Quotes from the book (10)

I guess that people working in academia are on the official list of "People who are not allowed to envy other people traveling for their job". Apart from the cleaners, obviously. So there goes the introduction I had in mind, when I decided to blog about one of the funniest books I read in a while: The travel diaries of Karl Pilkington. For those of you who are not familiar with Karl: he is a jack-of-all-trades in the media landscape (podcaster, author, television producer), best known for the travel series "An idiot abroad" and his appearances in the Ricky Gervais Show (the world's most downloaded podcast, unless Adam Carolla succeeded in setting a new record), mostly as the butt of Gervais' practical jokes. 

The aforementioned book, spun off the travel documentary television series, describes the adventures of Karl, traveling in Egypt, Brazil, Jordan, China, India, Mexico and Peru. It is written as a diary, including his telephone conversations with the people who sent him abroad in the first place (Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant), and it is downright funny. His one-liners are hilarious, and some entries could have been scripted for a stand-up comedy show. A few examples: 

I had some toast and a bit of papaya. This was the first time I've ever eaten papaya. It was okay, but if someone told me I'd never eat papaya ever again, I wouldn't be bothered. I feel like this about most fruit. There is too much fruit in the world, and I don't like buying a lot of fruit, as it goes off so quickly. Maybe that's why we are told to eat five portions a day, just to get through the stuff before it gets mouldy. 

The odd thing with China is, they like to go out of their way to do things differently. Even something simple like reading a book they mess with. They read books from top to bottom and then back to the top again. It looks like they're agreeing with everything they're reading. 

The thing with announcing funny stuff is that you may end up with people staring at their screen, finding it all but hilarious. In that case, grab the book yourself and read it from top to bottom. You can agree with me afterwards: funny stuff...

Conversationally challenged

This morning I was quietly doing some work at home, when the doorbell suddenly rang. As I live in an apartment building I have that typical phone in my own apartment that allows you to ask who’s there. Unfortunately the phone is broken. So I have two choices: either let the unidentified visitor enter (I can still use the button to open the door remotely) or go down and see who it is.

In this particular instance I wasn’t going to let just anyone in. Call me paranoid, but then again we’ve had somewhat strange visitors before here. So I went down to open the door.

Standing outside was a young guy – perhaps a couple of years younger than I am. He had blackish hair that was combed back with a lot of gel and wore a curious outfit. I guess he’s one of those people who decide, even though it’s freezing, that they don’t need to adapt their outfit to the weather. As if they think: “I don’t care if it’s -5°. A shirt and a summer’s jacket will do just fine”. Strange lot, and the more I keep my eyes open for them on the street the last few days, the more I seem to come across them.

Anyway, there he was. So I open the door and give him a friendly but inquiring look. Eyebrows slightly raised, head cocked to the side and looking slighly upwards. As if to say: ‘Yes?’. At this point the guy doesn’t say anything but just steps into my rather small hallway. Now call me paranoid, but to me that’s odd. Someone rings my doorbell, I open the door for them and they just step inside, without so much as a word. And even though I didn't initiate the conversation, I'm not supposed to, I think. He is.

So I said to him: “Can I help you?”, trying to sound casual and accommodating, but probably not able to erase all notes of suspicion in my voice.

He looked at me sharply and said “I’m here to see my brother. You must know him”. That’s what he said, literally and with the same emphases. Now I found this odd for a bunch of reasons, the most important one being what I subsequently asked him. “So why didn’t you ring his doorbell then?”

At this point the guy was obviously annoyed, as I surmised from his curt answer: “Because his doorbell is broken.” I replied: “Ah, okay, it’s just…” and I left my sentence to trail off. Obviously, I meant to say “Ah, okay, it’s just that I found it a little strange that you ring my doorbell and you don’t tell me why you're there when I open the door”, but I didn’t say it out loud. I mean, that’s the way people handle social situations like that. You leave something unsaid but imply it, rather than being rude by saying it explicitly. It’s called ellipsis. We do it quite often. For instance, why when you accidentally touch someone’s hand in a crowded train you say ‘Sorry’ and not ‘Sorry I touched your hand’. That’s just making things more awkward.

However, this guy wasn’t too socially adept, as I was heavily suspecting by now. And my suspicions were confirmed by his answer to my “Ah, okay, it’s just…”. He said: “It’s just… what?”

