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). 

Mondays

I’ve referred to the 1979 song I Don’t Like Mondays before – you know, the one Bob Geldof wrote after the 16-year-old shooter of the Grover Cleveland Elementary School massacre explained her actions with ‘I don't like Mondays; this livens up the day’ (full story here). But actually, I quite like Mondays. For me, there’s something refreshing in the start of a new week, but I guess we all suffer from a bad Monday once in a while.

Today, for instance, isn’t a particularly good one. My head is a bit foggy from a persistent cold and I’m in no mood to do any serious work. My brain sputters like an old lawn mower and my legs feel like sand. So imagine my surprise (and horror!) when I read that today should be the happiest Monday of the year!

That’s right. According to the Daily Mail (read the story here), psychologists are hailing today, 30 January, as ‘Happy Monday’. Apparently by the last weekend of January many people have recovered from the financial stress Christmas and New Year caused and therefore start thinking about the annual summer holiday. (Incidentally, two people told me about their travel plans last weekend.) The result is that today should be the happiest Monday you’ll spend in 2012!

It is, on the other hand, quite curious that only last week, you’ve gone through your worst Monday of the year. Indeed, the third Monday of January is known as ‘Blue Monday’ and is reputed to be the most depressing day of the whole year. (For Fred's jeans-related Blue Monday, click here) According to the Telegraph (read the story here) the reasons are post-Christmas blues, cold dark nights and the arrival of unpaid credit card bills.

Therefore, the researcher in me concludes, in only a week’s time our lives have apparently gone from zero to hero. Hooray for us. But for me personally, the conclusion is radically different. If this is the best Monday I’ll have in 2012, I’m in for some rough times… 

But wait, I almost forgot. I didn't factor in that all this BS (acronym for a large animal's faeces) about Mondays is pseudoscience. Indeed, I've had three splendid Mondays already in 2012. Besides, who are you, dear Telegraph, to tell me that today should have been my best? Or perhaps your editor was just having a bad day?

Keep on Rollin(s)

According to the Wikipedia entry on amor platonicus, genuine Platonic love means that 'the beautiful or lovely other person inspires the mind and the soul and directs one's attention to spiritual things'. Assuming this is a good definition, I can safely begin this blogpost by saying that I am Platonically in love with Henry Rollins. Born as Henry Lawrence Garfield in 1961, an American singer-songwriter, spoken word artist, writer, comedian, publisher, actor (Sons of Anarchy, for example) and radio DJ. Make your own acronym with the following words: disorder, attention, hyperactivity and deficit...

I've seen him on the Arenberg stage on Tuesday, performing his spoken word show "the Long March", and I was (once again) completely blown away. From the moment he comes on stage, wearing his standard uniform (black trousers and a black t-shirt, although not wearing Vans this time), until he leaves the stage three hours later: the man just doesn't stop talking. His mouth doesn't even stop for the smallest sip of water, he is a verbal muscle machine on a roll... Early Black Flag memories, provocative rants on American politics and global economy, flashes of auto-critique, funny travel stories and an insight into his ever-positive (and highly contagious) attitude in life: he kneads it into an entertaining show which somehow combines his humour ('uma', referring to one of his travel stories) with an amount of energy which could easily help a few countries through the winter months. Based in the Northern hemisphere, du-uh.

As today is National Poetry Day (not the international one, mind you, that would be March 21), I decided to add two particular pieces by Rollins. First of all, a quote: The only difference between me and others is that they think they can change something with cute little poems, nice cards or embracing trees and being nice to little lapdogs. From a man who is as active as he is (check the internet), I can take this.

Secondly, a cute little poem. By Mister Rollins, of course.

