what is the meaning of life?

Yeah, kind of like a huge chocolate cake; without the layers it doesn't exist!

...ogres are like onions...

You mean peel them, and you cry?

Hey, shouldn't you be at a parade or something?

I don't have a flag to wave! Damn it!

(or a life!)

So there's probably not much point in thinking about the meaning of it.....

On the contrary... if you haven't got one, it might be useful to know what it is you're missing, non?

Geeze! I just looked around, and there's a few other things missing too!

You should lock your doors, bo.

Someone stole my life once, but they returned it the next day. I even offered a reward for them to keep it, but to no avail.

Patio; we don't lock our doors...............

This is Canada!

Hmmm. I'd recommend you at least lock that door on the south side of the country. There's no telling what kind of belligerent riff raff are going to come through there. Surely you've seen "Canadian Bacon"...

When I try to take things one day at a time, several days seem to attack me at once.

It must be a question of outlook and preparedness. I think if, say, Bruce Lee had several days waiting to attack him, they would politely attack him one at a time until he had dispatched all of them. Your problem, snood, would appear to be one of mental distraction and of insufficiently silky black pajama bottoms.

But, I bet Snood would look great in them; in spite of all the band-aids!

Reminds me of a funny incident many years back.

My ex-wife and I and a buddy and his wife at a restaraunt in New York City -- on the menu for dessert was a seven layer chocolate cake.

My friend was a chocolate addict -- and honed in on the cake right from the start -- and talked about it through dinner.

He ordered it.

It was indeed a seven layer chocolate cake -- but it was the size of a large cookie!

Ahhh...the laughter. Ahhh...the disappointment. Ahhh...the vanilla ice cream with wet walnut that I ordered and loved!!!!

Frank; what a circuitous way of saying that "size matters"!

And, apparently, that wet nuts are to be preferred to a small dessert.

It does?

You mean she....ahh...ahh....

...never mind.

Jeez, you gotta be so careful in this forum!

Yeah, Frank, great imaginations from A2Kers is a given. c.i.

Nice story, Mr. Apisa. Did your friend find it to be a tasty chocolate cookie anyway ?

Now back to the meaning of life. We could twist Frank's parable as an allegory for the reality of the universe we inhabit: size doesn't matter; our universe is one of grandiose homogenity, isotropy, and uniformity. What happens in this constellation, happens billions of light-years away in other constellations, and vice versa.

This interconnected beauty can be of great consolation: we're no freaks in this place. Throughout the quantitatively immeasurable space, a great qualitative correspondence belongs to the universal character. The universe is truly small when observed by its features instead of its distances; it's the same wherever you look at it.

Fast forward: our Earth can be no exception to this. Hence, there is intelligent activity on other planets. Think about that, it's profoundly realistic and fantastic at the same time.

Our reflections on the meaning of life need to incorporate this fact as soon as possible, I think. The great philosopher and psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung wrote: "An objective knowledge of the human self will only be possible through contact with other mammals, or with inhabitants of other planets."

As long as this objective knowledge is not ours, debating the meaning of life is premature.