A New Goat & Bear Musical Short

Homophones, oxymorons, false causes, and appeals to consequences

Issue No. 15

Watch Episode 4 at youtu.be/4tjqUevD41k

I’m excited to bring you the fourth installment of Goat & Bear. This one’s on false causes and appeals to consequences. A reminder that a false cause is when we assume that because two events happened together, then one of them must have caused the other. This sort of inference is sometimes referred to as confusing correlation with causation. As in these verses:

If you’re in a log cabin
In a forest somewhere
And you work up the idea
To rough out a little square
And then when you look up
You spot a curious black bear
Hanging out by the stair
In a sight that’s surely rare

You might think the truth is bare
That the square led to the bear
To walk up to you and stare

But it probably showed up
Because it’s rummaging for food
Desperate for a bite
It’s in a right old mood
So before you conclude
That a thing caused another
Be sure it wasn’t chance
So your mind doesn’t suffer
And you disappoint your mother

An appeal to consequences is when we determine whether something is true or not based on whether the consequences of believing it are positive. If the consequences are positive, the thing is assumed to be true. If they’re negative, it’s assumed to be false. As in these verses:

Not disappoint your mother?
Is that what makes an argument good?
My my
Listen up—

Whether the outcome’s good or not
Eyes on the issue, don’t lose the plot
Judge it based on its own value
Separate it from result and milieu
Just because you might trip and fall
You shouldn’t pooh-pooh basketball
Now listen closely, far and near
Be mindful of results you hear

The next Goat & Bear episode will be on the composition fallacy—concluding that what’s true of a part (a steering wheel feels good to the touch) must also be true of the whole (the car is a good buy).

These musical shorts continue to be a lot of fun to put together. Partly, because it’s been really interesting looking into how a medium that combines video, music, and rhyming verse can help with learning, by making lessons more memorable. And partly, because I love wordplay. Which is interesting in and of itself, because wordplay often means writing things in a way that’s ambiguous, open to interpretation, open to misinterpretation. The exact opposite of what we try to do when we’re thinking critically about something.

My favorite form of wordplay is the homophone. Homophones are words that sound the same but have different meanings. Bear and bare, for instance. If the words are also spelled the same, they’re called homonyms. Bear (the animal) and bear (carry). You sometimes have words whose meanings have changed over time. Egregious used to mean really good, now it means really bad. Or words that have different colloquial meanings. Sick can mean ill, or it can mean excellent. Wicked can mean immoral or it can mean really good.

The dinner party was wicked, innit.

—Abraham Lincoln, Adventures About Town¹

P. G. Wodehouse is one of my favorite writers. Every solo road trip I ever took, I took it with one of his books playing in the car. In his writing, you often find this sort of ambiguity deployed, homophones and homonyms included.

‘It’s with ref. to this aggravated assault, sir.’

‘What aggravated assault?’

‘The one I’m telling you about, sir. I was assaulted by the duckpond.’

‘How the devil can you be assaulted by a duck pond?’

Constable Potter saw where the misunderstanding had arisen. The English language is full of these pitfalls.

‘When I said “by the duck pond”, I didn’t mean “by the duck pond”, I meant “by the duck pond” … proceeded Constable Potter.

—P. G. Wodehouse, Utterly Uncle Fred

In the sketch show, The Two Ronnies, there’s an episode in which a customer goes into a shop, and reads items off a shopping list, confusing the shop owner to no end. The shopkeeper brings him four candles. The customer goes, No, I said fork handles. The shopkeeper brings him (bath) plugs. the customer goes, No, I said (electric) plugs. And so on. It’s all really silly.

Homophones aren’t always used for comedic effect. They can be poignant. Here’s a vignette I scribbled down one time. It borrows a poetic structure I grew up with—AAAB quatrains where the first three lines always end in homophones. I must have memorized hundreds of lines in this form.

His mightiest swing knocked down a beam
Then a tumbling wall let in a beam
With a job well done, he flashed a beam
To his fellow builders and roused them

Not one to bend, he nearly broke
So he sailed to a land, as a new dawn broke
It carried him, for nine, then its water broke
And he found himself still a stranger

So homophones are fun. Another fun figure of speech is the oxymoron, which is not a disparaging term for someone, but rather when you have two contradictory words right next to each other in a sentence. A friend sent me a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy recently, appalled by my cavalier admission that I’d never read it. I’m glad he did. Among many other things, I realized for the very first time where that translation service from the ‘00s—Babel Fish—got its name from.

