The Eccentric Sage

Post 244

2011-04-14T10:35:00.006-06:00

So, I don't visit A Motley Vision nearly as often as Theric would probably like me to. I wander over there occasionally when he links to it or says something cool is going on, but I've never gotten involved with them mostly just because I really have no idea what AMV is.

But so far, the only person to comment on my previous post was Wm Morris of AMV fame. Of course, my initial thought was, "Who the heck is Wm Morris?" and then I clicked on his name and ended up at AMV and learned about this little writing contest they're having over there that I found really exciting. (Check it out)

Now, because I really know nothing about AMV, I don't have a clue what Monsters & Mormons is, so I don't know what I'm missing out on, so I don't really feel bad about potentially disqualifying myself by telling the whole world (or at least the two judges of the contest, both of whom apparently read my blog sometimes) why my entry is the best. [NOTE: I don't recall the rules saying anything about not being able to publish a submission elsewhere, so perhaps I won't DQ myself, but this is just a disclaimer to say that, regardless of the consequences, I'd rather toot my own horn than sit and wait for someone else to toot it for me.]

I wrote a passage from the Book of Lehi. But the awesome thing about it is that I composed this bit of false scripture by piecemealing various other scriptural passages. I changed a few names, and I added one word ("for"), but the rest of this is a scriptural hodgepodge. Check it out [note, I submitted it without the references; I'm writing this blogpost to show how awesome I am in case neither Wm or Th notice]:

Lehi 16:5-9

5 "And it came to pass that Laman and Lemuel" [1 Nephi 16:20, 1 Nephi 18:11] "took of the daughters of Ishmael to wife; and" [1 Nephi 16:7] "they had many children who did grow up and began to wax strong in years, that they became for themselves" [3 Nephi 1:29] "lewd fellows of the baser sort" [Acts 17:5].
6 "And now [Laman] had a son who was called [Bedlam]" [Ether 7:22]; for "when [Laman] went in to his wife, she conceived, and bare a son, and he called his name" [1 Chronicles 7:23] "Laman, being called after the name of his father" [Mosiah 24:3]. "Then said they unto him, Say now [Laman]: and he said [Bedlam]: for he could not frame to pronounce it right" [Judges 12:6] "; and therefore he was called [Bedlam]." [Mosiah 24:3]
7 "Now this [Bedlam] had, by his cunning, drawn away much people after him; even so much that they began to be very powerful; and they began to endeavor to establish [Bedlam] to be a king over the people" [Alma 2:2] "; and they did rise up in rebellion against us." [Alma 57:32]
8 "And [I] did exhort them then with all the feeling of a tender parent, that they would hearken to [my] words, that perhaps the Lord would be merciful to them, and not cast them off;" [1 Nephi 8:37] "[b]ut behold, [Bedlam] hearkened not, saying: Who is the Lord that I should know him?" [Moses 5:16]
9 "Wherefore, they went up into the wilderness. And [Bedlam] being a strong and mighty man, and a stiffnecked man, wherefore he caused a contention among them; and they were all slain [..] in the wilderness" (Omni 1:28) ": and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses." [Isaiah 37:36] "And thus endeth the days of [Bedlam]." [Alma 51:37]

So that's my scripture-wresting tour de force. Hope you like it. My only regret is that I failed to use my all-time favorite scriptural phrase: "Wherefore, lay apart all filthiness and [you ready for this?] superfluity of naughtiness" [James 1:21]. Oh well. I should be studying for my final finals anyhow.

Post 243

2011-04-12T19:27:00.002-06:00

I heard the joke countless times in my childhood:

Q: What's the difference between a piano and a fish?
A: You can tune a piano, but you can't tuna fish.

It occurred to me recently that, either this is a mistelling of the joke, or the joke's creator really fell short of the full potential here. I propose the following revision:

Q: How is a piano like a fish?
A: You can tune a piano, and you can tuna fish.

It's harder to grasp, I think. That's why I imagine that the joke originally ran this way but the six-year-olds who spread it around couldn't get it right. Or maybe we should just blame it all on REO Speedwagon.

Can is the pivotal word here. Replacing it with synonyms, we get "You are able to tune a piano, and you place tuna fish into cans."

You can tune a piano, and you can tuna fish. It's a lot more interesting grammatically, and it makes the pun work better because the sentence actually makes sense (because, really, what does "you can't tuna fish" mean? Would you say "you can't sardine"? I can't think of a reason such an utterance would be made).

In a week and a half, I'll graduate from BYU. I've spent 3 years studying the English language, and I've spent 2 years trying my hand at stand-up comedy. The result? I am now fully qualified to be a children's joke critic. Fantastic.

Post 242

2011-01-24T20:16:00.002-07:00

And now a very subtle joke:

To error is human.

Bahahahahahaha!

(Sorry. I just barely learned that error is a noun and err is a verb, so to "to error" is an error.)

Post 241

2011-01-20T22:43:00.003-07:00

This is an outrage!

So. That song "We Built This City" by Starship? It's kinda become my song in the last month or so for various reasons. I just really, really like it. "Marconi plays the mamba / Listen to the radio!" is pretty much one of the best things to happen to the 80s--and I like the 80s!

Anyway, I looked the song up on Wikipedia to see what I could learn about it. I know that Starship came into being as the result of a lawsuit, and so I thought maybe it was their first hit because the whole thrust of the song is, "Hey, remember us? Yeah, we're awesome. You know that; we know that. Corporations do their silly things, but we're still here, and we're ready to rock." Wikipedia said nothing about this, but it did say this:

In April 2004, the song was listed as "the #1 Worst Song Ever" by Blender magazine. [...] The Blender ranking of the song as the worst song ever was in conjunction with a VH1 Special of The 50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs...Ever. In order to qualify for the distinction, the songs on the list had to be a popular hit at some point, thus disqualifying many songs that would by general consensus be considered much worse.

Really, guys? Really? The #1 worst song ever? Really? I recognize that most people probably don't like it as much as I do and that I once had to tell a roommate that my musical selections "are not hampered by things like taste," but the worst song ever? Seems a bit harsh....

So I looked up VH1's little list, and that's when I got really upset.

To be fair, it might be a very good list (it has a lot of songs I don't know, so it's hard for me to judge fairly), and I have to give it credit for getting two of my least favorite songs ever ("Barbie Girl" by Aqua and "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue" by Toby Keith). They also identified several songs that probably don't deserve the honorific part of this dubious honor but really are pretty terrible ("I would do anything for love (but I won't do that)" by Meatloaf, "I'm too sexy" by Right Said Fred, "Achy Breaky Heart" by Billy Ray Cyrus, "Ice, Ice Baby" by Vanilla Ice, "From a distance" by Bette Midler). There are songs I like that I'm not surprised to see on a list like this ("Broken wings" by Mr. Mister, for instance), but that's to be expected, I guess. So, really, most of the list is probably pretty reasonable.

But the parts that aren't reasonable are so unreasonable!

First the songs that, regardless of how you feel about them, don't seem hate worthy: "Never gonna give you up" by Rick Astley, "You're the inspiration" by Chicago, "Cotton eye Joe" by Rednex (not a song I thought I'd ever defend!), and "Don't worry, be happy" by Bobby McFerrin.

If those were my biggest complaints for this list, it wouldn't deserve a blogpost, but here are the real kickers:

"Two princes" by Spin Doctors comes in at #46; "We didn't start the fire" by Billy Joel is #44; "Heart of Rock-n-Roll" by Huey Lewis & the News is #10; and "Breakfast at Tiffany's" by Deep Blue Something is #6!

Still not persuaded? I can almost imagine a person (not much of a person, but a person nonetheless) who didn't like any of those songs, but I cannot conjure an image in my mind of the sort of person who would hate all of those songs PLUS a song that I think has one of the greatest keyboard riffs of all time yet somehow lands itself a place on this ridiculous list at #16: "The Final Countdown" by Europe.

Who hates "The Final Countdown"?? Who even has a mild distaste for that song? Who of all the people who have ever heard that song as heard it without at least having a passing thought of, "Man, this song is pretty great"? What sort of terrible people wrote this list?

Furthermore, where is Eminem on this list? Where is Uncle Kracker (that song "Follow Me" is horrible!)? Where is Britney Spears? How did "Hey Mickey," "Material Girl," and "Tubthumping" all avoid this list? (I actually like all three of those songs, but they are pretty "awesomely bad.") No Twisted Sister? No Air Supply? No Aaron Carter? How is there not a single 90s boys band on this list? Also strangely absent: "All by myself" by Eric Carmen. (I would bring up Lady Gaga and Jusin Beiber, but they weren't around in 2004.)

