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They never meant for that to happen
Randy Blaser
Updated: January 30, 2013 4:12PM
There is a law of unintended consequences at work in the universe.
It goes something like this: You do something over here, and something over there happens that no one considered would happen.
Take for example this Manti T’eo story. He’s the Notre Dame football star who confessed last week that his girlfriend was fake and claimed to be the victim of a hoax.
Hold on for a minute. In his revelation, T’eo admitted he never met the girl he conversed with over the phone. They never held hands or went to a movie. Never shared a Coke and fries at McDonald’s and never kissed. I started dating later than most of the guys in high school, but even I know that if you don’t do those things (movie, hold hands, kiss), she’s not your girlfriend.
Not only was the girl fake, but T’eo’s idea that he had a girlfriend was fake. Now that’s really weird. I’ve had fake girlfriends before — Hayley Mills in “The Trouble With Angels,” Jessica Lange in “All that Jazz,” and Meg Ryan in “Sleepless in Seattle.” But at least the girls were real. It was just my relationship with them that was fake and somewhat pathetic.
Unintended consequences.
Also last week was this big controversy over Subway selling a sandwich they call a “footlong.” Some kid in Australia actually measured the sandwich and guess what? It’s not a foot long, which we in the English-speaking world know equals 12 inches. He measured his footlong to be just 11 inches, and even down under, that’s not one foot long.
I usually don’t buy the footlong sandwich. I usually just get a six-inch tuna. So that got me wondering: Is my six-inch sandwich really six inches? If the footlong is only 11 inches, than it is impossible for my sandwich to be six inches. Since they cut it right in half, my sandwich can only be about 5 ½ inches.
Does anybody worry about that? Unintended consequences.
I was watching TV last night and a commercial came on for an upcoming TV show. Regular people like the folks next door had guns and were protecting themselves from attacking zombies.
Now that got me thinking of the unintended consequences if guns get outlawed in this country. What is Hollywood going to do for story lines? Since every TV show and movie deals with shootouts and gunplay, what device will screenwriters come up with to move the story along?
In a movie, you never see a guy with a rocket launcher, because rocket launchers are illegal.
So what will movies do? Will they just become boring talkfests like British films, like this “Downton Abbey” thing my wife makes me watch instead of “Terminator 2”?
And then it hit me. If guns get outlawed, how will we protect ourselves from zombie or cyborg attacks?