ADVENTURES IN THE GREAT OUTDOORS
 You climb, and climb.
Hand over hand.
 You reach the top.
 You stand on the shaky edge of your heart.
 You look in her eyes.
 You hold your breath and jump.
 You Leap into her arms.
 Her arms fall at her sides.
 You fall past her window.
 You hit the ground.
 You are shattered.
 All broken up, like someone taking a bottle, and dropping it onto the ground.
 All busted up.
 Sharp jagged broken pieces of yourself lying on the ground. 
You put the pieces back together again.
 They never go back quite the same.
 The outside is seamless and smooth.
 But inside, broken glass, mind and soul with little cracks in the sides,
 and loose splinters at the bottom. 
They stay to remind you.
 At times the soul glass splinters will give you a jab to remind you of your leap.
 After a time when you start climbing again you will forget about the soul glass splinters.
 She can break your fall, or let you fall and break.
 And every time you jump
 You just know she’s going to catch you.

Ah, it feels good to 'know' people making you feel less afraid to turn 51...

Pippa

A few days ago an item came by in the news that reminded me to complain about something (lol). The segment was about the most popular names for baby girls in Flanders in 2011 (big sigh). The list is as follows: 1) Emma, 2) Julie, 3) Lotte, 4) Marie and 5) Elise. Yet the most interesting fact, apparently, was that there was a remarkable surge of one other name: Pippa. And of course Pippa Middleton’s popularity explains the phenomenon.

Now while you are reading this, ask yourself: why do I know Pippa Middleton? (Notice that I’m not even considering the possibility you don’t know her)

That’s right. Pippa Middleton is Kate Middleton’s sister and you know her because of these pictures:

At the royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton she made quite an impression, it is said time and again, for wearing a nice dress (some say nicer than the bride’s) and for being, well simply put, a nice-looking girl. Understandable, isn’t it?

I agree, but that’s where it stops for me. What happened after the wedding is sheer insanity.

Some facts. Pippa is photographed somewhere between 300 and 400 times a day (link). Pippa has recently signed a £400,000 deal to write a guide to party planning (link). Pippa’s ass is set to get its own YouTube online series (link). I kid you not.

And why, I ask you?

Why is this Pippa so famous? Does she have a lovely personality? We don’t know. Does she have a nice voice? We don’t know. What are her talents? We don’t know.

Apparently, we don’t know anything about this woman, but she’s world famous nonetheless. At least Paris Hilton has a sex tape and shows her knickers once in a while in some nightclub. But Pippa? The ‘news’ media watchers publish about her is often so boring (Pippa loans Kate’s coat. Pippa goes running a half-marathon), that I seriously suspect Pippa to be boring as well.

Surely it can’t be all explained by the bum, can it? I mean, sure the woman is blessed with a beautiful behind, but let’s be honest, it ain’t that fabulous. Seriously, let’s hand out a weirdly anonymous compliment, but I’ve dated at least three girls who had much better bums than Pippa. In general, I honestly think that many girls and women I know in person are more beautiful than this Pippa character.

So why is she famous? The truth? Pippa is famous for being famous. That’s how weirdly empty we’ve become as a society. And you know what is the weirdest part? 

I’m pretty sure Pippa hates it.

Length (sometimes) matters

I love it when I see my English vocabulary expanding. This, of course, in sharp contrast to my abdominal circumference or the occasional pimple on the inside of my ear. Today, I bumped into a word I hadn't met before: somnambulism, which is basically a synonym for sleepwalking. Once again, it made me realize how lucky I am not to suffer from fear of long words.

Yes, fear of long words. Chances are you didn't know this, but this is an actual phobia. Some of the known symptoms of this form of fear are rapid breathing, sweating, overall feeling of dread, shortness of breath, irregular heartbeat and nausea. Ironically enough, the official medical term for this phobia is (and I swear, this is real, I am not kidding you) hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia (or 'sesquipedalophobia' for "short"). Say what?

Now, imagine your name is Christopher-William and that you were born in a lovely village in Wales called Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. By the time you shared your personal details with the specialist investigating your condition, you might be vomiting the shit out of yourself in a corner of his office. And I'm afraid you don't even want to hear what you're suffering from: by the time the conclusion of the investigation is communicated, you could actually be dying...

