2010/11/29 Life’s Restaurant Poem by Margaret Alice

Alice looked forward to see the use of Bistromathics,
most powerful computational force known to Parascience
computations done on a waiter’s check pad cause numbers
to start dancing, Alice has always found numbers twirling
with dizzying speed

Bistromathics shows reality and unreality colliding on
fundamental levels, anything is possible within impossible
parameters, she knew why she never mastered mathematics
her mind was already tuned to Bistromathics, a new under-
standing of the behaviour of non-absolute numbers

Depending on an observer’s movement through life’s
restaurant, ever since her first tea party with the Mad
Hatter, Alice had knew something was fundamentally
wrong with a world where riddles never resolved
themselves, Alice learnt

The First Nonabsolute Number was number of people
for whom the Table of Life is reserved, there is no relation
between number of people or creatures who turn up, who
subsequently join them and who leave when they see
who else turned up, summoned by the Queen of Hearts

The Second Nonabsolute Number is time of arrival, a
bizarre mathematical concept, a Recipriversexcluson whose
existence is defined as being anything other than itself since
time of arrival is the only moment at which nobody will arrive,
depending on the Queen of Hearts, all ways are her ways and
might take a day to traverse – or only a nanosecond of time

The Third Nonabsolute is the most mysterious, Alice learnt,
she loves mysteries of all kinds: the relationship between
number of items, cost, number of people at the table and
what each are prepared to pay (number of people who
brought money being a subphenomenon)

Alice immediately understood why Peter Pan could not get
the calculations right when he was asked to help pay the
cost for Cinderella’s delight, why Conan the Barbarian
refused to be a King, why Attila the Hun refused to pay
money to see the Queen of Hearts

Why the peppery-tongued Duchess hit the Queen with a
croquet club, why Tom Thumb rode off in a huff on a bat,
waving a needle-sword, vowing to kill the Duchess and
all who took her side – the baffling discrepancies between
what is and what ought to be

Revealed a startling truth: Every person in this play refused
to pay what was required of them in the waiter’s check in
order to share the spoils of peace of mind in life’s
restaurant, Alice marvelled at ‘Interactive
Subjectivity Frameworks’

Which made monks sing strange songs about the Universe
being a figment of its own imagination, she looked up with
shiny eyes and smiled at Lewis Carrol and Douglas Adams
who explained her mysterious life so beautifully
empowering her with their Bistromathics

To understand her life…


Based on “The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide” Douglas
Adams pp.343 - 348