As a fitting remembrance of the late Matthew Perry, the fellow who brought Chandler Bing to life, allow me to reflect in academic form on a contradiction at the heart of the FRIENDS' theme song. The first line of the first verse: No one ever told you life was gonna be this way seems in pretty direct conflict with the fifth line of the third verse: Your mother told you there'd be days like these. The predicate of the two sentences is identical: "to tell." The subject affirmed by the latter would seem pretty clearly to be included in the subject denied in the former. That is: Mom is somebody. And, considering the object case, life is a succession of days. Perhaps some philosopher could defend the song from the charge that there is a DIRECT contradiction in the lyrics by contending that the object case in the former sentence seems to refer to a more pervasive condition of "life" than simply that it contains "days like these." But is it possible...