Back in the day one of my college friends sheepishly admitted that she had watched an embarrassingly large amount of "This is Spinal Tap" before realising that it was a joke. The continuity announcer on BBC2 had introduced it as "a groundbreaking rocumentary about one of Britain's loudest bands" and she assumed that she would learn about a band that was new to her.
My sister recently sent me a book that she thought I might be interested in. It looked like it was going to a parody of the new-age hippies. It was called "The Fifth Element" and it's about pyramids, numerology, music theory, crystals, philosophy, geometry and so forth – I assumed that the fifth element was going to be stupidity. It started off strong with an acknowledgements page including a Glastonbury book group and crop circle researchers and that had a spelling mistake and terrible layout. I started reading it and the jokes seemed few and far between and relied on quite a bit of mathematical knowledge. I was an embarrassingly long way in to the book before I realised that it probably wasn't a parody, but I still can’t be quite sure.
Richard "Poe's Law" B
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