tickled that they wasted it, because they wasted it for my entertainment.
I keep thinking about collections/groups/lists. And scale. And how at the low end, the small end, it begins as interest, as hobby. Take bottle caps, as a random example. Let’s say you collect 5, 10, 20. It’s a hobby, an interest. Let’s say you collect 50, 100, 200. You’re an enthusiast. 400? 500? You move beyond amateur/hobbyist.
What about 1000? What if you collect enough to fill up an entire room of your apartment, dedicated solely to your bottle caps? At the higher end, what could be seen as an interest blossoms into… obsession? Fetish? Compulsion?
But there’s some threshold, some line that… if you cross it, you move beyond the negative perception. Let’s say your bottle cap collection begins to exceed that one room. Kick up the collection to 10,000 or 20,000. Let’s say it spills out into ALL rooms – bedroom, living room, kitchen. Let’s say you have to move to a bigger apartment/house due to all your bottle caps. Let’s say you build a separate structure simply to house them all.
At that larger scale, it becomes something impressive, something others would find of interest. No one would care about your 10 bottle caps. People would look at you funny if you told them about your 1,000 bottle caps and maybe think of you as that “weird bottle cap guy.” But if your entire house is filled to the brim with the things? Well… people might just drive across the country, and to pay you money to see it.
Perhaps it’s Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point theory. But the whole numbers/scale thing is what I thought of, when looking at this Minotaur v. Centaur site. Had they only shown 5 or so interviews, it would have been a little weird. 10 or 20? Meh. But the sheer number they’ve accrued and have on display now (which I think is at around 100)… well that’s just pretty darn impressive. And probably the reason why so many folks are passing this link around.
When I showed Ben this site, he pointed out how this site matched my interest in repetition and variation. I was surprised to hear that, but he was right. It totally fits. [via]
It’s funny how the people who don’t answer are the ones who wind up looking like losers.
juliet (March 25, 2008 at 9:59 pm)