Russs* (for Russ*)

Today I was poking around the Internet, looking for something inspirational to write on the whiteboard above my desk. I stumbled across this, from the brilliant Russian (not Russsian) writer Fyodor Dostoevsky:

The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.

Wise words – it’s always good to question what you think you know, and remember how much you don’t know. I wonder if it’s exponential, however: if I call myself a fool more than once a month, does that make me even cleverer?
If so, I’m at my most genius on snowy mornings rushing to work. This morning, I called myself a fool at least four times:

1. When my alarm went off and I couldn’t figure out what the noise was. Did aliens land? Am I baking a cake? Is that the phone?
2. When I put my sweater on inside out
3. When I couldn’t find my left boot, even though I had worn it just last night
4. When I fell down, not on the ice getting to work, but on the floor inside my office

If Dostoevsky is correct, I probably shouldn’t spend all my foolish cleverness on this blog post. I’m off to prove Beal’s Conjecture, translate the Voynich manuscript, and figure out the meaning of the Nazca Lines.  I'll leave you with these stats: Russs* is a high probability typo, with 170 instances of Russsia and 245 cases of Russsian appearing in Worldcat.

Leanne Olson

(Image of the Tarot Fool card from Wikimedia Commons, uploaded by user Fuzzypeg.)