Editing 915: Connoisseur

{{comic
| number    = 915
| date      = June 22, 2011
| title     = Connoisseur
| image     = connoisseur.png
| titletext = Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.
}}

==Explanation==
[[White Hat]] is fond of good {{w|wine}}, and he can probably distinguish slight differences in different types of wine, perhaps being the type that attends {{w|wine tasting}} parties. He doesn't like the cheap wine that Cueball has served for him (implying a cheap wine cannot be a good one, an opinion held by stereotypical wine snobs), looking with disgust at the label of the offending bottle. On the other hand, [[Cueball]] doesn't have a preference; all of them taste the same for him, so presumably he gets the cheaper ones. White Hat tells Cueball that if he just tried some really good wine and paid more attention he would discover a whole new world.

Cueball's answer is the main message of the comic. He says that you can spend enough time focusing on the details of ''anything'' and develop an appreciation for the nuances. He lists a number of random categories that this is true of: {{w|house music}}, {{w|fonts}}, {{w|ants}}, ending with {{w|Wikipedia:Signatures|Wikipedia signatures}} and {{w|Canadian}} {{w|surrealist}} {{w|porn}}. He claims that, if you spend enough time focusing on any one subject, then you'll become a snobby '''{{w|connoisseur}}''' on that topic. This implies that wine drinking is simply a random hobby, no more valuable than any other.

White Hat does not seem to like this implication, and claims that some things have "more depth" than others. In many western societies, wine appreciation is a class signifier, and is treated as a mark of culture and education. White Hat appears to embrace this mindset, implying that there's an inherent quality in learning to distinguish "good" from "bad" wines, and that failing to do so means missing out on valuable experiences. Cueball counters this, maintaining that that same level of appreciation could be taken from any experience. As an extreme example, he chooses something as obscure as 500 pictures of [[Joe Biden]], then {{w|Vice President of the United States}} under {{w|Barack Obama}}, eating a sandwich. He claims that if people were locked up in a box with those pictures for a year (therefore being forced to focus on them, for want of other stimulation), they would end up being connoisseurs with the same vehemence regarding which pictures are good (and what makes a picture good) as any wine connoisseur. 

White Hat claims that this is an exaggeration, but Cueball takes this as a challenge so in the last panel, apparently White Hat and Cueball are actually running this experiment. The final panel shows a box containing at least two people arguing over the relative qualities of what appear to be the photos Cueball referenced earlier. The argument sounds very much like a pair of wine aficionados debating which vintages are best, displaying strong opinions about minute details and invented categories. Specialized interests and the people involved in them are used again, with ants being the subject of [[1610: Fire Ants]],  typefaces in [[590: Papyrus]] and [[736: Cemetery]], plastic straws in [[1095: Crazy Straws]], porn-video quality in [[598: Porn]], and common colds in [[2535: Common Cold Viruses]]. In [[1534: Beer]], Cueball also argue slight differences in alcohol brands don't make much difference (in 915 "Wine all tastes the same to me."; in 1534, "maybe we should just admit that all beer tastes kind of bad and everyone's just pretending?") and people just pretend due to social pressure.

The title text presents the same idea in a different wording. Our brains scale the quality of all things the same way, with a subjective impression of the difference between best and worst largely the same, regardless of what is being evaluated.  Things with a narrow dynamic range, like the Wikipedia signatures or pictures of Biden mentioned the comic, have their negligible differences in quality expanded so that the best are as good as the best of anything, and inversely for the worst.

==Transcript==
:[White Hat is holding a wine glass down in one hand and holding a bottle of wine up in front of him with the other hand. He is looking at the label and talking with Cueball standing next to him with his own filled wine glass in one hand. He is looking down at the glass.]
:White Hat: How do you stand this cheap wine?
:Cueball: Wine all tastes the same to me.

:[Close-up of White Hat.]
:White Hat: You've just never had ''good'' wine. If you paid more attention, you'd realize there's a whole world here.

:[Close-up on Cueball, who spreads his arms out, resulting in the wine in the glass sloshing so much that part of the wine is above the rim of the glass, some even hanging over the edge and a spray droplet hanging above the sloshing liquid.]
:Cueball: But that's true of ''anything!'' Wine, house music, fonts, ants, Wikipedia signatures, Canadian surrealist porn—
:Cueball: Spend enough time with any of them and you'll become a snobby connoisseur.

:[This panel has no border (aka a 'frameless panel') and is next to but aligned further down than the first three panels. It shows a zoom out of both White Hat and Cueball again. White Hat now has both glass and bottle held down at his side. Cueball holds his glass down, but tilted away from him. A small puddle of wine is on the floor next to Cueball.]
:White Hat: But some things do have more depth than others.
:Cueball: If you locked people in a box for a year with 500 still frames of Joe Biden eating a sandwich, by the end they'd be adamant that some were great and some were terrible.
:White Hat: You're exaggerating.
:Cueball: Oh, really?

:[This panel is below the feet of the two characters from the previous panel. It goes further to the left than those two, and is wider than the previous panels, but it does not go much past the middle, so there is a blank white space to the left of this panel, below the first and most of the second panel. It shows a box, with two star burst on the surface from where two voices emanate from the inside. Over the top left of the panels frame is a small frame with a caption:]
:A year later:

:[The voice from left side of the box:]

:Sure, most closed-mouth frames are boring, but in #415, the way the man's jaw frames the mayo on his hand is pure perfection, and—

:[The voice from right side of the box:]

:What a surprise- ''you'' praising a mayo frame. Listening to '''you''', I'd think there was nothing else in The Sandwich. 

:[The voice from right side of the box:]

:Frankly, the light hitting J.B.'s collar through the lettuce would put #242 in my top ten even if he had ''no'' mayo on his hand at ''all''.

==Trivia==
This is the first xkcd comic featuring [[Joe Biden]].

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring White Hat]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Politics]]
[[Category:Food]] <!-- Sandwich and wine -->
[[Category:Wikipedia]] <!-- Wikipedia signatures -->
[[Category:Animals]]  <!-- Ants -->
[[Category:Music]]  <!-- House Music -->
[[Category:Sex]]  <!-- Canadian surrealist porn -->
[[Category:Comics featuring Joe Biden]]