So I tried a variety of the same technique of ellipsis. I said: “Well... it’s just that I wanted to know”, again leaving out what I wanted to know. And then I made a conversational mistake, I followed the remark by “It’s not as if I don’t believe you, you know”.

At which point he just sighed. And that was that.

I think this easily qualifies as one of the strangest conversations I’ve ever had. I mean, I can't for the life of me figure out what the sigh exactly meant. Surely he didn’t realize that my “It’s not as if I don’t believe you” actually implied the opposite (i.e. “Yes, I am suspicious of you”)? He'd react more angry if he realized that. Or did he realize that he had been wrong all along by not telling me why he was there in the first place? But that could hardly have been the case, since he was probably lying to me. Indeed, I could clearly hear him knock on his brother’s door and shout his name in the hallway. His brother wasn’t there though. Instead they met a few moments later back on the street. (Oh yes, I confess. I was spying).

But the strangest thing is that I now feel bad about the whole exchange.

Indeed, who is strange here? The guy who rings someone’s doorbell and doesn’t explain why he’s there, or the guy who has spent the whole day analyzing what was said (and not said) in those 30 seconds?

Right.

Bananas?

A few weeks ago, one of the Muslim clerics in Europe warned Muslim women not to get too close to bananas, cucumbers or other phallus-shaped vegetables, in order to avoid sexual thoughts. The unnamed cleric, whose directive was featured in an article in a religious publication, added that if women wanted to eat these food items, they should address a third party - preferably a male related to them, such as their husband or father - to cut the vegetables into pieces before serving. 

(a) This could be me being a bit weird, but have you ever walked through the fruit and vegetable aisle at the supermarket, trying not to give in to sexual thoughts? It must be easy though, if fruits and vegetables make you feel horny. Think about all these supermarkets advertising their weekly deals in a glossy, colourful magazines. My life as a 16-year-old could have been a lot easier, with an abundance of free porn magazines getting shoved into the mailbox. 

(b) Why is it that only Muslim women were addressed. Straight Muslim women, to be more precise. To me, it seems pretty obvious that men should no longer be allowed to get too close to melons, grapefruits, tomatoes, oranges and apples. Unless they're gay, I guess. But if you think about it, virtually any piece of fruit or vegetable is either phallic (carrots, corncobs, zucchini, eggplants and French beans, just to name a few) or erhm... yonic. Which makes perfect sense of course, as fruits are essentially the structures of a plant containing its seeds. You'd better not be a bisexual Muslim, if you'd ask me...

(c) Why consider fruits and vegetables only? How about toothbrushes and vacuum cleaners, pens and pencils or brooms and soup mixers? I could be on a roll now, but to me these objects look pretty phallic as well. And I'm not sure there's much room for innovation, as I would not like to brush my teeth with a device that is not shaped like a stick...

Sounds like someone deserves being hit by a baseball bat. Or a medicine ball, depending on his sexual orientation of course...

Twitter and God

Judging from the fact that most of you came to this particular page through Facebook, I’m guessing  most of us are no stranger to the social media anymore. Or are you? Today I saw a picture being shared furiously on the aforementioned social network, which explained eight different social media in a funny way. What was less funny to me was the fact that I had never heard of five of them: foursquare, Instagram, Pinterest, Last.fm and G+ are total strangers to me. (Okay, I know G+ stands for Google+ but I have no idea how it works).

So that’s five out of eight, but which three are missing? Obviously the most popular ones, since even I know them. There’s Facebook, duh. YouTube, that’s another one. And finally there’s Twitter – which only last week was in the news.

The occasion was that recently the first major study was concluded as to the relevance of Twitter. As you probably know, this rapidly growing microblogging service enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters. Some use it for personal reasons, as a kind of online version of cell-phone text messages (sms), while others follow or write tweets in a more professional context, like the political media or cultural scene. The conclusion of the study was that a good tweet is relatively rare. It seems only 36% percent of them are experienced by the users as ‘interesting’.

Of course this is a difficult criterion. Suppose I asked you to rate your current email inbox. What percentage would you rate as ‘interesting’? Moreover, if a certain account you follow on Twitter is not interesting anymore, you can easily unfollow it. Indeed, whereas with Facebook you need permission to follow someone’s account, with Twitter you can instantly follow anyone you want. Personally, for instance, I follow @BarackObama, @ParisHilton and even @jesus. The sky is the limit, pardon the pun.

