THIS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN BY MONKEYS

The College of Engineering’s “Monkey Experiment” finally reveals the Meaning of Life!

There are some rather nasty rumors circulating about 218 Cushing Hall, the office of the esteemed Technical Review. With the TechReview’s office sitting menacingly across the hall from the Engineering Student Center, students have started to notice that rarely does anyone enter or leave the office, strange noises are frequently heard, and the smell can only be described as “If Silicon-Valley had a zoo.” The rumors have been fueled in past weeks by the Observer (motto: Independently Making Up News Since 30 Years Before The Founding of Notre Dame) which printed an article suggesting possible explanations about what goes on behind the solemn door of 218 Cushing Hall. Rumors have ranged from “It’s where the voice-mail lady lives” to “it’s a Super Mario warp zone to levels six, seven, or eight.” While there is some truth to these rumors, they have been blown way out of proportion.

And so, as the retired fiftieth Editor-in-Chief of the Technical Review, I am going to break the silence. I shall reveal to you, anxious public, just what is going on in the Tech Review’s office (besides trying to figure out ways of getting you people to actually read this magazine -- and no, Clockwork Orange-ish options have not yet been ruled out). Behind the door of 218 Cushing is . . . a 1000 monkeys typing at a 1000 typewriters, more or less.

That might not make complete sense to you just yet. Let me explain. Please. ... Pretty please?! Thank you.

Once upon a time, it was theorized that if you had a thousand monkeys typing at a thousand typewriters, eventually, just by simple rules of randomness or statistics or some lottery-type-concept, they would produce Hamlet or the screenplay for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade or some other great manuscript. Father Sorin, the clever man that he was (and not to mention just a little bit eccentric -- e.g. the “Golden Dome” and “Stepan Center”), decided that this was a legitimate research project. The college of engineering obtained a couple of monkeys from Michigan, since such primates were native to those parts in the early 1900’s. Unfortunately, after two years of unsuccessful research, where the monkeys spent most of their time trying to throw the type-writers at each other, it was discovered that four of the five monkeys were actually graduate students from the University of Michigan. While University officials admit it was a pretty funny prank, it set back the Typing Monkey experiment by a solid two years.

So, a group of Holy Cross Brothers decided that they had to go and recruit monkey typists themselves. After an exhaustive world-wide search, they eventually found a few dozen reasonably-priced monkeys right here on Grape Road (they’re not kidding when they say “A Million Reasons, Meijer, And A Single Store”).

Eventually the Animal Rights Groupies and the Correct Usage Of Typewriters People started to protest. At first this just involved hastily written letters to the Observer’s “Viewpoint,” and no one really took any notice. Inevitably, they whipped out the sidewalk chalk and the College of Engineering knew the protests were serious.

This was about fifty years ago. And so, they had to find a front for the Typing Rodent (T.R.) project (LITTLE KNOWN FACT: before the College of Science started to focus more on Biology, it was erroneously believed that monkeys were a type of rodent -- fair enough). Thus, they started the student run technical magazine, the Technical Review (T.R. -- not a coincidence!). The Technical Review was given a sweet office on the second floor of Cushing and the right to be pictured in the year book (this right was taken away the following year after the first “Technical Review” photo involved “mostly screeching, swinging from the ceiling, and rudely thrown bananas at the photographer. Also, there were a lot of monkeys”).

And so now you know that inside 218 Cushing Hall there are monkeys diligently typing away. This should explain the intense banana smell, not to mention the “Do Not Tap On Glass” sign on our door.

But, I should clarify that these are not just a bunch of monkeys pounding away on old fashioned typewriters, completely at random -- what goes on in the Technical Review office is distinctly different from what goes on throughout the college of Arts and Letters! To begin with, there are many, many more then a 1000 monkeys. Sure, at first they started off with just a thousand. But before they could convince the monkeys of the importance of Catholic Doctrine, they multiplied like, well, a bunch of monkeys. Also, once Sam’s Club opened, the College of Engineering was able to buy monkeys in bulk and the scope of the Typing Monkeys project grew rapidly. Another difference between this project and the monkeys of the theoretical “Hamlet Manuscript Project” is that they don’t use typewriters; the monkeys use Windows 2000. They insist on the latest Microsoft version, and trust me, you don’t want to anger a group of a 1000 monkeys. Imagine O’Shag if Waddick’s announced they were only going to serve normal, inexpensive coffee -- and it was decaf. Yes, that level of chaotic anger would ensue.