In one scene, a philosopher demands that a supercomputer capable of answering all questions be shut down to maintain “rigidly defined areas of doubt”. It’s a memorable line because of how absurd the contradiction is.

“You just let the machines get on with the adding up,” warned Majikthise, “and we’ll take care of the eternal verities thank you very much. You want to check your legal position you do mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we’re straight out of a job aren’t we? I mean what’s the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?”

“That’s right,” shouted Vroomfondel, “we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”

―Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Language can be a lot of fun.

To close out the issue, I figured it would be nice to give a glimpse into some of the work that went into this little side-project, and the talented people who contributed to this series.

Alejandro Giraldo drew Goat, Bear, and Little Dude. What I love about Alejandro’s style is that every time we work together on a project, his style will be slightly different. There’ll be a splash of something new in it, on account of new experiences or inspirations he’s had. I asked him about this, and he said that’s exactly what inspires his work.

Each of my illustrations comes from a large background of references: it can be other people’s work, a conversation with a friend, a movie I once or recently saw, anything! The magic happens when you mix all of that with your background to create a brand new piece of art. My advice to young illustrators is, don’t worry about sticking to a style, focus on the core message.

Dylan Hales is a voice artist. I reached out to him, originally, to cast him as the voice of Goat. But then he said, oh by the way, I’m a composer too. So he did the music for the series as well, which I’m sure you’ll agree, is catchy. I asked him to share a thought on voice acting that most people don’t know about:

The subtle nuances of the voice are so easily overlooked. When you try to replicate a normal conversation into a scene you suddenly become very aware of the way you say things and what a dramatic a difference that makes in how you’re understood. A simple example is emphasis.

If you take the sentence, “I didn’t say that you knew.” Where you place the emphasis can totally change how the sentence is understood.

“I didn’t say that you knew.”

“I didn’t say that you knew.”

“I didn’t say that you knew.”

Awareness of how we say things is just as important as what is being said.

Onur Cobanoglu is the voice of Bear. He comes from a heavy metal background, which is apparent in his singing style. It adds a fantastic touch to Bear’s personality. Ana Luiza Viola Primo worked on the short animations you see in some of the episodes. She did a wonderful job. I learned how time-consuming it is to do animations, which is why the format for the series ended up being the way it is, with static images, mostly, and short animations mixed in.

Here are some of my early sketches of Goat and Bear from December 2022. My own personal process for projects starts with sketches or notes that have, at best, a vague direction, and eventually turn into something concrete. It’s a messy, unpredictable path. In this case, the initial thought was for the project to be an illustrated book for adults who are children at heart. Then the idea evolved into it being an interactive book. Then came the idea of one long story as a video. Then the eventual idea of one-to-two-minute-long musical shorts.

Constraints made it all the more interesting. I didn’t have the budget to animate the whole thing. So there’s faux-animation in the videos, you’ll notice, which happen mostly with zooms, crops, pans, and quick edits. There’s an analogy a standup comedian once shared that I like, and that’s relevant to constraints. He said with creative work, what you sometimes do is share samples of what’s possible, much like when you go into a furniture store and the salesperson shows you samples of carpets or curtains. I’m probably butchering the line, but that’s the gist of it.

Bear singing to himself (left); Bear urges an uptight Goat to get in on the singing (right).

Goat sings to Bear, “Your mind will connect things that aren’t at all related …”

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One of my promises when I started this newsletter last June was to write two essays a year on something personal, possibly related to the creative process. I haven’t done that yet, so I’d like to spend the next weeks making a start on that essay. If I find I’m not able to fulfill that promise, I’ll pause all paid subscriptions, which means existing paying subscribers won’t get charged anything for the foreseeable future.

I’m thinking of covering apophenia next—the tendency to see and assume meaningful patterns where none exists. It’s a topic I’ve wanted to dig into for a while.

Adam felt that he was sleepwalking. It’s a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it.

―John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Until next time,
—Ali

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1. Abraham Lincoln didn’t actually say that.