Anyway. I think it's terrible. Here's the list, for anyone who's interested. Tell me, friends, what injustices you can find:

50. Corey Hart - I Wear My Sunglasses at Night
49. Puff Daddy f/ Faith Evans & 112 - "I'll Be Missing You'
48. Michael Bolton - 'Can I Touch You There'
47. Bobby Brown w/Whitney Houston, 'Something in Common'
46. Spin Doctors - Two Princes
45. Ruben Studdard, 'I'm Sorry'
44. Billy Joel - We Didn't Start The Fire
43. Master P feat. Silkk, Fiend, Mia-x & Mystikal - 'Make Em Say Uhh'
42. Rednex - Cotton Eye Joe
41. JC Chasez - 'Some Girls (Dance with Women)'
40. 4 Non Blondes, 'What's Up'
39. Snow - 'Informer'
38. Ja Rule - Mesmerize
37. Bette Midler, "From a Distance"
36. Color Me Badd - I Wanna Sex You Up
35. Don Johnson - Heartbeat
34. Crazytown - 'Butterfly'
33. Jennifer Lopez - 'Jenny from the Block'
32. Mr. Mister - Broken Wings
31. R. Kelly, 'You Remind Me of Something'
30. Nelly - Pimp Juice
29. Meatloaf - 'I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won't do That)
28. Rick Astley - 'Never Gonna Give You Up'
27. Wreckx-N-Effect - 'Rump Shaker'
26. Bryan Adams - The Only Thing That Looks Good on Me is You
25. Michael Jackson, 'You Rock My World'
24. Phil Collins, "Sussudio"
23. Sisqo - 'The Thong Song'
22. Lionel Richie - Dancing on the Ceiling
21. Rembrandts, "I'll Be There For You"
20. Toby Keith, 'Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue'
19. Chicago - You're the Inspiration
18. Hammer - 'Pumps and a Bump'
17. Right Said Fred, "I'm Too Sexy"
16. Europe, "The Final Countdown"
15. Crash Test Dummies - Mmm, Mmm, Mmm, Mmm
14. Will Smith, "Will2K"
13. Aqua - 'Barbie Girl'
12. New Kids on the block - Hangin' Tough
11. Gerardo - Rico Suave
10. Huey Lewis & the News - Heart of Rock-n-Roll
9. Bobby McFerrin - Don't Worry Be Happy
8. Ricky Martin - She Bangs
7. Eddie Murphy, "Party All the Time"
6. Deep Blue Something, "Breakfast at Tiffany's"
5. Vanilla Ice, "Ice Ice Baby"
4. Limp Bizkit, "Rollin'"
3. Wang Chung - Everybody Have Fun Tonight
2. Billy Ray Cyrus, "Achy Breaky Heart"
1. Starship, "We Built This City"

Post 240

2010-12-11T13:37:00.002-07:00

You know that song "We Wish You a Merry Christmas?" It's an upbeat song, right? And it gets a little rowdy about halfway through with the carolers demanding figgy pudding and saying they won't leave until they get some--this is a song meant to be shouted as much as sung and is usually delivered by people who are giddy with Christmas spirit, right? That's just the nature of the song.

Isn't this common knowledge? I think so.

So a question: WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA???

I stumbled upon this a few days ago, and my wife and I listened to it until "we won't go until we get some" and just couldn't take it any more.

Post 239

2010-11-27T11:55:00.002-07:00

So, it's officially Christmastime. The passing of Thanksgiving lifted my wife's moratorium on Christmas music, so I'm listening to lots of it now. I don't know what happened to me last year, but it was the first year since halfway through high school that I wasn't offended by Christmas music being played ridiculously early, and this year I found myself turning on holiday jingles whenever I was driving somewhere without my wife. It's good to wait till after Thanksgiving, though: since there are only, like, 30 or 40 really good Christmas songs in existence, I'd probably get sick of it by mid-December if I listened to it non-stop.

Anyway, the point of this post is to once again demonstrate the awesome breadth of the internet's reach. When I was very young, we got a Christmas basket from a family in the ward, and one of the things in it was a tape of really random Christmas songs. I remember several of them (one called "Santa Got a Cold on Christmas Eve," one with a refrain that began, "We are Santa's reindeer / We've learned to sing this year," one sung in a weird accent about how the kids go nuts at Christmas, a version of "I'm Gettin' Nuttin' for Christmas" that ended with a burglar coming in a Santa suit...), but my favorite of all of them was a song by Mel Blanc. I remember it was by Mel Blank because my eldest brother had to explain to me who Mel Blanc was when he told me who sang the song.

I loved that song as a kid, and the inventions of Google and YouTube have made me try every year to find it online. This year, I finally did (thanks to Google, not to YouTube). I can't embed it here, so just click on this link to listen. (NOTE: my wife wasn't terribly impressed; I think it'll probably appeal to you a lot more if you're, say, 7 years old.)

Merry Christmas!

Post 238

2010-11-15T17:31:00.002-07:00

So, there's a new Muppet movie coming out in about a year. It's being filmed right now. I like the Muppets, so I'm naturally inclined to be curious for the film and to hope that it isn't terrible, but I'm actually really, really excited for it.

Why, you ask? Because of the guy co-writing and guest starring in it: Jason Segel.

If you don't know who Jason Segel is, or if you do know who he is but can't quite imagine him being involved with the Muppets (or any PG comedy), I advise you to click here and watch a pretty awesome video (because I had no idea he did any sort of puppetry).

Post 237

2010-11-05T18:36:00.003-06:00

[NOTE: this post is lengthy because I'm writing it for mostly cathartic reasons. If you want to learn some interesting stuff without finding out how I myself found this stuff, just hop down to the very bottom of the post and read my findings. Otherwise, get comfy: you're gonna be here a while!]

Years ago--probably more than a decade ago--ya know, back when I was in high school--my Sunday school teacher (who had previously been my bishop) was in the habit of writing a quote on the board before class started each week. One week, it was a quote from Goethe. I don't recall how my Sunday school teacher rendered the quote, but I've always thought it was "Choose well, for your choice is brief yet endless."

I like that. I think it's very fine. Stirring, poignant. Recently I've been thinking about it a lot, and I decided that I wanted to know what the actual quote was and where it came from.

The most common rendering of the quote it, "Choose well; your choice is brief, and yet endless," though it can be found with just "yet" and just "and" and even with "but" instead of either. It appears on many, many quote pages, usually attributed to Goethe but never any of his works. I Googled and Googled and Googled trying to figure out where it came from, hoping that I could find the original German and figure out whether the double conjunction was a vital part of the quote or just the most famous translation.

Usually, if something can be found on the internet, I can find it through Google in no more than a few searches and a couple of minutes, but it took me, like, two hours to find the information I'm about to share with you, and I hope that by collecting my findings here on my blog I can aid future researchers with their quest.

The first thing I discovered is that Masons love this little line, and the reason they love it is that it came from a poem Goethe wrote about Masons (Goethe was one himself). But none of the sites about Masons and Masonry said anything about the original poem except that it was translated into English by Thomas Carlyle, and it's Carlyle's English translation that they always talked about.

Carlyle's translation (entitled "The Mason Lodge") is where the quote comes from. I looked at a few different pages that had the full poem, but they all gave Carlyle's version without any mention as to what he translated it from. But then--a breakthrough.

I found a website that had English versions of three Goethe poems about Masonry: "The Mason Lodge" translated by Carlyle, "A Symbol" translated by Edgar Alfred Bowring, and "Song Of Fellowship" also translated by Bowring. The important thing, though, is that the website says that Carlyle's "The Mason Lodge" and Bowring's "A Symbol" "are both translations of the same original, written in 1827, but so different that they even have different titles!" (source link).

"A ha!" I thought. "I'll just compare the line in the two different poems and see which I like better!"

Not that easy: Carlyle's "Choose well; your choice is / Brief and yet endless" corresponds to Bowring's "To do what is best, Unceasing endeavour!"

Somebody cheated!

I got this far in my quest in a few searches and a couple of minutes, but the puzzle I found here propelled me through my desperate search for the next few hours.

I still don't know where Carlyle's translation was published, but I found (courtesy of Google Books) a book by Bowring called The Poems of Goethe Translated in the Original Metres. I found "A Symbol" in there and found a footnote that said, "This fine poem is given by Goethe amongst a small collection of what he calls Loge (Lodge), meaning thereby Masonic pieces."

Because Bowring was interested in maintaining "the original metres," I thought that perhaps his title for the poem would resemble the original title more closely than Carlyle's, so I used a few different online translators to translate "symbol" into German, and they all gave me "zeichen."

I looked and looked for something by Goethe that had "Zeichen" or "Loge" in its title, and I found nothing except a book called Wielands Andenken in der Loge Amalia, which I could find no machine-searchable version of. I looked to see if BYU's library had a copy, and they do--on microfiche.

No good.

