Excerpt: The Name of My Country

This should be done either at the zoo, on a farm, or in the Amazon jungle. These are three areas where you can reliably expect to find both horses and parrots. Don’t count on knowing any friends who have one of each, and if they did they wouldn’t let you borrow them for this experiment. This is not dangerous to either the parrot or the horse, but you will never be able to convince your friends that this is the case, or that you are not insane. It would probably be a good idea not to tell your friends about this at all, now that we think of it. Anyway, go to where you can see both a parrot and a horse. Look at them really hard for about a minute. Then squeeze your eyes shut and remember which one was on the right and which was on the left. Then open your eyes. You’ll find out something about parrots and horses and which is which in an alternate universe. We really want you to do this. We don’t just want you to take our word for anything, which is why we’re not telling you what you’ll see. This is what we told Dave to do when Larry got his email, and he believes us now. We told him how we figured it out. But we won’t tell you unless you can prove you tried it to. Go for it. Do it now.