Welcome!

Once there was a dog named Zeb. He was greatly loved by his adopted family. Maybe he was even a tiny bit spoiled, because Zeb would get his food heated up right on the stove. But sometimes the food served to him was a little too warm and Zeb couldn’t eat it. When that happened, Zeb found a solution: he barked at his food. And it worked! After sufficient barking, the food was cool enough to eat. Clever dog!

Of course, people don’t do that sort of thing. That would be like honking at a red light to make it turn green, or pressing an elevator button more than once to make it speed up. I’m pretty sure nobody does that. But wait! Sometimes, somebody does something that looks a lot like barking at their food. When that happens we’d like to know about it, so we can post it here as a tribute to Zeb. We’d like to believe that somewhere, Zeb is watching over us thinking, See, I was right!

But we’re about more than just bringing food-barkers to light. This website is about exposing fuzzy thinking, bad use of language, logical fallacies and paradoxes. We’re fascinated by optical illusions; and fallacies and paradoxes might be termed “language illusions.” Because often, once the fuzzy thinking or bad language use that is behind such an illusion is exposed, the fallacy or paradox vanishes in a puff of clear thought.

You may find some humor on this site, too. No topic is so serious that someone hasn’t joked about it. And jokes often depend on or illustrate logical fallacies or paradoxes. You’ll find us lashing out at some of out pet peeves, too, such as calling noon “12 pm.” Dang, that makes no sense at all.

We hope you enjoy your visit.

Photo from http://www.freedigitalphotos.net