Furthermore, this is not just a project of complete randomness, as that initial experiment proved rather wasteful. These monkeys were well instructed in the art of typing, and thus they are primates who not only know about the Home Row Keys, they actually use the Home Row Keys (which is a lot more then can be said for most of you Engineers!). Once they were taught some basic words, their manuscripts, while still completely random, did produce some rather interesting results.

While this has never been revealed (outside the walls of a South Bend mental institution), the monkeys of Notre Dame are responsible for a wide variety of literature in the past 50 years. Do you remember Gerald Ford’s inauguration speech? No? Well, that’s a shame -- it was a monkey speech. Well, maybe you remember the Cosmo article about “How To Make Your Mate Go Ape.” Monkeys. They contribute, on average, a half dozen Cosmo articles each year (including quizzes). They have written numerous Hollywood classic films (e.g. The Great Muppet Caper and The Usual Suspects), although, shamefully, they’ve written a few flops too (e.g. Rudy 2: Application To Graduate School and, awful as it is to admit this, they are responsible for all of the quote-unquote “Dialogue” in Titanic). They frequently write manuscripts which are used for Health Class videos, some rather awful “jokes” have been used by Bazooka Bubblegum, and WNDU relies on the monkeys for a good story during slow news days (i.e. days ending in “y”).

Of course, not all of their work is main-stream. Some of it, due to the random nature of the project, is just pure drivel (I’ve already mentioned Titanic, right?). At times, what they type (and again, this is purely at random and that’s where the beauty of the project lies) is often of profound academic significance. Some of the best philosophical, historical, and scientific theories of our time have been discovered by Notre Dame’s monkey experiment (we have a few monkeys who focus just on Mathematica and Matlab -- those are the monkeys being punished for “severe” misbehavior).

Recently, after I had delivered the monkey’s weekly supply of bananas (and the necessary ingredients for both a decent Banana Daiquiri and a respectable Banana Split), I discovered the following manuscript. It contains, much to my amazement, THE MEANING OF LIFE!! Not only is that in itself ingenious, but the monkeys responsible for this Paramount Random Discovery did so in the form of a poem! Unfortunately, since you are all Engineers, this might take a few further comments so that your minds won’t explode upon the reading of your first poem (or at least your first poem that doesn’t start with “Roses are Red” and end in an offensive joke about the human reproductive system). You will completely miss the point of the poem if you have not had the subject of poetry thoroughly explained to you. I’m sorry that the monkeys had to convey the meaning of life in poetry, and not in the form of something more Engineering oriented, such as with an equation or FORTRAN 90 code. But, at last, we must recognize that many of the great writers are considered “great” because they hide their profound insights in long, boring, confusing webs of literary pitfalls.

I should mention that I am going to really enjoy explaining Everything You Need To Know About Poetry in 1000 Words or Less. I can’t wait to see the horrified faces of my Arts and Leisure friends as they read such scandalous statements as “poetry can be explained and understood with just a few short minutes of instruction.” Hee-hee!

DEFINITION: A poem is a dense, small creation that is difficult to understand (not to be confused with my last ex-girlfriend). This way you will read far more into the poem then what the author is capable of intending. In a poem, the slightest word can suggest entire books of the Old Testament. (A good poet will often just blurt out “ABRAHAM” a few times so that scholars can argue for centuries after their death if they were so brilliant as to allude to the Old Testament, to the Civil War, or to Homer Simpson’s father “Abe” Simpson).

WARNING: The following contains METAPHOR, HYPERBOLE, IRONY, ALLEGORY, PARABLE, and EXPLICIT ADULT MATERIAL. Do NOT read the following if you are deeply offended by dense literary structure, or if you are currently performing a delicate surgical procedure. (I am SICK AND TIRED of receiving letters from the nation’s top surgeons complaining that my articles are hindering their ability to perform delicate surgery. Duh, put my article down! Read it later! Brain surgeons -- what a bunch of idiots.)

