Like Carol said...
I LOVE the non-dysfunctional Lane family!!! Really! And 'Uncle Bernie'... CLASSIC!!
Yeah!!!
And Elisabeth pointed out another little gem:
My favorite part was Lois' reaction to realizing she would now have to go to the kitchen to dump her coffee.
Ha-ha!!! Yeah!!!
That exchange between Lois and George the guard was delightful, too. People make happy small talk with this Lois. She isn't Mad Dog Lane here.
A favorite part of mine was the "motto" for this part:
Knowledge is not a loose-leaf notebook of facts. Above all, it is a responsibility for the integrity of what we are, primarily of what we are as ethical creatures. -- Jacob Bronowski, English historian & mathematician
I absolutely agree. But you know what? The fact that knowledge isn't a loose-leaf notebook of facts for us humans sometimes makes us more stupid than animals. Really. We have this compulsive need to see patterns in everything, and sometimes we see patterns where there are none, and sometimes we see quite the wrong patterns instead of the ones that are really there. Well, a friend of mine has just recently seen an experiment demonstrated on Swedish television, an experiment performed on humans and mice. Two lamps lit up in a totally random pattern, but the humans hadn't been told that it was random. (The mice hadn't been told either, I suppose.
) If the participants could foresee which lamp would light up next, they scored a point. (And the mice got a little piece of cheese or something.
)
Well, the humans desperately tried to memorize in what order the lamps had lit up before, and they tried to make out a pattern which would tell them how the lamps would light up next. But there was no pattern. Trying to make out a pattern meant that the humans got, at best, a score of 65%. The mice, however, quickly figured out that it was the lamp on the right that lit up most frequently, and they ignored the lamp on the left and just waited for the lamp on the right to light up. And because the lamp on the right lit up 80% of the time, each and every one of the mice got a better score than each and every one of the humans! Imagine that!
As for seeing the wrong pattern... that was like how Lois refused to see that Clark was Superman in the show, so that she was forced to come up with the explanation that Clark was a flake who needed to run off whenever they had a serious conversation.
Last time, Lois seemed to be on the verge of realizing something interesting about Clark. I'm looking forward to more B-plot in the next part, and I hope Lois will be able to make out the right pattern!
Ann
stupid 'random fic finder' opening Momentum which I'd never read [/grumble]]
