This is a truly beautiful piece. A proverb and mathematical equation merged together perfectly. This is the type of puzzle/riddle/problem that I imagine will be written in algebra books a thousand years from now. Who are these boys? I think these boys are us, mankind. Innocent and sleeping on a Sunday afternoon. A parable wrapped inside a question mark, it is a lyrical and powerful work.

With a crackle and an electronic hum, the low tone ramps up into a sustained oscillating rhythm.

Man, the machine, a haunting metaphor with a rich history of powerfully acclaimed thinkers subscribing to it, is reflected quite nicely in this piece. Here, however, the machine is not without a sense of humanity, if humanity is defined by its lack of perfection, its idiosyncracies, and its built in shortcomings.

The movement from certainty (the perfection of the machine) to uncertainty (the irrational and earthly self) in the third block is propelled by the injection of yet another all too human characterstic, our need to be somehow guided by a higher power. Here the subtle, exclamatory use of 'jesus' to denote surprise at how memory can so easily be corrupted, marks the precise moment that the "man as machine" metaphor breaks down and is exposed in its inability to maintain its integrity within the context of the complexity of human existence. The humor is gentle and quite appropriate.

The author leaves us with a glimmer of hope for the proponents of this man-machine metaphor by noting that even in the face of this glaring breakage of the model, it does suffice as an effective point of view for much of the human state.