I Googled the web for anything that talked about Carlyle and Goethe or Bowring and Goethe; I searched for websites that had side-by-side English and German versions of Goethe's poems; I searched Wikipedia for the quote; I perused Goethe's and Carlyle's Wikipedia pages--couldn't find a thing.

I actually gave up after a while. I decided that there was no way I was going to find the original poem and decided that I would just compare the number of pages Google came up with when I searched for the quote with various conjunctions, with and without quotation marks, appending Carlyle -Goethe and -Carlyle Goethe to see who was most often given credit for the quote--all this just to know what the most common version of the quote was and who the author is most commonly supposed to be.

I learned a funny thing about Google search results a couple years ago in a class I was taking: when you search for something, and Google tells you it's come up with, say, "about 21,900 results," if you go to the bottom of the page and hop over to the very last page of results, you often find that Google only actually found, like, 153 results (those numbers come from a quick search of "brief and yet endless" [with quotation marks]). I kept this in mind as I tried to figure out which version of the quote produced the most pages, and that's why magic happened.

On the very last page of a search for the quote and Goethe and Carlyle, I found a page in German. I can't read German, but I understood well enough the phrase "Goethe und Carlyle" and I recognized a new word: Symbolum.

Symbolum??? That's not German--that's Latin!

Ah, mais bein sur! This is the 1820s we're talking about--of course the title's going to be in Latin!

I Googled Goethe Symbolum and found a Wikipedia page called "Symbolum." This page only exists in German Wikipedia, but I glanced over it and--hallelujah!--the poem was there. I had Google translate the page, and then I looked at the poem and found my line: "Missed practice not to / The forces of good!"

grumbleWORTHLESSgrumbleCRUMMYgrumblegrumbleAUTOMATEDTRANSLATIONgrumblegrowlgrumble

But at least now I had the title of the original poem. Early on in my searching, I had found a website that had the poems of Goethe in both German and English, but it had been useless to me because it had the poems organized alphabetically by German title, and they didn't have a poem called Zeichen or Loge. Now, knowing that the poem is actually called "Symbolum," I Googled my way back to that site and found the poem in both German and English.

The end of my quest, you think? Wrong: it had Carlyle's translation!

Gar!

I kept looking, but all the sites I found used either Carlyle's or Bowring's translation, so I gave up on that. I went back to the German Wikipedia page for "Symbolum" and found the line I was looking for and then hopped over to Babylon online translation and translated the words one at a time.

This, of course, gave me something that was no better (even a little worse) than Google Translation's version.

In a fit of futility, I copy-pasted the entire phrase into Babylon, and that's when I finally found what I was looking for: "Do not fail to exercise the forces of good."

So Carlyle and Bowring were both cheating: neither one of them came anywhere near what the original German said!

At least now I know....

So here are the lessons learned:

1) Babylon online translation is amazing. To be able to identify and translate an imperative phrase is very impressive to me (that is assuming, of course, that it actually is an imperative phrase; I don't know German, so I really can't say for sure, but the translation sounds very convincing).

2) Perhaps everything I could ever want to know is on the internet, but sometimes it's very hard to find.

3) [and this is the important one:] "Choose well; your choice is brief and yet endless" is 100% Carlyle! It may have been inspired by Goethe, but it doesn't even approximate anything Goethe wrote, so it probably ought to be attributed to Carlyle instead. (Even though I still have no idea where Carlyle published his translation, his version is so consistent from one website to the next that there's no real reason to doubt the double conjunction.)

Post 236

2010-10-22T18:39:00.009-06:00

It's been more than two years since my review of Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians, so I feel like it's probably okay that I just read another modern work of fiction. I mean, certainly lots and lots of young men have served honorable, full-time missions in the time it took me to get around to it, so the overall good that's been add to the world since August 2008 will hopefully counteract whatever badness I'll bring into it by reviewing another novel.

Anyway. Enough pretending that reading fiction is a sin. On with the review!

Hugh Laurie. I know him mostly because of his role as the titular character in House. I remember one of my roommates went on a House kick, so I saw it from time to time. Honestly, hospitals make me queasy, so I didn't watch much, but I occasionally got a lot of enjoyment out of Laurie's performance and the character he portrayed. I really did. And then I remember one time when one of my roommates was channel surfing and I was riding his wave and we came across Stuart Little 2, and we saw Hugh Laurie playing a caring family man. It was jarring. We sat in a stupor for a while, watching this man talking sans gravel sans scruff sans sarcasm sans bitterness and doing it so well. And then, ya know, we realized we were watching drivel and changed the channel, but it was a magical moment for me.

The biggest surprise was when he won an award for his performance as House and got up to give a speech.

He's British! He's totally British!

I was shocked, and my roommates laughed at my ignorance.

And then just a week or so ago, I looked Hugh Laurie up on Wikipedia and was again shocked: the article started by calling him "an English actor, voice artist, comedian, writer, musician and director."

Wait, what?? English--check. Actor--check. Musician--check (he occasionally played piano on House; he's very good). Writer, director, voice artist--didn't know that, but no surprises. These are all things I can swallow. But comedian? Hugh Laurie is a comedian? House! Is a comedian? Unthinkable.

But I YouTubed Hugh Laurie comedy and, yes, he's a comedian. In fact, I think he's hilarious. In fact, if you care to take a three-minute-and-two-second detour and laugh a whole bunch, I beg you to click here.

Did you watch it? Did you laugh? Perhaps British humor isn't your thing; that's okay, I guess.

Anyway, after discovering that Hugh Laurie is funny, I learned that he is the author of one novel: The Gun Seller. So I had to give it a try. I looked it up on the Provo library website, saw that they had it and that it was not checked out, so I picked it up.

The first chapter was a brilliant mix of action and hilarity, and I giggled audibly throughout it (if you don't believe me, just ask my wife, who was trying to study at the time). I liked the second chapter even more because it was more funny and less action packed than the first.

At first, my feelings about the gun seller were very much the same as my feelings about Alcatraz, to wit:

The novel is in 1st person, and [very often], Alcatraz stops telling the story and goes off on random tangents. I, being the sort of person who would rather read a well-written essay than any book-length fiction, enjoyed these so thoroughly that, rather than seeming to get in the way of the story, I felt the story detracted from the tangents! I mentioned above that I occasionally found myself suffering through the story at times, but that was only because I wished Al would stop telling me his stupid story and go back to the good stuff.

Tom Lang (the main character and narrator in The Gun Seller) did the same sort of thing, but I enjoyed his tangents far more than Al's because the tangents are about real life things. I learned about guns and aerial tactics and diplomats--and lots of things not related to war. For example (though I'm a bit embarrassed to say this outright), one of my favorite parts was the book's one illicit sex scene ('cuz what's a Bond-genre book without a sex scene, right?). The scene itself was, I dunno, two or three three sentences that were nothing like explicit (Jack Weyland wrote a more explicit sex scene in his book-length-punch-for-LDS-family-services-masquerading-as-a-novel Megan, which I read in high school because it was a Christmas present). The reason I liked that part of The Gun Seller was that it caused Tom Lang to fill a double-page spread with some really down-to-earth thoughts about sex, which I really enjoyed (not least of all because of their stark contrast with the typical action hero's I'm-here, you're-here, we-may-as-well attitude on the subject).

So it's hard for me to recommend this novel as a novel. This is the first military-intrigue novel I've ever read, and I must say that I won't be picking up any Tom Clancy anytime soon because I really didn't enjoy it that much. Frankly, the ending came and I was like, "What? That's it? We defeated the bad guy, so now that story's over?" And also, in the second half of the book (it's divided into parts 1 and 2) Hugh Lorrie started cheating a bit by leaving out details to heighten the suspense (e.g. "'What do you want?' [I say, and then] I turn back to the window and listen to Barnes for a while, and when he's finished I take a deep breath, hoping desperately and not caring at all, both at the same time. 'When?' I say." pg 315-6). Maybe that's a convention in thrillers, but I don't like feeling left out of the loop. So I don't like the genre, and most of Part 2 is straight-up thriller with humorous descriptions and metaphors and sidenotes tossed in for flavor.

Another difficulty was the dialect. Mostly, I kept pace with the Britishisms okay, but sometimes they threw me. Usually just little things--like it took me almost a full chapter to figure out that "braces" means "suspenders"--so that wasn't too bad, but occasionally he'd say something that was totally incomprehensible to me, like this beaut from page 278:

'Twelve years in a sherry cask,' I said cheerfully, 'stuck out on a Highland hillside, waiting for its big moment - and then bang, doesn't even get to touch the sides. Who'd be a single malt whiskey?'

I had to read that one twice silently and then twice aloud to my wife before I could make any sense of it. Now, it seems glitteringly clear to me and I'm half afraid you'll laugh at me for not getting it. There were others that stymied me, but this one was easiest to find just now.

