Perhaps Monkeys are More Intelligent than We Thought

Most of you have heard about monkeys and Shakespeare - if one could theorectically put an infinite number of monkeys (which is not possible) in front of an infinite number of typewriters (which, again, is not possible), they would come up with all of the works of Shakespeare. Or perhaps Dierdot, or maybe even Dumas, but that might be pushing it. Brandon and I have discussed this problem several times, and I have always insisted that that could never happen. Well, I might be wrong.

Yesterday morning, while typing my last post (I apologize for two in two days; that really is much too often), I handed Kathleen our phone to keep her busy. She likes phones and keys and whisks and measuring spoons and pencils and chess pieces, just not her toys. The beeping sounds that come out of the phone, and occasionally even Grandma's voice, are an endless source of fascination to her. And there is no possible way she could actually get a correct sequence of numbers entered while the phone was on to actually call someone - that would be akin to some monkey typing "to be, or not to be" (all less than three letters).

However, after hearing someone's voice, not the operator, come out of the phone, I unplugged the phone line to be on the safe side. An hour later, a police car showed up in front of our house. Was everything fine, he wanted to know, they had recieved a call from this address. And that's when I realized - I should get some monkeys, some typewriters, and see if they could best good old Bill.