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LUDIC LOG

To: Dr. Carl Ibold <cibold@sci.duke.edu>
From: Dr. Alissa Stark-Palatine <astark_p@sci.duke.edu>
Subject: Progress on Project Bedtime

Carl --

I appreciate the time and effort you put into Project Bedtime. And I know it's a prestige project; it's a name project; and there's a lot of Hollywood money behind it. Believe me when I say that I don't for a minute believe in this program and its goals. I am as dedicated to scientifically testing the validity of cliches, truisms and everyday expressions as is anyone involved in the Project.

That said, I'm wondering if we chose the right test for our first venture into the field. We've had nothing but problems from day one. Briefly:

- While I appreciate the fact that the Hollywood people are funding the project and need to be given the appropriate level of consideration and participation, there seems to be an unduly large amount of demographic factors at play in the selection of the test group. All of the people in the group, I can't help notice, are from Beverly Hills or Bel-Air, California and work in the entertainment industry. My request that a more random selection process be used for the test group was met by the response that the ten subjects had a range of letters in their surnames ranging from 5 to 15.

- Although there was not as much trouble as I had anticipated in arriving at a working definition of 'fun', there has been a great deal of debate over what exactly constitutes a 'barrel of monkeys'. Robert's suggestion of a giant, environmentally sealed BioBarrel in which are placed a male and a female from each subgroup of genus Pan seems to me overambitious, but he is the senior research director, and my suggestion that he had let the Hollywood money go to his head was met with scoffing. Kenneth is a graduate student, of course, but he still maintains an undergraduate's sense of humor, and his suggestion of a Heinz Hot Dog Relish jar with 10 ounces of various pureed monkeys in it was thought to be poorly thought out and unamusing. We eventually settled for a sturdy 19th-century combination rain-barrel/pickle keg in two test states (open and sealed), into which were placed various members of each of 8 tribes of genus Pan Troglodyte. But there has still been grousing.

- We have had a lot of difficulty arriving at a consensus on what quality of the situation posits the fun value -- that is, is placing the monkeys in the barrel inherently fun, or is there some aspect of the monkey-barrel combination that produces fun-reaction? Naturally, the best way to compensate for this was with the use of placebos. However, my idea that we use an empty barrel with "MONKEY" written on the side with red letters has proved insufficient, and no better ideas have been forthcoming save for Bill's suggestion of a barrel full of broom handles with Afro wigs on them, which frankly I find both impractical and racially insensitive.

Carl, at this point, I wonder if we shouldn't just move on to one of the other tests. I've got a bunch of the poli-sci undergrads ready to fight City Hall; Bill has done some interesting work in the field of light-greasing; and the people in mathematics are this close to coming up with a practical method of formulating a time-stitching equation. Let's show Hollywood what we can do!