Existential Riddles

January 5, 2016 7:09 PM

"Which is heavier, a ton of feathers or a ton of gold? Everything is equal in a cruelly indifferent universe." Existential Riddles by Ethan Kuperberg.
posted by jcreigh (17 comments total)

Clever format, if you've heard these before there's something new for you, and you've never heard them and get them wrong it's no biggie since we're all gonna die anyway.
posted by subdee at 7:20 PM on January 5, 2016 [7 favorites]

A woman lives in a yellow one-story house. Everything in the house is yellow. What color are the stairs?

Yellow, of course. Their non-existence doesn't negate their yellow-ness.
posted by explosion at 7:47 PM on January 5, 2016 [9 favorites]

A ton of feathers is actually less likely to kill you if it falls on you because of the larger volume and the space inbetween would drop less of the total weight directly on your body. It could still kill you but... what was the question again?
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:05 PM on January 5, 2016

I'd favorite this post... but really, why bother. I'll never refer to it again, and will probably forget it like I've forgotten more than 99% of all the other experiences I've had.
posted by not_on_display at 8:27 PM on January 5, 2016 [7 favorites]

I was going to post this earlier. It's good to know that my action or inaction has no effect on the Universe.
posted by Navelgazer at 8:31 PM on January 5, 2016 [12 favorites]

The Shouts and Murmurs column is now basically McSweeney's, right?
posted by kevinbelt at 9:21 PM on January 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

Nooo...

"The answer is the feathers.

200 pounds of bricks is just a bunch of bricks, but if you try to carry 200 pounds of feathers, you also have to carry the weight of what you did to those poor birds."
posted by ShawnStruck at 10:45 PM on January 5, 2016 [12 favorites]

The answer to the last one is wrong. Well perhaps just incomplete. Rather than just returning to the sea shore, when he was there he met another lighthouse keeper, the one he met was the original teller of the story of two ships in a dark storm, the captain of one get on the radio and insists the other bear off, he refuses obscurely, the captain explains his ship is an aircraft carrier, still the first one refuses, eventually explaining he is a lighthouse keeper, unfortunately this does not give the ship enough time to stop and an entire charming little village on the sea is scrunched up by the giant ship. That never happened but it makes for a good bit of late night insomnia guilt typing.
posted by sammyo at 11:40 PM on January 5, 2016

I read this post today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.
posted by robotot at 1:27 AM on January 6, 2016 [4 favorites]

Too many bloody articles from the New Yorker this week. I'm already passed my monthly allowance. Bah.
posted by trif at 4:02 AM on January 6, 2016

Hope is a thing with feathers. So your hope crushes you, and you die.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 4:34 AM on January 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

Steel is heavier than feathers
posted by Yowser at 6:04 AM on January 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

Somehow reminds me of Jean Paul Sartre cooking an omelet ... So much so that the two are identical in my mind now. A simple diff command pretends to disconfirm this. We are no longer friends.
posted by kleinsteradikaleminderheit at 7:46 AM on January 6, 2016

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Neither.
posted by Oyéah at 10:15 AM on January 6, 2016

I just posted this on fb, and now I'm thinking no one is going to like it. No one ever likes anything I post.
posted by numaner at 3:54 PM on January 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

Which is heavier, a ton of feathers or a ton of gold?
The ton o' feathers, because gold would be weighed in Troy (12 oz per lb), no?
posted by milnews.ca at 5:25 PM on January 7, 2016

I can lift all the bricks, one at a time. I lift all the feathers, one feather at a time, but grow old and die before I'm done. What have I done?

Oh lord, what have I done?
posted by mule98J at 5:48 PM on January 7, 2016 [1 favorite]