Established 2003. Now incorporating The Sudbury Hill Harrow and Wherever End Times

Monday, May 23, 2005

Kronk's law of the conservation of beauty

My objective here is to provide a guide for the layman to my immensely important theory of the conservation of beauty.

While studying a picture of yellow hair under a tree in the great tropical glasshouse at Willesden Gardens, a 5 kilo soursop fell on my head and I passed out for several hours.* When I awoke I had the complete theory of the conservation of beauty in my mind and I rushed to my office to type it out before it vanished.

It occurred to me that I could produce the same picture of yellow hair by spinning a camera in front of any yellow object, for example a forsythia bush in full bloom. Of course forsythia in blossom is beautiful, but it looks nothing like that picture of yellow hair. And yet they are both beautiful. An easy experiment confirmed that the simple action of the camera** was enough to separate the photons of beauty into strands of yellow hair, like that which "maddened every mother's son" (as mentioned by Senator Yeats.)

Now I can reveal why I have often been seen disfiguring pictures of supermodels in magazines and breaking parts off statues - to the perplexity of those unaware of my scientific purpose. It is counter-intuitive to think that beauty could survive any transformation, and if you asked the average man in the street he would say that beauty could be destroyed. The strange fact is that beauty, just like energy / mass, can never be lost, it is merely transposed to another form. Shakespeare intuitively felt this, and I will now proceed to set out the mathematical proof.***

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by Professor Kronk

*A salutary lesson; never sit under a guanabana tree.

**The camera was kindly furnished by Willesden Observatory.

***A locksmith from Purley knocked on my office door at this point, responding to a call I had placed earlier concerning my briefcase. Most unfortunately, the mathematical proof of my theory - which I had entire - slipped my mind during this person's visit. I will have to start over from first principles, but at least I can now get my sliderule out of my briefcase.

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