I suppose that, in regards to the British dialect, I should warn you that the F-bomb (such a terror here in the US that was have a name for it) is not used sparingly in this book. It flits around in GunSeller dialog like "Oh my heck" at a Spanish Fork young women's camp in the 90s. So, yeah--now you know.

I can't recommend Hugh Laurie's style enough; this book really was a joy to read. He's clever and fun almost all of the time (e.g. "When he got there, he sat down very slowly. Either because he was haemorrhoidal, or because there was a chance that I might do something dangerous. I smiled, to show him that he was haemorrhoidal." pg 266) and surprisingly poignant and touching here and there (right up there with the sex scene was one part where he talked about life's hard times, which was so good that I typed myself up a copy). For those reasons, I can't recommend this book highly enough. But the story itself is--I dunno--really, really interesting and exciting and fun and clever and smart, so if that's what you look for in a book, this is a good one, but I'da much rather just read a collection of essays by Hugh Laurie than this.

I guess I'm just boring.

The plot really was very good. There was action and there was romantic interest and there were several times when I inhaled sharply at the end of the chapter and turned my wide eyes to my wife and said, "The plot thickens!" (Unfortunately, I read the book silently to myself, so she didn't really understand what I meant. Cruel of me, really.) For that reason, I really did enjoy Part 1 a good deal more than Part 2 because Part 1 was more lighthearted and less military than Part 2.

The end of part one was where the action really started. Most of Part 1 was just witty writing diluted by all too much plot and character development (for me, I mean; you'd probably like it, if you're into that sort of thing), but then page 171 came around and turned me on my head.

"What?" I said aloud (my wife was at work at that moment, so I said this to an empty living room). "Wait, what?" and I had to get up and walk around, even though I was in the middle of the chapter. After the surprise had worn away, I sat back down to continue reading.

Little did I know that page 171 was nothing compared to page 172!

It really is a good book. I've tried to sprinkle some quotes in here and there to give you a taste, but I've left out my favorite parts so that, if you do decide to read the book, you won't have the best quips ruined. If you'd like, you can read a sample chapter online here. It's the first chapter, so it's a reasonable place to start; just remember that I said that I liked the first chapter, but "I liked the second chapter even more because it was more funny and less action packed than the first."

So in conclusion, let me just say that, if you like military-intrigue novels, this is a pretty good one, I think; if you like British humor, this is an excellent choice; if you like clever, thoughtful, witty, insightful writing, this is really top notch. It isn't my favorite novel, but I don't know that I've ever enjoyed reading a book more than I enjoyed this one--not since becoming an adult, at least (it really is hard for any book to compete with the thrill I got out of reading Marvin K Mooney Will You Please Go Now? as a child).

Post 235

2010-10-17T17:14:00.003-06:00

In response to what's going on over in Thutopia right now:

My relationship with money has always been a bad one. Not to say that I'm a hoarder or a gambler or a thief or a con artist or anything like that; me and money, we just don't get along so well. It's never been a reality for me. Even as a kid, it was just too theoretical a construct for me to grasp.

I was a strange kid (and still am, I suppose, in many ways). I can remember being no more than 5 or 6 years old (judging by the house we were living in) and trying to wrap my head around the relativity of money because the older of my two sisters had tried to explain to me that, though $100 seemed like a lot of money to us kids, it wasn't a lot of money for our parents, who had to pay on a mortgage and pay bills and buy food for a family of 8. This notion of relativity really got to me and the realness of money started to fade. Consequently, I can remember being 8 or 9 or 10 and getting in an argument with my nearest-aged sibling because I maintained that money was nothing more than paper, that it had no value, that it wasn't real. I can also remember being about the same age and pressing my parents for answers about what money was for, why we had it, who made it up, how it worked, and isn't there a better way? I remember in my early and middle teens getting in arguments with my mom because (get this:) she wanted to give me an allowance! She had set up a merit system in which we kids would do our daily and weekly chores and mark a calendar to say which days we had done them, and then she would pay us at the end of every month according to how much we had done. The first few months, I refused the money, telling her that she needed it more than I did and that I was confident that she could put it to more productive use than I could, but she insisted that I take it. Finally, I got wise and did my chores but simply neglected to mark the calendar. I can distinctly remember her being irritated and telling me that she knew I did my chores and then giving me an allowance anyway. (Meanwhile, the other two kids at home were constantly saying things like, "I really did do my chores; I just forgot to mark the calendar!" to which my mom would respond, "Do you think I'd get paid if I forgot to fill out my time card?")

What a strange kid I was--what a strange man I've been! I just glanced over the posts on this blog under my "money" label, and my my my how quickly I've forgotten how passionately I bashed money less than three years ago. As a kid, I just didn't understand it; as a young adult, I actually hated it. Now, as I near my quarter-century mark, I feel something entirely different, which strangely enough hearkens back to something that predates the money-bashing posts of this blog.

The final few months of my mission sent me home thinking about money a lot. In my penultimate interview with my mission president, he told me to be a millionaire. That really caught me off guard. He was telling me how much potential he saw in me, how great he thought I could become, and then he said, "You could do anything--be anything. Be a millionaire, Elder Jepson. There's nothing wrong with financial success. Be a millionaire and give it all to the Church."

A few weeks before that, my companion and I had been teaching a lesson to a man named Mickey Traylor. He was telling us about the circumstances that caused him to move from Texas to a suburb of Boise, and it mostly had to do with the fact that he had been getting so caught up in his financial success that his relationship with his wife had started to suffer, so he called it quits and took her far away to a place where they could just relax and enjoy each other.

"Money'll change you," he said.

"Money wouldn't change me," my companion assured him.

"Only people who've never had money say that," Mickey said. "I used to say that, but then I got money, and it changed me."

At the time, I thought that conversation was the final nail in the coffin of my estimation of money, but then I had that interview with my mission president, and I got confused.

Then came the very last day of my mission. My zone leader arranged for a member to give me and a few other home-bound missionaries a ride to the mission office. This member was a very wealthy man, and his advice to me as a returning missionary was to go home and make as much money as possible. "The Lord can't use you if you're poor," he said.

That naturally offended me, but the rest of his conversation was even worse. He spent the drive telling us the way he had amassed his wealth, and it was unethical and perhaps illegal. I really didn't understand, but I'll try to explain: he said that right after he got married, he bought a little house. Before buying it, he got it appraised at well more than it was worth, and then got a loan for the amount of the appraisal. He then talked the seller into selling it for much less than the advertised price, used his enormous loan to buy the house, and used what was left from the loan to invest enough money that the interest paid for (or at least helped to pay for) his monthly mortgage payment. Once that house had paid itself off, he sold it and bought a bigger house in the same way, which he sold and bought an even bigger house. He finished by saying, "I now live in a two-million-dollar house that pays me to live in it."

This man, for whatever reason, could not go all the way to the mission office, so he dropped me and the other missionaries off at another man's house. Some other home-bound missionaries met us there, and then that man gave us a ride to the office. When I asked this second man what he did for a living, he said, "As little as possible," which did not impress me. When I asked him for more details (because he had a nice living situation for someone who was at home in his PJs halfway through a Wednesday morning), he said something like, "Basically, I convince people who have a lot of money that they should have meetings with other people who make a lot of money so that they can learn from each other how to make even more money, and then I convince them to pay me a lot of money to set the meeting up."

And thus my conflict began. My mission president had exhorted me to become a millionaire, yet the wealthy people I met didn't make me want to join them. Very early on in my mission, I had had dinner with an anesthesiologist and his family. They lived in an enormous brick house with lots of land, but the kids of the family didn't think they had anything. From their conversation, I gathered that each child (I think there were four of them) had their own private room and bathroom and that for Christmas they had each gotten their own ATV, yet they were completely dissatisfied and asked their parents over and over, "When are we going to move into that big house we looked at?" I had at the time an awful sort of lurking pride regarding my middle-class (arguably lower middle-class) upbringing, and I was disgusted by those children.

When I first moved to Provo, I quickly became overly fond of this quote by Brigham Young:

The worst fear that I have about this people is that they will get rich in this country, forget God and his people, wax fat, and kick themselves out of the Church and go to hell. This people will stand mobbing, robbing, poverty and all manner of persecution, and be true. My greater fear for them is that they cannot stand wealth; and yet they have to be tried with riches, for they will become the richest people on this earth.

I guess I mostly lacked faith in myself. I assumed that if I ever became wealthy I would subsequently become petty, greedy, snobbish, and unaffectionate.

I've changed now. I've recently come out of a phase in which I was seriously considering pursuing a career in law. I think my highest desire right now--and this is certainly resultant from my recent wedding--is to become an excellent breadwinner. I still don't aspire to wealth, but I do hope for some material comforts. I never hope to have an expensive car or a mansion on a hill or a private jet, and I hope that if I'm ever in a financial situation to see such things as viable options that I'll find a better use for my money.

