Castle In the Sky

Alas, this is not a reference to Miyazaki's awesome movie, although I am a great fan of his. Last night, I had to give a 45 presentation to my Group Dynamics class with my small and humble group of minions. I mean classmates.

I had been reading Gulliver's Travels for the third time, and I was amused by the notion of the "Flappers" that Lemuel meets in Castle Laputa. The Flappers are basically an 18th century metaphor for red tape- they flap these strange contraptions in front of the mouth and ears of the people talking and allow them to communicate with other people. If a Flapper doesn't distinguish something, the people on the castle don't even know it exists.

I formed an exercise for the class that required them to rely on Flappers to communicate. There were two Designers who designed paper airplanes. They gave their information to the Flapper, who emailed the design to the Builder, and gave a verbal description of the design to the people designated to fly the planes.

My teacher asked, "What book did you pull this exercise out of?"

"Gulliver's Travels," I replied.

She seemed to be a bit surprised that I was able to come up with something so cleverly ingenious, but then again, I've really slacked off this quarter in her class. I could have been more of a team player, but it's a lot more fun to play the devil's advocate. ^__^