Our Mission Statement, or 1/100th of One Cow

The concept for this blog was born when Harry Wollstonecraft Shelley  asked Ginny Woolf, “What does .01% actually mean?”

Ginny puzzled for a moment and offered, “I believe it’s 1/100th of a percent.”

A bewildered look swept across Harry’s face. She paused, cupping her chin in her hand as if to prevent an unwise interjection. She removed the hand and examined the surface of fist, before raising her index finger, an arrow pointing towards the query shaping itself above them. “Let us allow our minds wander to a more concrete pursuit, so that we can intimately know such an amount as 1/100th of a percent. If I were to obtain one hundred cows…would our ratio equal one cow in its totality, or 1/100th of one cow?”

Ginny reflected carefully. “Well… it is one cow in a hundred, correct? So would not a cow as such be equivalent to 1/100th of a percent of cow?”

“Wait! I’ve got it!” Harry triumphantly exclaimed. “The solution is 1/100th of… of one cow. One cow in its entirety would be too large a figure.”

In a minute gesture, Ginny scrunched her eyes closed and shook her head, as if reacting to an unpleasant smell. “How could this be?!” She mused for a moment. “Wait… I think this notion is becoming clearer to me. If we accept the premise that one cow represents 1%, then 1/100th of a cow, out of 100 cows, could certainly quantify 1/100th of a percent. But wouldn’t that make your total  population of cattle 1000%? 1/100th times 1/100th comes to 1/1000th, correct?

Harry began to question herself, suddenly acutely aware of her assumptions relating to math and bovines. “It must work! It positively must! Perhaps this would be clearer if we employed the analogy of 1000 cows.”

“Yes!” Ginny’s universe settled into place again for a moment, only to erupt into shards at the new problem presented. “So one cow of these thousand is truly 1/100th of a percent?”

“No… surely not,” Harry negated. “A cow, or any animal of one’s choice, is one of many, ad infinitum… enslaved to singularity.”

“Ah, so we have not even scratched the surface of our veritable conundrum: a creature does not lend itself to such a mathematical construct. Could a cow, or any mammal for that matter, ever yield a mere percentage? Short of mutilating every cow’s parts to yield a collective whole, doesn’t a ratio corrupt the essence of an animal? A mass sum of cattle parts would be the purest method of extracting .01%, would it not?” Ginny was content to rest at her simplification, her notion that some questions were never meant to be posed.

Harry reticently protested, “And yet surely there is a way…”

Harry’s comment was snatched into the abyss of the day’s monotony, a thought frozen in it’s conception. Ginny and Harry toiled away in their solitary lives, haunted by an inability to escape their meaty ponderance. Maybe they never would, and every controversy would boil down to this moment, this seemingly unanswerable 1/100th of one cow.

The reader will be relieved to know that since the infamous cow debate, philosophers have discovered a theory to address this stupefying concept: it is called “basic mathematics.”

The writers of this blog will attempt to answer life’s astounding inquiries and confrontations with the sole mechanism at an English graduate student’s disposal: endless contemplation. We hope the reader will relish our paradoxical battles and contribute to the growth of the academy’s least and most practical arm: English studies.