After that interview with my mission president, I decided that perhaps the most admirable thing to be is a middle-class millionaire, and in the past couple years I've discovered that our nation has quite a few of those--in fact, all the best financial advice these days is to live poor so you can retire well. I struggle with that idea because my immediate response to such advice is always, "What's the point of having all that money if you don't do anything with it?" I don't hope to have a Ferrari, but I do hope to have good, reliable transportation. I don't hope for a mansion, but I want a house that holds out the rain. I'm quite fixed on the idea that my kids will share bedrooms and bathrooms, but I don't want to shove them into bed-sized closets when I tell them good-night.

I guess what I'm saying is that I do want money, but I want happiness more. If I ever have money, I hope to use it well.

Be a millionaire, Elder Jepson--just don't be stupid about it.

Post 234

2010-10-08T17:12:00.002-06:00

Go me! I feel so validated! It's great!

I'm going to graduate in April, which means I only get one more semester after this one to milk my undergraduate career for all it's worth. One thing I've kinda been regretting recently is that, despite earning an English minor, I have yet to take a single creative writing course. It's just one of those things that I always wanted to do but never made a priority, and now I'm pretty well out of time.

There are two levels of creative writing courses here at BYU: a 200-level survey course that introduces students to methods of writing fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and then there are three different 300-level courses that specialize--one for fiction, one for nonfiction, one for poetry. It's the 300-level nonfiction course that I've always been interested in, but the 200-level introductory course always stood in my way, and there were always other classes that I felt were more important.

Well, registration is approaching once again--the last time it will for undergraduate Schmetterling. About a week ago, I was looking at classes, trying to figure out my final semester's schedule, and I whimsically pulled up the nonfiction class. It has two sections, one of which is taught by a teacher I've heard very good things about--especially in regards to this class. An English-major friend of mine, upon hearing that I was interested in creative nonfiction, told me that this professor "is the king, queen, and prince of creative nonfiction." I really want to take this class.

I glanced at the prerequisites just to make sure that it was impossible when I found a loophole: "ENGL 218R or instructor's consent." So I decided to try my luck by sending the professor an email asking him whether there was any chance I could get his consent.

His response:

Thanks for your interest in the class. I rarely make exceptions, but I'd gladly take a look at a sample of your writing to determine whether you can take the class without the prerequisite. Send me something?

The juxtaposition of 'rarely' and 'but' made me feel less than confident, but I had to try it--especially since he was willing to give me a chance. I dug through my computer files, looking for something worth banking on. I found nothing. And then I thought of my other blog, so I grabbed a story off of it, gave it a quick brush up, and sent it off to him.

Four days went by--which, really, that's pretty impressively prompt for a professor to read a 6 pages of stuff written by a student trying to work the system--but it was still nerve wracking. Frankly, I'd already resigned myself to never being able to take that class.

'TIS NOT SO!

Today I got this email, which made me feel oh so very good about myself:

That's a fun piece to read. I like it. You have my permission to sign up for English 317R. I look forward to meeting you next semester...

Yay me!

Post 233

2010-10-07T14:40:00.003-06:00

Without a doubt, my absolutely least favorite word in the whole English language (at least as far as my vocabulary extends) is twelfth. L, F, and TH in rapid succession? Seriously gross. Who thought that was a good idea?

Post 232

2010-10-05T10:05:00.005-06:00

A few weeks back, my wife and I watched Alfred Hitchcock's Rope. I was really interested to see what a movie with no cuts would look like. As it turns out, Rope isn't exactly that: aside from the cuts that Hitch did his best to hide, there are deliberate cuts about every 20 minutes for when (according to Wikipedia) the projectionist had to change reels in the theater. Regardless, it was the closest thing to a single-shot film that I had ever seen, and I enjoyed it.

As I watched the film, I came to a very interesting realization: I didn't really notice the lack of cuts. More interesting still was that I noticed the hidden cuts more than I noticed the deliberate ones, and it occurred to me that a far greater miracle than a single-shot film is the fact that normal, multi-shot films don't disorient moviegoers. Because you think about it, there's nothing in real life that remotely resembles a movie. In real life, we can only ever have one perspective. So a single-shot film (or a play, for that matter) is much more analogous to real life than any movie, yet we here in modern society generally take cuts in stride. It makes me wonder whether the audiences watching the first multi-shot films were caught off guard by them.

It's hard to judge the success of Hitchcock's effect. I was shocked that it was so unobtrusive: I was almost as blissfully unaware of the camera work in Rope as I am in any other movie. But that's what we American moviegoers generally value, right--an unobtrusive cameraman? So perhaps the affect was perfectly well wrought. But if there comes a point that an affect can be so well done that it goes unnoticed, really, what's the point? It's like this blasted a cappella craze that's been slowly building in the past decade, culminating (and hopefully ending) with Glee. Yasee, I don't understand the point of getting a bunch of talented singers together, tossing in a beatboxer, and having them do their best to sound like they've got a band--why don't you just get a band? I remember the good ole days when the only a cappella I knew was Rockappella doing the theme song for Where in the World Is Carmen San Diego?--which I liked because they sounded like an a cappella group. Now a group of people get on stage and try to sound exactly like Journey and I'm like, "BOO! Get off the stage!" because if I wanna listen to Journey, I'm gonna grab one of my Journey CDs, not go see a cover band that doesn't have a single guitar, keyboard, or drum set in sight.

But I digress. The point is that it's hard to judge the success of an effect whose epitome is invisibility, and that's what the carefully choreographed camerawork in Rope was. I watched some stuff about the making of it, and I was blown away by the enormously complicated set--the whole thing certainly was a cinematic tour de force--but in the end, what have we gained? Absolutely nothing. So really, as awesome as the undertaking was, what's the point?

On the other hand, my wife and I recently saw The Russian Ark courtesy of BYU's International Cinema. It actually was a single-shot, and the effect was inescapable because the main character was in first-person. It drove me crazy, but I'm not sure that was the film's fault. For one thing, we arrived about five minutes into it, and without cuts or scenes to reorient me, I was never able to get my feet on the ground. Also, for whatever reason, it was in really low resolution--like watching a low-res YouTube video in full-screen mode. I at first believed that that was a sacrifice that the director had made to be able to do 90-some-odd minutes of film in a single shot, but the Wikipedia article tells me that it was shot in high definition, so I don't know what happened there. Also, the subtitles were buggy: there were times when people were talking but there were no subtitles, and there were times when large crowds would just be hubbubbing and subtitles would come up that couldn't be clearly attributed to any one speaker. So it's really hard for me to give the movie a fair shake overall, but I think this affect was probably a lot better than Hitchcock's because it played a role in the film itself, and I think that's important. I'm all for artistic and experimental film making, but I feel like it has to be done to some end, and I don't consider "Let's see if anybody notices" or "Just because I can" are very good ends to work toward.

Post 231

2010-09-28T11:27:00.002-06:00

I was listening to a radio station that played "Nights in White Satin" and "Stairway to Heaven" in the same set. Shockingly, those weren't the only two songs they played.

This post is a waste of space....

Post 230

2010-09-22T14:06:00.002-06:00

It's commonly accepted in the linguistic community (at least in my narrow experience in that community) that all language changes but that spoken language changes much more quickly than written language and that writing has historically slowed down language change (at least in English; come to think of it, I know nothing about the history of other languages). Thanks to our standardized spelling system, this is easy to see: surprise is still spelled s-u-r even though few people pronounce that r anymore; special is still spelled c-i even though everyone I've ever heard say it has pronounced it sh; every is spelled as though it's still pronounced with three syllables; mission and related words--well, we've just come to accept s-i-o-n as an alternate spelling of "shun," ignoring entirely the fact that it was once pronounced as it is spelled. The list goes on. People often complain about how our language isn't very phonetic, but I think they fail to realize that we'd have to update our spellings of words at least once every generation to keep the phonetics up. Personally, I'm grateful for standardized spelling because it makes Google and other information-age technology work so well; sure, I think the language could have been standardized a little better (drop the a out of feather like Noah Webster suggested, spell corn and kernel the same way, etc.), but standardization is good in general (in this regard, at least).

(This, not surprisingly, is not at all what I intended to talk about. Welcome to my blog.)

ANYway, as I was listening to some songs on YouTube today, I had a spark of hypothesis that I'd like you to weigh in on. This is purely speculative, and I doubt it'll be possible to study this for at least another 40 or 50 years, but I wanna write this down so maybe some day someone will stumble across this and think, "Wow. That kid was on to something. Wish I knew more than just his nym." So here goes--

I enjoy reading comments on YouTube. They often get far removed from the subject of the video. Because I'm not on FaceBook or Twitter and because I'm in the class of people who punctuates text messages, YouTube threads are really my only exposure to typical online communication, and it fascinates me!

