Nothing else in my opinion could be a sufficient cause for so apparently absurd a custom". Cook later brought back a tattooed South Sea islander known as Omai, who was paraded before King George.
My random choice of French words had put me in the apparently absurd position of ordering a fish course to follow a fish course.
In some ways, asking the apparently absurd question "does a parenting guide have anything to teach us about the criminal justice system?" is to ask the fundamental question of Plato's Republic.
Brewster claimed that Sir Isaac Newton's religious beliefs had previously considered nebular ideas as tending to atheism, and quoted him saying that "the growth of new systems out of old ones, without the mediation of a Divine power, seemed to him apparently absurd".
He provides the example of Crash, where he took the "apparently absurd" idea that car crashes might have a beneficial role, and tested this "against the reality that people were actually experiencing".
Well, that is apparently absurd.
At least one of the apparently absurd programme ideas pitched in desperation by Alan Partridge to the controller of BBC Television, in fact, made it to air.
China's censors are not alone in the apparently absurd lengths they go to protect their population from anything that might "hurt" nationalist sentiments.
Sometimes it is when we stop trying to understand or interrogate apparently "absurd" phenomena — like the category of the "new" in art — that we become more open to them.
Certainly, the global village seems to need a more complex moral code than that offered by Rambo and the Terminator, and Bollywood, even with all its apparently absurd sentimentality, may be better placed to provide it than the cynically, if slickly, retailed violence of Hollywood.
However, when the apparently absurd prediction was actually put to the test by François Arago, it was borne out, demonstrating that reductio ad absurdum does not work in science.
