The Back Page of the Merry Goblins Warhammer Page
(Where you find out just how warped my mind really is)
Issue #2 : 16th August 2002
Yes, folks, by virtue of popular demand comes issue two of The Appalling Green Biology, the back page of the Merry Goblins Warhammer Page. This is a place where I put some of my more random thoughts to keyboard as they flit across my mind in a grand effort not to get run over by the overarching twin juggernauts of mindless tedium and inane logic.
At work one day, during lunchtime, a random thought drifted into my head, as random thoughts do. This particular random thought considered names of dramatic heros and villains, such as "Ming the Merciless", "Sprite the Wonder Pixie" and "Gerald the Eternally Eternal". The latter two are, as any time traveller from the far galaxies knows, especially famous in the 27th century. But I digress. Now, Geralds' name lead me to thinking about mixes of adverbs and adjectives ('eternally' is an adverb, 'eternal' is an adjective). Bob the Boringly Boring. Cyril the Worryingly Suspicious. Sammy-Joe-Jimmy-Jenkins-MCMXCVIII the Sillily Named.
That in turn made me think about being eternal. Now I don't mean about me being eternal (god help the universe if I were to be in it for ever :o), I imagine being immortal must get very boring after a while (if anyone immortal is reading this now, mail me and tell me if I'm right). I mean this: is being eternal and being eternally eternal the same thing?
Let's put this in context. Some combinations of adverbs and adjectives work, some just plain don't make sense. You can be throat-slittingly boring. You can be pathetically sad. You can be sadly pathetic. You can be pathetically pathetic (or, indeed, sadly sad). You can't be unpopularly popular. You can't be secretly public. Also in some cases, using an adverb based on the adjective makes the use of the adverb unnecessary - boringly boring, for instance. In other cases the adverb can add something useful extra. So, in the phrase 'eternally eternal', is the adverb any use?
This cuts to the nature of being eternal (or at least how I imagine being eternal must be). If you're eternal, are you by definition also eternally eternal? My twisted thoughts think not. Unless you do indeed happen to be an advanced time traveller from the far galaxies, how do you know if you really are eternal? Even if you are such a time traveller, and if you think you're eternal, unless you find a counter example (travelling to a time when you're dead) you won't know you're not. So you could argue that 'eternal' is a label you can only ascribe to something on presumption that it is, really, eternal. So something that is described as 'eternal' may not be so. It could be argued to mean something we presume will be eternal. If a being (choose one from your favourite fantasy genre) outside of time and space described something as eternal, however, then we could perhaps describe it as eternally eternal - really eternal.
Yes, this is rambly, perhaps even warped, logic. But so are the pathways through which thoughts tend to circulate in my head - and that's what you came here to read, right?
Next issue: The rabbit, his mating habits, his silly floppy ears, and his sometimes rocky relationship with the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat.
Do you know why this page is called The Appalling Green Biology ? Mail me at if you work it out.