Today I realized that, in the modern world, written language is changing faster than spoken language, and I wonder if it will start affecting the way people speak. I mean, if I walk into a fast food joint, walk up to the counter, and say, "I can has cheeseburger?" that certainly wouldn't fall into the realm of normally accepted American English, but if I see a video on YouTube in which a guy walks into a fast food joint and orders a burger, I could leave a comment that says, "i can haz cheezeberger" and be totally appropriate.

Now, sure, I admit that quoting pop culture is nothing new, but the fact is that YouTube threads aren't always quoting lolcatz--in fact, most times people aren't quoting anything; they're just typing. Sometimes, I come across a comment that is totally unintelligible to me. (I don't have time to look for one right now; perhaps I should start collecting them.)

I'm not suggesting the change will happen very quickly--and I'm not even sure what the change will be. I mean, a lot of the change is solely visual (e.g. you are-->ur), so that can't really come through speaking, and I don't really hear people saying things like lol, etc. It's mostly grammatical, I guess. Subject-verb agreement is often ignored, and I think it's on purpose: I don't imagine the people who type things like "27 ppl is retarted" on a video with 27 dislikes on it would say such a thing out loud, but I certainly don't know that for sure.

Anyway. Gotta go.

Post 229

2010-09-03T23:03:00.001-06:00

Grumble....

So my blog has this problem for some reason that, whenever I try to embed a YouTube video, I only end up with the left half of the video frame, even when I choose the smallest frame size.

But take my word for it, this is pretty awesome.

(Also, my links are invisible in my current layout--another thorn in my side. So click on 'this is pretty awesome' even though it doesn't look much like a link.)

Post 228

2010-08-31T12:28:00.002-06:00

I noticed recently that my Firefox browser has a "private browsing" option in its tools menu. Not sure what that was, I consulted the Firefox help website and found this explanation:

{Open Quote}

History is used by the browser to enhance your experience on the Internet. When the browser remembers a website you previously visited or the username and password for your favorite web site, this information is considered your history.

However, there may be times when you do not want other users of your computer to see or access such information. For example, if a friend or family member shares your computer, you might prefer for them not to be able to see what websites you've visited or what files you've downloaded.

Firefox 3.5 and later provide "Private Browsing," which allows you to browse the Internet without Firefox saving any data about which sites and pages you have visited.

Note: Private Browsing prevents information from being recorded on your computer. It does not make you anonymous on the Internet.

{Close Quote}

Can anybody think of a reason that "you might prefer for [your family and friends] not to be able to see what websites you've visited or what files you've downloaded"--other than a hidden porn addiction, I mean. Near as I can tell, this is an option by the porn addicts for the porn addicts, and that makes me sad. The only other thing I can think of is, like, Christmas shopping, but unless you're making a mix CD for your teenaged love-crush, I don't know why you would need to hide your downloading history.

Post 227

2010-08-27T15:30:00.005-06:00

A cruel trick has been played on me, readers--too cruel, almost, for me to bear.

Where to begin?

I discovered recently a sanctuary to save my sanity from my oppressively mindless and menial occupation (chiasmic alliteration, anyone?). It's called Librivox, and it's fantastic. Theric once told me that one of the most charitable things I could do with myself is to contribute to Wikipedia and thus add to the mass of readily available knowledge that is now at mankind's fingertips, and I believed him, but should I ever find a spare day in my near future, I'd much rather record a story or two for Librivox and thus similarly add to mankind's memory. Librivox.org is a place where audio recordings of works that are in the public domain are available for free. The idea is that people volunteer as readers and editors and organizers and work toward the goal of getting everything that is in the public domain recorded and downloadable.

My job is, as I said, more than usually mindless lately, and I have therefore been reading (or rather listening to) a wide variety of worthwhile old time stories. In the past couple of weeks, I have listened to The Hound of the Baskervilles as well as several shorter Sherlock Holmes tales, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man, several short stories by Poe and Twain (some were very funny, which is a tribute to both men, and some were not at all funny, which is a tribute to Poe but not Twain) and several other authors, some of whom I'd heard of and some of whom I hadn't. I must confess that I enjoyed most of what I listened to, most especially because they were things I never would have gotten around to reading for myself.

I had so much I wanted to tell you about these old works, but now I can't because I'm so upended by this nasty trick.

Those of you who remember this blog's heyday back in 2008 might also recall my attacks upon the world of fiction. Much of what I said was sensationalized to promote ongoing discussion and hatred, but all of what I said had some tinge of honesty to it and, though I've mellowed out a lot in recent days, I still feel as though I have no time that I can sacrifice to the golden calf of fiction (except for the occasional movie with my wife)--and if I ever do find time to sacrifice to it, I'd much rather spend the time carving my own calves than admiring the existent herds. But listening to these books has been different because I have been able to do so while doing all that is expected of me by my employer. I have been, I suppose, reading for pleasure's sake alone and (worse yet!) as nothing more than an escape from the drear of my bread winning.

The Schmetterling of 2008 would slap me with a furious antenna, I'm sure.

But that's precisely why the trick was so cruel. You see, yesterday and today I listened to The Man Who Was Thursday, which I had never heard of before a few days ago when a friend mentioned it in passing. I looked it up on Librivox and read the description. It sounded like an exciting and thrilling tale: a Scotland Yard man undercover among anarchists--what could be a better distraction from my humdrum life of find-and-replace?

(If you know the book, which I'm not really counting on, you might well be laughing at me now, and you have every right to.)

Yesterday, I got through a good chunk of the book, and it was everything I had hoped for. Some of it seemed contrived and hokey, but it was fun and engaging and unpredictable and curiously funny at times. As I listened, I downloaded a Gutenberg etext so I could copy excerpts to email myself, and I spent large parts of last night wondering how on earth the tale would end.

Today I listened to the last half, and it became inexplicably hard to pay attention to after a while. Then the inexplicability became perfectly clear: I was having trouble following because it was all falling apart. The plot vanished; the characters started fading away. An opaque sort of meaning distilled upon the lens, as it were, distorting the clarity of the story, and then the whole thing ended in an instant, absurdly arriving somewhere near (but not precisely at) the place where it began.

I felt robbed. Where is my denouement? I demand a denouement! I asked Wikipedia what had happened, but it only hinted, delighting in the secret it so politely kept for the book and impolitely kept from me. Dash it all, Chesterton, what has happened to this adventure?

I turned on Pandora and returned to my work, brooding. And then a dismal light dawned somewhere in the fog of my intellect and I beheld the grandest and cleverest but also cruelest and most elaborate trick that anyone ever pulled on me, and I'm not even sure who to blame for it.

In all my raging against the beast of Fiction, I never once concluded that it was incapable of enlightening its readers. Of a truth I intended to argue that it was perhaps better able to edify than nonfiction is, but its aim is so often to merely entertain, and that was the sin that led me to seek so intensely to crucify its advocates. In my mind, Fiction's great crime was not its inability to improve humanity (impotence is a disability and not a crime); no, the crime of Fiction was that it ignored its almost limitless potential and thus became a guilty bystander that observes crimes without punishing them. I hated fiction because it seemed to me an infinitely wealthy man who says, "Be thou warmed and filled" and yet gives nothing.

And then the trick. Just when I sit at the table and say, "Fine, my fair French Princess, I will eat cake. How I wish I had some bread because I'm starving here, but I will feast upon your well wishing. Bring me the feast of the multitude of nations, and I will be the man who dreams that he eats and awakes to an empty soul or dreams that he drinks and wakes up faint; only let me dream that I am filled and I will be satisfied till morning." I sit like Peter Branning with the lost boys, merely pretending to feast, starving and yet momentarily satisfied by the illusion. Herein lay the trick: in the midst of this absurd meal, I found the meat and potatoes I had often sought, the hearty meal I thought I was only pretending to eat. But cruel, cruel world--I wasn't paying attention! I thought, "Hum! This plate of phantasm is curiously tough to chew!" and swallowed it before I knew what it was!

So I'll never know how good a meal it was because I never intend to eat it again, but I daresay there was meat of some kind in there, and even if it was only a McNugget of thought, I wish I'd given it a bit more attention than what I did because I think it came from the breast of one of my favorite theological questions.

[P.S. Is it apparent that I've had hours and hours of literature fed to me through my ears? My words sound stilted to me even as I type them.]

Post 226

2010-08-21T10:33:00.003-06:00

I have solved a mystery, readers, and uncovered a heretofore unnoticed tragedy (at least by me).

