2003-02-06 at 4:47 p.m.
During an email exchange today with my newest Diaryland buddy, geofortean, the subject turned, as it inevitably will, to monkeys.
Specifically, to that well known theory about monkeys-
I am not a huge believer in this theory.
Firstly, we must take into account the average lifespan of a monkey. Once we do that, we quickly realise that after fifteen years or so, all the monkeys would be dead. So, for 999, 985 years, you'd just have a room full of decaying monkey carcasses, lying around and getting nothing written.
Secondly, for the money it would take to pay personell to feed the monkeys, clean up after the monkeys, repair the typewriters, pay the rent on the monkey holding facility, replace the typewriter ribbons, supply paper, and break up monkey fights for one million years, you could just use modern cloning techniques to bring back Shakespeare himself, without having to bother with the whole 'monkeys' scheme.
Thirdly, one imagines that when the monkeys did finally produce Shakespeare, it would be so smeared with faeces as to be illegible.
And then the monkeys would eat it.
Lore Sj�berg, of Brunching Shuttlecocks fame, has also explored this theory here. Lore discusses documents which, statistically speaking, are likely to be produced before Shakespeare. I, too, have thought long and hard about this (for about three minutes), and have deduced that the following documents would also be produced before Shakespeare-
The phrase 'Ronald McDonald is the Antichrist'
Two pages of 'Bushisms'
A story entitled 'Harry Potter and the Amazing Levitating Cow'
The script of 'Yentil'
1,436 dirty limericks
and...
The phrase 'If a thousand monkeys worked at a thousand typewriters for one million years, then, statistically, they would eventually produce one of the plays of Shakespeare'.