What intrigues me, is the following question: would there be a maximal amount of letters people suffering from sesquipedalophobia can handle without getting sick? This might seem like an irrelevant question to you, but think about this: one year you're having your birthday party (although it's not very likely that the actual Dutch word for it, verjaardagsfeestje, was mentioned on the invitation), safely enjoying your pancakes (pannekoeken, which was a valid way to spell this word before 1995). Next year however - after the Dutch spelling reform - pancakes make you sick because you have to add an extra letter! The other option is that sesquipedalophobia symptoms arise through a gradual process, starting with a mild headache for words containing between 5 and 8 letters, shortness of breath between 9 and 16 and an irregular heartbeat for words containing at least 17 letters. Which is pretty cruel, don't you think? The more points you score in Scrabble, the sicker you get...

Also: how do you organize your life? I mean, what kind of job can you do when you have a phobia for long word? Nowadays, with all the neologisms they are inventing to mask the true nature of a job (head of the logistics department in a waste service company may in reality stand for 'driving the waste truck'), reading job ads may already be quite a hazardous situation. Obviously, anything related to chemistry is excluded, especially when your childhood dream was to investigate titin (the largest known peptide): the chemical name for this protein is Methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminylarginyl...isoleucine, a word (well, people are debating this - as it is a technical term, it is not in the dictionary) containing 189,819 letters! Yes, Wikipedia is your friend; unless of course 9 letters or more make you sick... The only option I see is to become a crossword puzzle maker, so that the maximal amount of letters you are confronted with on a daily basis is bounded. But that is pretty uninteresting, don't you think? Sorry, I mean 'dull'.

Next time you want to use a long word to impress people, I suggest you think twice and consider using an easier synonym. Because length sometimes matters...

[We would like to point out that this post is not meant to make fun of people suffering from fear of long words: we don't like floccinaucinihilipilification...]

Quotes from the book (9)

… or rather: ‘Quotes from the books’, double plural.

Indeed, it seems I have grossly neglected, dear reader, to keep you posted about my reading habits. Instead, for a long time I let on (in the box on the right) that I had been reading Dave Eggers’ complex novel A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but that was far from the truth.

So while I may have given the impression that I was knee-deep in a bulky book of high-brow literature, I was in fact reading some pretty pulpy stuff. Common cultural practice dictates that I should now start to justify this, by saying, for instance, that I’m doing this as a kind of experiment, in order to ‘contextualize my reading praxis through an explicit anti-canonism’ or some academic mumbo-jumbo. However, the truth is that I just like reading pulp too, plain and simple. In my case, that means things like glossy magazines (OK magazine! Dag allemaal!), gossip websites about Hollywood celebrities (TMZ! Perez Hilton!), autobiographies of sports’ or TV personalities, adventure tales, vulgarizing history, and of course fantasy literature. Aside from anything else it also makes me quite good at knowing all types of strange stuff at quizzes!

So, instead of offering you quotes from a Dutch classic like Lijmen / Het Been, or an impressionistic English novel like Eclipse, as I did in the past, today I’ll offer you some citations from stuff I’ve read in the past year with just as much lip-licking pleasure as the other high-faluting books. Enjoy (I certainly did!)

1) Bear Grylls, Mud, Sweat and Tears:

(or how the adage ‘know thyself’ is important even for hosts of TV survival shows)

Climbing. Hanging. Escaping. I loved them all.
Mum, still to this day, says that growing up I seemed destined to be a mix of Robin Hood, Harry Houdini, John the Baptist and an assasin. I took it as a great compliment.*

           (* not sure that was really wise, Bear)

2) Dave Eddings, The Redemption of Althalus

(or how 900 pages of previous story can prepare you for even the worst of melodrama)

‘Are you serious?’ he exclaimed.