Which brings me to the following. To give you a small sample of how Twitter works, I thought I’d give you a selection of Ricky Gervais’ tweets. Besides an outrageously funny comic, he’s an animal rights activist, a humanitarian and a convinced atheist. Above all, Ricky Gervais is not afraid to speak his mind about what he believes in.

About God and religion, for instance. A while ago Gervais got caught up in a discussion about religious matters. I don’t know exactly when it started, but it seemed to speed up after this tweet:

@rickygervais And this photo is NOT me a dressed as Jesus. It's from The Invention Of Lying. And even if it was, so fucking what? http://pic.twitter.com/DhOD7lF1

20 Jan

What followed was a veritable bombardment of Gervais on Twitter by people who tried to convince him to believe in this or that God or religion. Here’s some of the funnier ones (in quotes “ ”), most of the  time with Gervais’ answers immediately following:

@rickygervais “@HerNameIsDawn: @rickygervais What do you think happens to the mind after you die?” The same as what happens to your voice

24 Jan

@rickygervais “@ckleass: do you have any friends who r Christian?” Yes. & Jewish & Muslim. I've also friends who love GLEE. We don't have to always agree

25 Jan

@rickygervais Ask yourself why you don't believe in all the other gods. Your answer, is why I don't believe in yours. This endeth the religious tweets.

25 Jan

@rickygervais “@jskrew: I believe in Santa Claus and the Easter bunny- what religion is that?" As valid as any other.

29 Jan

@rickygervais “@LeoDukes: Here's a thought! I'm a fan who enjoys your works, but Im sick of you going on about religion. Should I stop following?” Yes

1 Feb

@rickygervais “@ChallonGoodeRVC: @lewisdent @billybasset1 there's heaps of proof of Gods existence!” Go on...?

3 Feb

@rickygervais “@Graeme289: oh man give it a rest about god .....” Sorry for tweeting you all the time Graeme I...oh hold on, YOU'RE following ME. #gorp

3 Feb

Now who said comedy and philosophy couldn’t go together?

Ricky, if we had one, we would award you the 2012 Fred and Fred prize!

One gozer, more geezers...

Yesterday, I went to the latest show of whom I consider to be Belgium's finest stand-up comedian: Bart Cannaerts ('Waar is Barry'). With his mix of clever puns, funny observations describing the connection between our language and everyday life, neurotic stories and a sheer amount of visual humour, he had me going through the complete spectrum: from chuckling over smiling to laughing out loud. One of the nice things about his show was the fact that it actually carried a message. Without giving too much away, as I do recommend you to check him out yourself, I can share a particularly interesting reflection of his, concerning photographs. "Photographs", he said, "are usually taken under the pretext of giving you the opportunity to live the moment again, at home. This is bullshit, as you didn't actually live the moment, since you were too busy taking the picture in the first place."

This reminded me of a particular experience I had this weekend, not to mention all the previous times (notably whilst traveling). I had one of these moments that will sound quite familiar to keen photographers, in which the only thing you can think is "Damned, where's my camera when I need it?". On my way home, cycling along a riverbank in Ghent, I noticed a flock of birds (geese, I suppose) flying in what can safely be described as a fractal formation. You are probably familiar with the typical V-shaped form, but this was different, almost like a binary tree - if that makes sense to you. Halfway one of the legs of the bigger V, another leg branched off, generating a smaller version of the original shape. This repeated itself at several places, including the smaller branches, generating something which essentially resembled a river delta. Quite fitting, I thought, as they are probably on their way to a river delta, somewhere near the equator. 

This particular view of the sky was mesmerizing: the mathematical pattern, the actual colour of the sky, the birds following each other; it made me realize that I was missing a perfect shot. And yet, in retrospect, I feel quite happy that I did not have the opportunity to capture it on film, as this might have ruined my recollection. The mental image is firmly etched into my mind now, making it way stronger than the 4.6Mb image I could have extracted with my camera. As cheesy as it sounds, I really enjoyed riding my bike whilst looking upwards, seeing these magnificent creatures head towards their friends in the South. They were probably completely in panic "What the duck is going on here? Weren't we supposed to leave like... I don't know, a month or two ago?". I envisioned families of geese, switching heads from thermometer to calender, staring at the not so freezing temperatures in utter disbelief, fearing that the annual barbeque party in the backyard of their African friends would no longer be an option. 

