Meta and Meta

Wishes for the New Year

A "happy" new year? That seems hackneyed and unrealistic.

Better: May your suffering in 2008 at least be productive.

That's Cold

Eliezer Yudkowsky remarks upon Ayn Rand and the "Objectivist" cult:

You might think that a belief system which praised "reason" and "rationality" and "individualism" would have gained some kind of special immunity [to incipient cultism], somehow...?

Well, it didn't.

It worked around as well as putting a sign saying "Cold" on a refrigerator that wasn't plugged in.

Read the whole thing. Then read everything Eliezer's written over at Overcoming Bias. (Then repeat after me: "We are all individuals...")

Marketing Bliss

"[T]he more you know about music, the less qualified you are to sell Rock Band."*

Or rock, for that matter.

Believe It Or Not!

Shelley Batts notes that "foreign objects introduced [in]to the brain via the eye sockets can be deadly."

Yes, I would have thought so.

Top Ten Most Obscure Words

I was going to provide a list of the top ten most obscure words. But that would be a little self-defeating, wouldn't it?

Join 'Em

Possible brand name for fresh eggs: Better 'n Beaters. ("More flavor than Egg Beaters™, with nowhere near the same amount of fat or cholesterol.")

Dictionary Use Gone to Pot

My dad yesterday recounted a story involving a friend (of my dad's generation) who professed both unfamiliarity with the word 'cannabis' and an inability to find that word in a dictionary -- two odd bits of cognitive incapacitation that rather ironically suggest a robust familiarity with the substance in issue, if not its designation.

Anyway, this got me thinking about basic dictionary-using competence. Seems like if you weren't good at using a dictionary, you'd have a need for a reference work, say, "Dictionaries for Dummies." But then given the very incapacity in issue, you'd need another reference work for that, ostensibly "'Dictionaries for Dummies' for Dummies." And so on. This obviously leads to a pedagogically vicious regress. Turns out, then, dictionary illiteracy is irremediable.

As a corollary, it is impossible that you are comprehending this post at all.

This Will Make You Parse Your "Lips"

Headline from Yahoo! News feed: "Prostitutes sew lips together in Bolivia protest."

Yes, the vulgar interpretation was the first to occur to me. Intentional punning by editors? Or am I just depraved? (Or both?)

Places New, and Ladies Too

The Enchantress and I got to talking about television shows we liked as kids. The pickin's in Barbados were slim, but one show I used to watch was "B.J. and the Bear."

It was only as I explained to TE why I used to want to be B.J. McKay (which character was played by Greg Evigan) that I realized how exquisitely preposterous the show concept was:

Well, honey, B.J. McKay was a really cool, handsome itinerant trucker who always got hot chicks and wound up involved in dramatic adventures. And he owned a chimp named "Bear."

Right...

And of course it turns out that several people have youtubed the show's intro theme and montage. ("And best of all I don't pay property tax!") It doesn't get much better than that.

Endless Forms Most Interesting

P.Z. stirs me out of my bloggerly dormancy with a viral challenge to name

An interesting animal I had;

An interesting animal I ate;

An interesting animal in the Museum;

An interesting thing I did with or to an animal; and

An interesting animal in its natural habitat

and then infect nine other hosts with the meme. This is a suitably frivolous exercise, so looks like I've little choice but to succumb to this animal madness:

An interesting animal I had. A Bajan vervet monkey. His name was Togo. We'd met him down at the local beach bar, Sparky's Joint (itself a watering hole frequented by many other forms most interesting). My folks offered Togo's owner one of our Doberman pups in exchange.  Togo turned out to be a handful. He was by turns aggressive and, well...overly amorous. (Ever heard Richard Pryor's bit about his pet monkey who had an unnatural attraction to the external acoustic meatus? Let's just say I find his account ear-ticklingly plausible.)

An interesting animal I ate. Rattlesnake cooked on an open fire. Tasted like...rattlesnake.

An interesting animal in the Museum. At a museum? The only animals I've ever seen at a museum were taxidermied. And the less interesting for it. (Then again, there was Picasso's Goat at MoMA. Does that count?)

An interesting thing I did with or to an animal. When I was seven I shook forelimbs with Orky (or maybe it was Corky) at (now defunct) Marineland. Also, patted his (or her) tongue. Wow. Second place: Swimming amidst a vast bloom of small jellyfish in the Caribbean Sea. They stung, to be sure, but the pain was mild, and I wasn't about to give up viewing this extraordinary spectacle.

An interesting animal in its natural habitat. I've encountered barracuda a couple of times while snorkling. They rarely attack humans, but man they are some creepy looking fish. Second place: Vervet monkeys. Yes, the forest around our house was swarming with them. They are not highly domesticable. Togo didn't much care for his wild brethren, either.

And now I choose nine prospective victims...

Ideas of Imperfection
A Chequer-Board of Days & Nights
Grasping Reality with Both Hands
The Buck Stops Here
alicublog
Varieties of Unreligious Experience
wo's weblog
The First Element
de crapulas edormiendo
onegoodmove

...but suspect they will show a healthier resistance to this sort of thing than I do.