Please bare with me as I now present Everything You Wanted to Know About English Literature But Were Afraid to Ask (or too asleep during your Freshman Composition course). A few definitions follow.

METAPHOR: A metaphor is a comparison between two seemingly dissimilar things, without using the word “like.” If you use the word “like,” then you have written a simile, and are less cool then your friends who are capable of writing metaphors. For example “I like metaphors” is a simile that compares “I” and “metaphors.” This is a fairly deep sentence, since “I,” the fiftieth editor in chief of the Technical Review, am hardly like a comparison between two seemingly dissimilar things. OR AM I?! Like most people, I can be rather dipolar. Martin Scorsese could make an excellent movie about my life, perhaps played by a stoned Willem Dafoe, since I am torn between my duality (i.e. I am an engineer but I sometimes enjoy reading non-equation books “just for fun” and discussing questions more profound then “how many significant digits should I use?”). The movie, of course, would be called “The Last Temptation of a Cheg,” and it would feature a “Dream sequence” where Satan, in the form of a little girl with a British accent (Scorsese’s idea, not mine) tempts me with a life that could have nothing to do with engineering. In what the College of Engineering would call “Blasphemous” and “Just plain stupid,” I would be pictured creating art and even going out during the week and, dare I say it, just relaxing at Lula’s Coffee House with my grande hot choclate. In the end, of course, I would choose my fate: the trials and tribulations of chemical engineering.

Some people try to convince me that my writing is often “distracted” by my tendency to “go off on tangents.” I have no idea what they’re talking about.

HYPERBOLE: A hyperbole is a statement of extreme exaggeration. For example, when your Arts and Letters roommate says “I have a gajillion hours of homework to do this weekend,” this is a hyperbole. They in fact mean “I have a few minutes of homework to do this weekend! Wah!” Of course, when you, dear engineer, say “I have a gajillion hours of homework to do this weekend,” this is actually the literary technique of UNDERSTATEMENT or HOPELESS OPTIMISM. You only WISH you had a gajillion hours of homework to do this weekend. You in fact have a “FRICKIN’ BAJILLION” hours of homework, “GOSH DARNIT!”

IRONY: [note: the author of this article is going to find it very difficult to avoid making jokes that were only funny in 1996, i.e. jokes about Alanis Morisette and the cliché “Rain on your wedding day” humor. I’ll do my best, but it won’t be easy.] Irony is what you call something in an English book where it contradicts something the author previously wrote. In an engineering problem such a contradiction is called a “mistake.” In an English class it is called “irony” or “deep man, deep.” In order to avoid rambling endlessly about how ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife “sucks” but is in fact not “ironic,” I shall move on.

ALLEGORY: To call a story an allegory is to say that it can be interpreted on many levels. Animal Farm was an allegory. It wasn’t just about talking pigs -- it was also about talking bacon. Very profound. This is particularly useful if you are watching a movie that you think is just awful, and your date thinks that it outshines the renaissance spirit of sliced-bread by an order of magnitude.

If they ask you why you liked it so much, and you want to impress him/her, you’ll want to avoid saying something like “I was bored to tears because nothing happened. The characters were idiots and I am dumber for having seen this movie. By at least 10 IQ points. I feel dirty. Seriously dirty.” Such films that will make you feel this way include The English Patient and Any Movie Whose Previews Brag About The “Cinematography.” Instead, furrow your brow (the most important indication that your synapses are hard at work) and say “I enjoyed it on many levels, since, clearly, it was an allegory.” Your date’s eyes will brighten up and he or she will go on and on about oh how right you are and it could be read as a social commentary about . . . [five minutes later] . . . not to mention the implications on the political influences of . . . [20 minutes later] . . . the scientific revolution of the 18th century which was . . . [2 months later] . . . and of course we haven’t even talked about the Religious commentary, which starts when . . . . [the four horsemen of the Apocalypse walk by] . . . etc. etc. It is important to be in a coffee shop when you propose a film or book is allegorical, by the way. First of all, it is only in this setting where an engineer can hope to mask his/her technical side with a flood of expensive cappachino and suave literary arrogance. Also, when your date rambles on and on about the many levels to a film that was essentially vomit (although you could argue that it is an insult to vomit everywhere to call The English Patient “vomit”), you’ll definitely want to be drinking caffeine. Lots of it, too. If you thought the film itself was boring, just wait until you hear people talk about it. Painful. Very painful.