But look, it's one week later and the situation drastically changed. Hundreds of people frozen to death as temperatures keep plunging (reasons to stop complaining about trivial shit: plus one), political turmoil over the fact that homeless people have to spend the night outside, and there is more to come. I am safely inside now: nicely warm on the outside - thank your local deity for sweaters and heaters, nicely warm on the inside. Because I saw them geezers on their way to normality, minding their own aviary business. I wished them good luck, I do hope they'll drop me a postcard... 

LinkedIn: TED (The Surprising Science of Happiness)

For various reasons I have been studying cognitive literary theory over the last few months. And although I find it fascinating, I'm not going to bore you with it. However, it did remind me to get you Fredians acquainted with one of my favourite websites: www.ted.com.

TED, which stands for Technology Entertainment Design and which uses the subtitle Ideas Worth Spreading, is a nonprofit devoted to just that: its website is full of passionate talks by the world's most inspired thinkers. And although the three domains seems somewhat limited, there's really no end to the variety of subjects and speakers. From performance artists over business men to mathematics professors.

But I'm dragging on and I wanted (have to!) keep it short today. So here's the reason I was reminded of cognitive literary theory. One of the talks featured is called The Surprising Science of Happiness and is delivered by cognitive researcher Nancy Etcoff.

It's fascinating stuff. Not only does it show how profound the impact of cognitive research is, but also (and much more importantly) it is the most intelligent thing I've ever heard anyone say about the most difficult topic out there: happiness.

So if you can spare 14 minutes and 22 seconds, you won't regret it...

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/nancy_etcoff_on_happiness_and_why_we_want_it.html 

Dictionary for aliens (3)

It's been a while since the previous entries, see here for an example, but we are finally back with another episode of the dictionary for aliens...

Baseball: This is a popular ball game played by earthlings, especially in the United States, Japan and Cuba. It is played with a bat and a baseball. The latter is modelled on fossilized remnants of so-called Flurkimons, a type of rodent which once inhabited the planet Flurkistan in the Mice Galaxies, next to that gigantic hypermarket where they used to sell vintage sponge umbrellas. 

Flurkimons (Leporidae Ceruminis) became famous in the year 27915AR, when two Flurkinese scientists (Wofflidop and Zondistrop) solved a famous, long-standing problem in Textile Engineering for Creatures with Ears: "Does there exist a way to cross earplugs with ear warmers?". The answer turned out to be the Flurkimon itself: this fluffy animal was found to feed on earwax, and it therefore became common practice amongst creatures with ears to balance two of these hairy rodents on top of their head: the fur itself protected the ears against extreme temperatures, whereas the tongue of the Flurkimon (instinctively inserted into the ear, to feed on earwax) protected the bearer against excessive noises. In exchange for some gentle slurping noises. Or gnawing noises - depending on the consistency of the creature's earwax...

Legend has it that the first visitors to planet Earth had Flurkimons on board, but they soon got bored by the deafening silence in the spacecraft (which was built according to advanced noise-reduction techniques developed a few decades earlier for vacuum cleaners) and so they wanted to know what would happen if they put the tongue of a Flurkimon inside its own ear. This turned out to be a complete disaster: as biologists have later confirmed, the saliva of a flurkimon triggers the production of its own earwax, causing this creature to get trapped in an almost sadistic consequence of what the laws of evolution predicted. Its tongue and ear continued to grow, as the production of saliva and earwax ran out of control, whereas all other body parts shriveled away and in the end disappeared completely. During the penultimate phase of its existence (the Red Giant phase), the Flurkimon expanded as a throbbing ball of earwax-slurping, heavily pulsating tissue, after which it imploded into a little white spherically-shaped object of incredible density (the White Dwarf phase). This object was left behind on the Earth, not in the least because of its smell.

We believe that the inventor of the baseball must have picked up the fossilized remnants of this particular unfortunate Flurkimon, but decided to throw it away immediately. Because of its smell, obviously. This also explains the strange rules according to which this game is played: one earthling throws the ball away, as fast as possible (the smell!), another earthling then hits the ball as far away as possible with a bat (I am telling you, the smell!) and a third earthling then tries to catch this ball, only to throw it back as quickly as possible (yups, the smell). 

Wofflidop A.,  Zondistrop, A., On a remarkable connection between Flurkinese rodents and Textile Engineering, Journal of Edible Excrement 15, pp. 12-9038 (27915AR).

Gorilkouftimon, G. Is it possible to build a perpetuum mobile with Flurkinese earwax and saliva, Journal of Unlikely Answers to Difficult Problems 9 No. 78, pp. 12-13 (27911AR).