He only gives one class a week and his secretary is very efficient. He (the secretary is male) has plenty of time to attend to his other duties, such as finding pens and topping up inkwells. A clever student optimized the whole thing and explained it to him. Remember, telephones and email haven't been invented so there's nothing to tie a secretary to an office desk.
He doesn't see it as deception, if it's he who is doing it. Rogues are masters at self-deception.
No, he doesn't. He uses intuition. He intuitively understands people. That's Wis, not Int.
Not when you own the university.
Not when you own the university. You get awarded honorary doctorates by other universities.
Yes, it is very unlikely. He's the only one who's done it out of millions who haven't. But then, he's a genius. He can achieve things that are a million-to-one against.
Not if you own the university where it's quite frequent for otherwise promising careers to be cut short. People who get deputed to collect half a gallon of fresh dragon blood from the Blue Mountains of The Auramands sometimes never seem to come back. Odd, that.
See above.
I said he was Professor of Logic. I didn't say he taught classes in logic. It's a purely honorary title bestowed ex officio on the owner of the university.
You haven't got it yet. He is the administration.
Actually, yes.
You've never been to a social event for owners of universities, have you? They play different games there.
I think that's a decision the gods might wish to make for themselves.
I loved all these responses (and damn I wish the quotation nested one level deeper) and I think it may reveal another divide between the two camps:
One line of argument seems to be "that is highly improbable/it would never work that way/real such-and-suches don't have that behavior/that's not the definition of that word/etc." Proponents seem to be making an argument that is, "Fictional worlds should adhere to real-world analogues as closely as possible, and only stray when it is absolutely necessary." By this reasoning, Eloelle's existence results in more complexity than is actually needed, so therefore she is...undesirable. In a sense, members of this camp are trying to make the fictional world as "real" as possible.
The other camp is interested in telling a tale, and doesn't care if the details needed to support that tale are improbable. After all, some of the best moments in fiction come about because the events were improbable.
The thread above exemplifies this. Danny is right that in the real world it would be insanely hard for the Professor to get away with the story Bold is describing, to the point that the probability of sustaining the illusion is vanishingly small. But Bold doesn't care...he's showing how you can just throw in more fictional details to counter every criticism.
In another thread Maxperson and I got into it over the question of why Gandalf didn't ask the Lord of the Eagles to just fly to Mt. Doom with Frodo on his back. My explanation is just that it wouldn't have been a very good story, and I don't really need any more reason than that. If you think about it you can come up with plausible reasons, which for me is sufficient to maintain the fiction. But I don't really care which reason is the "real" one, nor do I believe there even is such a thing. The only real reason is that Tolkien wanted to tell a different story.
But Max kept insisting that the Eagles
could not have made it to Mt. Doom because Sauron would have zapped them out of the air. In saying that's silly, I was taking the stance of "Well, if Tolkien had wanted to resolve the story that way there are a million plausible ways to get the Eagles there. It's ridiculous to say they couldn't have made it. After all, he found ways for two Hobbits to freakin' walk there, which is even more improbable."
Max responded quite vehemently insisting that the Hobbits-on-foot plan was actually a higher probability plan than the Eagles flying. A stance that I found utterly perplexing.
But, in the context of this debate, I think I finally get it: if the Eagles flying were in fact a better plan, then obviously Elrond and Gandalf would have known that (being Wise and all) and so they would at least have considered asking the Eagles to help. Since they didn't, it must be because it was a bad plan. In other words, for the fiction to remain "connected" to its mechanics and "not broken", you have to believe that Hobbits walking was the best plan.
Fascinating.