I recently attended the one credit Theology seminar on Imaging the Divine: Jesus and Film. It was a nice course about Jesus films, both directly about Jesus Christ and film’s which were about Christ-figures. While this has little (and by “little” I mean “absolutely nothing”) to do with Poetry, it does emphasize my point that we engineers are just not good at “reading between the lines.” The lecturer for the Jesus Film series would go on and on about how everyone was a Christ figure. “Don’t you see, when the dog, whose name was CHRIS, was PUT TO SLEEP? The DOG is CHRIST! The neighbor’s poodle is Mary Magdeleine! The cat is Judas! Obviously!! WHY CAN’T YOU SEE THAT????” Well, I couldn’t see some of the Christ figure’s because 1.) I’m not an Arts and Letters major and thus I tend to think in reality and 2.) I wasn’t high. I really regretted the latter choice. Yeah, drug free is cool and everything, but those were some long movies that we watched. If the room was spinning I could at least have been fascinated by the monumental task of not falling out of my seat. One more Literary Technique, and then on to THE GREATEST POEM EVER.

RANDOM SENTENCE STRUCTURE: When a poet has no idea how to make something rhyme, he or she will break from the previous rhyme scheme to “draw attention to an important point.” Of course what the poet is really doing is drawing attention away from their inability to come up with a good rhyme. Okay, so poetry doesn’t have to rhyme. Our Congress is currently hard at work creating legislation that would force all poetry to rhyme (all previously written “poems” that don’t rhyme would be declared “poorly spaced prose” and a new Windows program will convert them into their proper form, i.e. run-on sentences like this one). We can only hope that such legislation will pass quickly. Anyway, another part of random sentence structure is the use of long and short lines. If a poet gets really stuck on what to do next, they can make irregularly long or short sentences. Also, if a poet is completely clueless, they’ll just mess around with the tab key. For example:
This       sentence is
poetic                       because the
      spacing is                   all messed
           up.

And so ends my introduction to LITERARY STRUCTURES. Let me now get to THE MEANING OF LIFE AS REVEALED BY MONKEYS.

The meaning of life is
-- complicated.
Have fun. Have virtue.
Have the decency to buy a recent graduate a Guinness.

I hope you have found this poem to be deeply inspirational. Yes, you will have to read into it, picking it apart and debating endlessly about it in dusty literary criticism texts, but it will be worth it.

With an enormous knowledge of history, philosophy, theology, and imported frothy beverages, you will be able to understand the monkeys’ profound intellect, as conveyed through the amazing powers of Chance and Windows 2000. It has been my pleasure to share such information with you, dearest readers.

ABOUT THE EDITOR: John Barry, a chemical engineering major at the University of Notre Dame, will graduate on May 21st 2000 (this comes as a shock to many, many people) and he will start work in the “Real World” some time this summer. His company will soon discover that John’s sense of humor isn’t very applicable to the world of Nuclear Power, and he expects to begin collecting unemployment by mid to late August. If you know John Barry and are living off campus next year, please choose to purchase a comfortable sofa as John will be moving in with you by labor day. Also, please buy a dart board so he has something to do while you’re at class. In return for your kindness, John will provide the vital service of making sarcastic quips and little pieces of pottery made from play-dough. You may not keep a single play-dough item for more then 8 hours as John has this pet peeve about returning the play-dough to it’s proper container so that it does not dry out. John strongly promotes the practices of Devil’s-advocacy and Open Bar -- the two indisputable fundamental goods of society.

ABOUT THE MONKEYS: The monkeys of 218 Cushing Hall would like to thank all those Big Apes who make their project possible. To Bill Gates, for giving them the tools they need to play solitaire when the Editor of the Technical Review isn’t looking. To Meijer, for all the bananas and catchy, inspirational radio-jingles. And of course, to the students who keep hooking-up across the hall in the Student Center -- thanks for making us feel like we’re not the only ones in Cushing with such primal urges!