Date: Sat, 28 Dec 2002 15:06:57 -0600
Subject: Re: (urth) tease me?
From: Adam Stephanides 

on 12/24/02 6:11 PM, maa32 at maa32@dana.ucc.nau.edu wrote:

> Just a brief comment.
> It is obvious that Wolfe is teasing either myself or the member of the list
> who confirmed that his statement was a jest.  We can't say with any certainty
> who Wolfe would be more likely to tease.
[snip]
> On the back of the card:
> "No, No, NO!  Green is Urth."

I have no access to Wolfe's motives, of course, but my money is on Wolfe's
original comment to you being the joke, for several reasons:

1) While I don't believe Blue is Urth, I'll admit that there are several
correspondences between Blue-Green and Urth-Lune which give the theory a
certain coloring of plausibility: the pair of a blue and a green planet, the
green planet being lighter than the blue planet, the underwater city on
Blue, the Scylla-Mother relationship.  If the pairings are switched, none of
these correspondences apply, and the "evidence" you gave for Green being
Urth seems quite weak to me.

2) Conversely, all the objections to Blue = Urth apply just as well to Green
= Urth.  I realize you aren't convinced by any of them, but I for one find
at least Wolfe's interview statement very hard to explain away.

3) As you say, Wolfe doesn't like "tromping out the definitive answer," so
it would be uncharactistic of him to do so in this case.  It seems more
likely to me that he would have assumed his answer was an obvious joke when
it wasn't.

4) If Wolfe is your friend, that makes it all the more likely that he would
"tease" you a bit, and all the less likely that he would destroy your theory
with a one-sentence, minimally informative answer.  And to follow up by
telling a third party that he'd deceived you when he actually hadn't would
be a deliberate act of malice at the expense of both you and the third
party.

> The question - does he remember my conjecture from, no joke, a year ago?  Why
> would he tease me about it?

He wouldn't need to remember your whole elaborate conjecture.  Your question
made it clear that you thought Blue was Urth (which may have reminded him of
the relevant portions of your earlier questions).  And he's no doubt aware
that there are other people who think that Blue is Urth

--Adam


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