Monster

You find yourself zippered into a snug rubber suit. There’s a rubber head over your own actual head and you can hardly see a thing. Everything sounds muffled and strange. And you’re so uncomfortable – the suit is so tight the sweat can’t even get out of your pores and there are all these hot lights pointed directly at you and a man is yelling at you to pick up the young woman in the nightgown but you can barely move or breath and why would you want to carry her around anyway? Do you feel a swell of murderous rage?

mph X 4.7

Our initiative to get the world’s speedometers converted to angstroms per nanosecond is moving along at a snail’s pace. Actually, expressing a snail’s pace in Å/ns yields a number smaller than one, which is inelegant. So, what’s shorter that an angstrom? Well, the Planck length. It would take 6.25E+24 of those little buggers to add up to one angstrom. Wikipedia says that if a 0.1 mm dot was magnified to the size of the observable universe, one Planck length would be about 0.1 mm. So, quite small. Does thinking about that make you slightly queasy? I know it does me.

Europe Between The Oceans

According to this one book I’m reading, when the first humans got to Crete about 10,000 years ago, their first order of business was to kill and eat the indigenous dwarf hippopotamuses, which they did with such persistence and enthusiasm that to this very day the complete absence of dwarf hippopotamuses is one of the notable features of the island. An inquisitive visitor might ask, “Have you any dwarf hippopotamuses?” to which a local guide might reply, “No, we killed and ate them long ago.” “What?” (Eyebrows shoot up in disbelief) “All of them?” Then, shamefaced: “Yes. Every last one.”

Wahoo.

Finally, the Cleveland baseball team is going to be renamed. Some of us still remember how back in the early ‘70s Russell Means suggested that maybe “Indians” wasn’t such a great name. The thought experiment he presented was to imagine the club was called the “Cleveland Negroes,” a comparison that was apt, fair, and funny. And look! A scant five decades later, results! So there’s hope for those of us who want to advance social justice. (And get rid of the designated hitter. Because the pitcher’s at-bat is an excellent time to go to the john or buy a hotdog. )

Brain Kibble

If you give a man a fish, you have fed him for a day. If you give him a poison fish, you have fed him for a lifetime. Just a few hours devoted to trial and error can save literally minutes of reading the instructions. There are two kinds of people in the world, those who agree that there are two kinds of people in the world and those who do not. Despite what cartoonists would have you believe, there’s nothing particularly funny about being stranded on a desert island. It’s hard to get people to talk about their aphasia.

Word to the wise

Come to find out, “palabra” means “word” in Spanish. So I thought, “Ah ha! Bet that’s why they  call a conversation a palaver in old cowboy movies.” But Wikipedia says palaver comes from Portuguese, and is also the name of a place in the Antarctic, Palaver Point. Then Wikipedia goes on to say there’s a food called palaver sauce, which Wikipedia says might be because “… when the stew was first made, with long, ropey greens, people would start quarrels by slapping each other with the greens from their stew.” Then I said to myself, “That’s enough Wikipedia for today.”

False false-flag

If I was running a vast global conspiracy to brutally subjugate the entire human species under the repressive yoke of my iron will (not that I am - just hypothetically) I would make sure to create a fictive theory that contained some crucial elements of my actual plot inextricably embroidered with absurd and obviously untrue details. I would recruit a clueless team of unreliable and unappealing goons to promote these preposterous ideas so that they would be widely derided and thoroughly debunked. Then anyone who attempted to reveal my insidious scheme would be instantly dismissed as just another witless clown.