As you might know, Billy Joel is by far my favorite musician (see my profile). I own more than half of his studio albums and have at various times had ambitions to own all of them (this desire only flags when I realize that I already have more than 9 hours of Billy Joel music, which is already far more than I am able to listen to on a very regular basis). Someday, I would love to publish an article (only on this blog, no doubt) reviewing all of his albums, giving each a nickname, and providing thoughts about each. Ya see, Billy Joel is--um--heck, I'll just make up a term--Billy Joel is what we connoisseurs call an Album Artist. I have heard in him several interviews say that he writes albums. He doesn't just write a bunch of songs and throw them all together to make an album; he decides what he wants an album to be, and then he writes songs to render the effect he was going for, so listening to any of his songs outside of the context of its album (he says) is unfair to the song. That's why, in this era of individually sold mp3s, I continue to buy entire albums on CD--so I can pop it in and listen to it straight through in the way that the artist intended. Doing so has made it obvious to me that he really does write albums, and that the songs do have a little something extra when surrounded by their siblings at home (as opposed to hanging out with friends at the Greatest Hits Club, I guess).

Anyway, this really has nothing to do with what I actually wanted to blog about (which is a good sign I'm getting back to the good old days of prolific blogging).

Billy Joel's song "The Entertainer" is one of those "Wo is me! I'm a world-famous rock star!" sorts of songs. These sorts of songs usually get on my nerves, and this one did initially, but the music is just so good and the lyrics are so well crafted that it won me over. Still, one line always confused me.

"The Entertainer" is on Streetlife Serenade, the album that came out after Piano Man, and one verse runs thus

I am the entertainer,
I come to do my show.
You've heard my latest record,
It's been on the radio.
Ah, it took me years to write it,
They were the best years of my life.
It was a beautiful song.
But it ran too long.
If you're gonna have a hit,
You gotta make it fit--
So they cut it down to 3:05.

This has always confused me. The only song this could possibly be talking about is "Piano Man," but a quickly glance at that song in Window Media Player shows it to run 5:38. What gives, Bill?

Well I've figured it out, readers, and I'm very sad about it. I have been nearly evangelical at times in sharing with people just how awesome Mr. Joel is. I proudly tell people that Billy Joel is by far my favorite artist, that he does, in my opinion, leave far in his proverbial dust all other bands, singer-song writers, artists, and musicians. My friends often say, "But [Shmetterling]--what does he sing besides 'Piano Man'?" to which I respond, "Wellletmetellya!" and I rattle off songs that I know they know (longesttime,riverofdreams,wedidn'tstartthefire, etcetcetc). I have often thought to myself how sad it is that they only know to associate one song with this great man--but now I feel differently.

Now I feel that it is downright tragic and a horrible injustice to music and humanity that they know even less than that!

Several months back, I was sifting through radio stations in the car and found one that was playing "Piano Man," so I sat back and sang along. And then--wait, what? Suddenly, I was on the wrong verse. Somehow, the song had gone straight from the bartender ("...but there's someplace that he'd rather be") to the rest of the crowd ("And the waitress is practicing politics...")--it skipped, like, two verses! And then it skipped another verse and went straight to the end!

What the heck?? Five and a half minutes from the greatest musician to ever step foot on the rock 'n' roll scene is not too much to expect of a radio station--especially in a world where "American Pie" is far from absent on the airwaves. I tell you, friends, if ever there was a sign of a cultural misappropriate of priorities, this was it!

Anyways, a couple of days ago, I was driving up State Street to pick my wife up from work, and the radio station I was tuned to started playing "Piano Man." It took me the first couple of bars to remember my duty to society, so by the time I looked at my watch, I was a few seconds late, but when the song ended, my best estimation is that it did, in fact, run just a little more than 3:05.

Horrors.

Post 225

2010-08-15T20:42:00.002-06:00

Okay, readers, help me out, here. Political discourse of any description usually gives me patriotic tingles up and down my spine, but I have no idea what to make of this video:

I admit that I'm really out of touch with current events, but can anyone answer these questions for me?

0:40 "You claim you have not heard us." - What does this mean? Has President Obama said, "I hear that people have said that they reject my vision for the country, but I haven't heard them, so oh well!"?
0:51 "You claim you have not seen us." - Is President Obama on the record as having said, "Tea parties? What tea parties?"
0:58 "...as President Wilson said, 'a leader's ears must ring with the voices of the people'" - What was President Wilson talking about? Also, do we look to Wilson as an advocate of the rights of "the People"? I know some not so savory things about the way the privacy of "the People" was flouted during his reign.
2:01 "That unfinished cause for which our soldiers willing go to battle" - ...is analogous to Gettysburg how?
2:44 Obama has "violated our Constitution" - how, precisely?
2:46 Obama has "confounded laws" - what does this mean?
2:50 Obama has "destroyed jobs" - how?
2:52 Obama has "perverted our economy" - what does this mean?
2:54 Obama has "curtailed free speech" - how?
2:56 Obama has "corrupted our currency" - what does this mean?
2:58 Obama has "weakened our national security" - how?
3:00 Obama has "endangered our sovereignty" - how?
3:05 "By compromising our nations cultural, legal, and economic institutions" - How has he done this? What is a "cultural institution"?
3:16 "Through generational theft you are robbing the unborn of opportunity." - Very poetic, but what does it mean?

Just a little confused. I myself am a little unsettled by how much money has been spent in recent days, but Mr. Obama is signing the bills that Congress puts in front of him, so let's not just blame him. I don't really mean to defend our president (I lack the political interest to do so), but I'm not a fan of rabble-rousing, and I think that's all this is.

Post 224

2010-08-02T12:24:00.001-06:00

"Stoned wallabies make crop circles" might sound like a headline from The Onion, but it's actually from BBC news.

Check it out.

Post 222 (apologetically misordered)

2010-07-22T10:22:00.002-06:00

So, I'd like to tell you I'm going to blog more faithfully these days, and I'd like to believe that myself, but we'll see what happens, I guess.

Just a little bit of poignant randomness to ripple your day:

Post 223

2010-06-12T22:07:00.001-06:00

Why haven't I posted in so long? Well....

Post 221

2010-04-06T13:21:00.001-06:00

It's snowing today here in Provo. Snow on April 6th! A friend texted me this morning to wish me a happy white Christmas. Hahahaha. White Christmas indeed! THAT, my friends, is good, clean, down-to-earth funny, right there. What a kidder.

My apologies to anyone who isn't a Mormon and doesn't get the joke.

Post 220

2010-03-17T19:01:00.001-06:00

If it weren't for holidays and YouTube, I would never post, it seems....

Post 219

2009-12-24T12:41:00.002-07:00

Christmas is a time when folks who normally wouldn't associate with one another lay down their differences and come together--so we get some pretty odd pairings. For example, Frank Sinatra and Cyndi Lauper:

Stranger yet, Bing Crosby and David Bowie:

What's next--Miss Utah and a stand-up comedian??

Post 218

2009-11-04T12:10:00.001-07:00

This from a 1976 "Dear Abby" submitted by THINKING MAN:

"If you absolutely cannot refrain from drinking, start a saloon in your own home. Be the only customer and you will not have to buy a license. Give your wife $12.00 to buy a gallon of whiskey. there are 128 shots in a gallon. Buy all your drinks from your wife at 40¢ a shot and in four days when the gallon is gone, your wife will have $39.20 to put in the banks and $12.00 to buy another gallon. If you live 10 years and buy all your booze from your wife and then die with snakes in your boots, she will have $35,750.40 on deposit, enough to bury you respectably, bring up your children, buy and house and lot, marry a decent man and forget she ever knew YOU!"

Maybe I need to develop some expensive bad habits while I'm single so someday when I'm married I can give my wife a nest egg....

Post 217

2009-10-27T12:08:00.001-06:00

I love substantives. They are an awesome.

Post 216

2009-10-19T22:04:00.000-06:00

If I've said it once, I've said it once: tautology is tautology.

And that's that!

Post 215

2009-10-07T14:48:00.002-06:00

It is a foolish man who amidst the storms of life runs outside to shout at the thunder and flail in the wind. A wiser man knows to hunker down and wait for fairer weather to come.

Post 214

2009-10-07T14:45:00.002-06:00

And so it was the courage was the only casualty that day, for a speedy retreat hath many a happy marriage made. That a man may courageously die for a cause is true, but that a living coward may prove of more use to a society than a dead hero is just is true.

Post 213

2009-10-01T22:31:00.004-06:00

Hey friends. Because I've become such a once-in-a-blue-moon sort of blogger (not as bad as some, I know, but far worse than I am wont to be), I thought I'd give you a post that is completely new and different in style and media and whatnot.