She stroked her tummy again. ‘If I’m not, this is. We’re going to have a baby, Althalus’.

He stared at her in absolute astonishment. Then he suddenly felt his eyes fill with tears.

‘Are you crying, Althalus? I didn’t think you knew how.’

He took her in his arms then and held her with tears of joy streaming down his face. ‘Oh, I do love you, Em!’*, was all he could say.

(* When the story starts, Em or Emmy or Emerald is a cat. No kidding.)

3) Sean Michael Wilson, Hagakure. The Code of the Samurai

           

            (or how I know that even samurai can be pussies)

It’s good to carry some powdered rouge in one’s sleeve. It may happen that when one is sobering up or waking from sleep, his complexion may be poor. At such a time it is good to take out and apply some powdered rouge.*

(* Bought this one together with Fred at Narita airport with our last 1000 yen. Money well spent.)

Pissed off

Ah, the news. Always new opportunities to get irritated, frustrated or downright angry. During the past few days, a particular article had me raise my eyebrows...

You might have seen the video featuring American soldiers urinating on dead Afghan bodies. The 40-second clip, showing four men in combat gear exposing their genitals and relieving themselves whilst making bad jokes ("Have a great day buddy, golden like a shower!"), went around the world quickly and sparked outrage and a possible diplomatic row between Washington and Kabul. Even the Pentagon spokesman said the video was deeply troubling, and added "Whoever it was, and whatever the circumstances, it is egregious behaviour." Understandable, right? 

In a sense - a very weird one, that is, because the comparison I am about to make is more farfetched than a massive cruise ship running aground off the Italian coast, because the captain felt like waving his family (and a few other people, may they rest in peace) goodbye - this all reminds me of a discussion I had when I was 21 years old. I used to be a member of WINA at that time, the student organization associated to our mathematics department. As a matter of fact, I was in charge of taming the freshmen at our cantus activities (schachtentemmer, if that makes sense to you). 

To be more precise, this also implied that I had the final responsibilities over the student initiation ceremony (for those of you who are not familiar with this: it's a kind of passage rite, involving lots of beer, some nudity, oodles of ingredients to make pancakes and, of course, even more beer). Even today, I can still clearly recall that one particular moment when some of my fellow WINA members asked me whether they were allowed to 'wash' the students that very night. When I asked them what they meant by that, they gave me a 'you-idiot, isn't-that-plain-obvious'-look and added "Spit on them, of course!". I wasn't shocked, I knew far worse stories from other student organizations, but I obviously answered that they weren't. Because to me, student initiations were (and still are) all about recruiting people, engaging them in social activities and offering them a night of fun to remember for the rest of their lives - despite the alcohol. As opposed to what some people believe, it is not about humiliating people. 

So why am I telling you this? What does it have to do with US soldiers urinating on Afghan war victims, facing severe punishment because of (and I quote) this apparent desecration of the dead as a violation of our nation's military regulations and of international laws of war prohibiting such disgusting and immoral actions? I will tell you why: because this reasoning pisses me off badly. I find it very ironic - in a bad sense of the word - that people are judged as immoral because of something they did during a fucking war. It wasn't a cantus, nor a social activity meant to bring people closer together or to offer them an experience to remember forever (I am afraid that soldiers are returning with enough experiences they'd rather not remember). It happened during a conflict which, by its very definition, leads to mortality and human behaviour defying what we consider to be 'right'.

I am no expert, nor a philosopher - merely a pacifist with a humble opinion I feel like sharing - but according to me it doesn't make sense to make rules about what is okay and what is not during a war. Because the act of declaring and fighting a war itself is not okay. Period. Who are we to judge people who were actually trained to kill other people, from behind our desks or the comfort zones we tend to call 'houses'? Do not get me wrong (repeat twice!), I am by no means saying that what these soldiers did is morally right, but I am questioning the very concept of making rules about something that should not be in the first place. Amen.