May All Your Wishes Come True

I have this history exam tomorrow, which I thought was going to be the day after tomorrow. If I had known it was going to be so last minute I might not have gone in to uni today to hang out, but I'm kind of glad I went anyway. It's cold and rainy at the moment, which I actually quite like. This is probably because it is good weather for books, video games and films. And beef noodle soups from the Half-Time cafe in Sunnybank.

But I digress. It was raining when I was planning on walking back home from uni, so I took the ferry instead. They have some banal television program on for people who don't want to look at the awesome view of the river, and as my eyes were passing contemptuously over the screen I saw "Words of Wisdom" in large comic-book letters next to a broadly drawn tree. And then the following faded in to the center of the screen:

"May all your wishes come true." (Ancient Chinese Curse)

This sounds off to me. The only way I know of saying something like this in Chinese is 万事如意 wanshiruyi, and I'm pretty sure it's never used as a curse.

I mean, seriously. I could be totally wrong, but...what kind of Fu Manchu bullshit are they trying to pull here? Even if this was an ancient Chinese curse, it would still be stupid. Can you imagine the bearded villain wriggling his fingers whilst uttering some incantation, to harness the forces of darkness so that the hero... loses some weight, meets a nice girl, gets the kid through college, becomes an astronaught and dies peacefully surrounded by family and friends?

It's moronic, is what it is. "You might not know the entire consequences that would follow from a particular set of conditions" or "If you could see the entire chain of events, you would not wish for it" seems to be the point they're trying to make. Which is actually quite different from getting everything that you wish for.

Let's assume that there really is a curse you can make, which will bring about the actualisation of all of someone's wishes. Firstly, you can't wish for something that you have no conception of. That's not what wishing is. Now, say that drinking a beer would entail stumbling across the street which would entail getting hit by a bus. Unless I harbour a deathwish, it's unlikely that getting hit by a bus is one of my wishes. In fact, I probably would wish for the non-occurence of that event.

Now assume that I didn't know about the causal necessity which would bring about my flattening, and we've established that you can't wish for something unknown. So suppose I wish to have a beer, and I wish that I don't get hit by a bus. If some asshole has put a curse on me so that all of my wishes come true, he clearly hasn't thought it through very well. I will drink the beer. And I will not get hit by a bus; non-contradiction ensures this.

At which point, I like to think that the prick who cursed me has a Cronenberg moment, looking something like this:


In fact, if that curse existed, I would want someone to try it on me. Because one of my wishes is that those dropkicks who try and justify ridiculous ideas by claiming that the idea is ancient and Chinese will have their heads explode. Not to mention all the other awesome states which would be brought about.

Not such an ingenius curse now, is it? My points here are that a) most 'ancient Chinese' stuff is not that ancient, not that Chinese, or just plain fabrication, and b) rationality doesn't discriminate.