I work as a research assistant. It's mostly mind-numbing work. To keep myself from going crazy, I made myself a Pandora radio station with 99 Luftballons as a seed song. I have since been very much enjoying the music of female artists from the 80s--and they are fantastic! My girlfriend gives me some ribbing over the fact that I suddenly have a crush on the music of the likes of Madonna and Cyndi Lauper, but it's good stuff! Don't believe me? Well, let me prove you wrong, friends--let me prove you wrong! Behold! Music that you can't listen to a be unhappy; if you are unhappy, it will cheer you up:

Post 212

2009-09-18T12:57:00.002-06:00

I'm not convinced that I have any interest in seeing Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, but this awesome bit from Ebert's review:

Let me search my memory. I think — no, I'm positive — this is the first movie I've seen where the hero dangles above a chasm lined with razor-sharp peanut brittle while holding onto a red licorice rope held by his girlfriend, who has a peanut allergy, so that when she gets cut by some brittle and goes into anaphylactic shock and her body swells up, she refuses to let go, and so the hero bites through the licorice to save her. You don't see that every day.

Post 211

2009-09-18T12:56:00.000-06:00

I have a plot to overthrow the entire world using only the power of rhetoric.

It has prose and cons....

Post 210

2009-09-03T16:27:00.001-06:00

Hahaha. I love literalism! And I love the 80s. If you love these things also, you will love this video:

Post 209

2009-09-02T16:33:00.001-06:00

Awesome headlines in the Chicago Tribune in the early 1900s:

Girls sold by gypsies; whole town up in arms

BALLOT OR THE BALLET? HERE'S A NEW ARGUMENT FOR WOMAN'S SUFFRAGE.

DANCES 3 DAYS; CAN'T STOP, Girl Whose Feet Won't Keep Still Drugged to Save Her Life. MANIA PUZZLES DOCTORS. Only Thing Like Philadelphia Case Is Tarantula Madness.

FATHER LOST FOR 34 YEARS; FOUND ONLY TO BE ARRESTED

'BASEBALL BABY' BORN IN PARK AS CUBS TROUNCE PIRATES

PASTOR TURNS MATCHMAKER Men with Proper Credentials May Meet Young Women Tonight.

CREATES FICTION, ALL RIGHT, BUT IT'S BY WORD OF MOUTH. Proposed Double Wedding Called Off When One Bride-Elect Finds "Story Writer" Fiance Is a Barber.

BURGLARS HALT THEIR WORK TO GIVE MAN HIS MEDICINE

LET A PHYSICIAN FIT YOUR CORSET Latest Straight Front and Easy, Well 'Made Waist Adds Health, Says Doctor. MAKE WOMEN BEAUTIFUL

Post 208

2009-09-02T13:13:00.002-06:00

HeylookI'mback. With any luck, I'll give my long, glorious, fantastic excuse for my absence from blogdom on Fake Dates within the next week or so, but today I wish to give an academic lament of sorts in far more brevity than I'd like because I've got a lot of stuff to do.

I'm back to school now; I started on Monday. I'm taking an English class called something like "Studies in Rhetoric and Style: Style and Stylistic Criticism." Today we were talking about what style is, trying to define it using the ridiculous bit of prolix that serves as our book's two prefaces and lengthy introduction. My professor said something about how the study of rhetoric has fallen out of English curriculum in the past couple centuries and has recently been picked up by linguists, which, she said, is unfortunate because the linguists approach it too scientifically. Later in the lecture, she mentioned how Plato poo-pooed rhetoric and wrote it off so now the whole philosophical community shuns rhetoric as something evil, "but Plato was wrong," she said.

This is facinating (and heart wrenching) to me. Last winter, I took an English Language class called "Semantics." This had an underlying sentiment of "Trying to understand how words mean stuff is really facinating, and English students are morons for not looking in to this." I really enjoyed the class and found it refreshingly not scientific, though I was a bit miffed because we were standing on the shoulders of a lot of philosophers while pretending that we were not studying philosophy. The summer before that, I took a Philosophy class called "The Philosophy of Language," so that's how I knew all these philosophers.

It's strange (and sad) to me that all three disciplines are working toward the same end (viz. understanding how language means anything) yet refuse to work together: the philosophers and linguists ignore each other as much as possible, but, when they can't ignore each other entirely, the philosophers call linguists like Chomsky (stupid Chomsky) philosophers while the linguists call philosophers like Grouse (blesses Grouse) linguists so that both groups can continue to pretend to be unrelated; the philosophers and rhetoricians are always at each other's throat, the philosophers calling the rhetoricians sophists while the rhetoricians give philosophers the finger for writing them off as such; and we ELANG kids don't associate with the English kids except to spank them at Scrabble once a year.

So where does this put me? I'm an ELANG major with minors in English, Linguistics, and Logic--I stand happily in all three camps. And so I am sad because all three are falling short of their goals because each only has a piece of the puzzle and see it through colored perspective. I hope that I can somehow within myself resolve the differing views and combine them into an academically orgasmic threesome that will cause all of language's mysteries to melt before me, but I feel totally incapable of doing so: I fear that, by dabbling in all three disciplines, I do none of them justice.

(Just another one of my rambling thoughts on academia that none of you probably cares about. Sorry to end my blogging hiatus with something so exclusive.)

Post 207

2009-07-18T17:02:00.002-06:00

I learned recently that, just as English fairy tales often begin with "Once upon a time" and end with "And they lived happily ever after," Hungarian fairy tales often begin with, "Once where there was and wasn't" and end with "And they are still alive if they haven't died yet."

Which do you suppose makes less sense?

Also, right after "Once where there was and wasn't," many tales include a completely irrelevant bit of information. The one I read started with "Once where there was or wasn't, the Lord of Dobrogi loved red apples"--and then he wasn't even the main character: he was the bad guy and didn't show up until a few paragraphs later.

Interesting stuff, these folk tales.

Post 206

2009-07-13T13:41:00.001-06:00

I'm famous!

At least, I will be so long as this site stays under construction.

(Thanks to Schlange for alerting me to this)

Post 205

2009-07-13T13:31:00.004-06:00

So, I was just at the BYU homepage and saw an announcement that there will be a devotional tomorrow (there's one most every Tuesday). The topic: happiness; the speaker: this guy

Seriously, dude--if you're gonna be talking about happiness, maybe you should smile a bit!

Post 204

2009-06-01T20:17:00.001-06:00

Sometimes, dogs chase their tails; most times, their tails chase them.

Post 203

2009-05-29T17:53:00.003-06:00

So, my phone has audio recording capabilities, which I used to use to record the ideas for songs I would get when I was a janitor and my mind had nothing better to do than make up songs. I thought of that today, so I listened to all those recordings as I walked home from school. Audio File 0701081933-00(9/26) surprised me because it wasn't a song: it was me talking.

I do not remember making this recording. I do not know what circumstances I recorded it under. I checked the file information and learned that I made the recording on July 1, 2008 at 7:33pm, so I looked up my journal entry for that day and found this paragraph (and several others, but this is the relevant one):

It's been a long day. Left Tehachapi shortly after 9am, got to Burbank around 1pm, boarded the plane a little before 2pm, landed between 4:30 and 5pm, drove Grandma to Brigham City so she could get a ride from Leroy home, got back to Provo a little after 9pm.

I am grateful now for this little paragraph of excessive detail: it tells me that Audio File 0701081933-00(9/26) was made while I was driving from Brigham City to Provo (because I doubt I made it while my grandmother was riding with me).

So here is a piece of my mind while driving the last leg of an 11-hour journey:

What could possibly be inside of Box K? It's 168 inches by 157 inches by 115 inches, and it weighs 11,300 pounds. It's a cardboard box on a truck. It's fragile, and it needs to be kept dry; you're not allowed to forklift it--how do you move 11,300 pounds without a forklift? How do you get it on a truck--a crane? Doesn't seem any more delicate than a forklift. Strange. Anyway. That's it.

Any guesses as to what was in Box K? I assume all this information was written on the cardboard box. What could possible be so big and so fragile and not water proof?

You are now free to speculate.

Post 202

2009-05-25T15:34:00.004-06:00

So, I'm taking this Latin class, yeah? And it's, like, crazy intense, ya know? I mean, I've had three or four weeks of learning Latin, and I just translated the first 25 verses of St. John from the Vulgate into English as a homework assignment. Now my head is threatening to explode, but I feel pretty good about myself--even if my translation is a little... well... amateur, for lack of a better word.

Here it is:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was in the presence of God, and God was the Word. This was in the beginning in the presence of God. All by him was made, and without him nothing was made, because it was made; in him was life, and life was the light of man, and light in darkness shines, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

There was a man sent by God, whose name was John; this man comes in testimony, so that testimony testifies of the light, so that all believe through the light. He wasn’t that light, but that testimony testifies of the light.

He was the true light, which illuminates all men, came into the world. He was in the world, and the world by him was made, and the world did not know him. He came in his own, and they did not receive him.

As many however were accepting him, he gave to them power to become the sons of God, this, who believe in his name, who were born not by reason of blood nor by reason of the will of man, but by reason of God.

And the Word was made flesh and he lived in us; and we saw the glory of him, glory as it were of the Only Child from the Father, full of gratitude and of truth.

John’s testimony testifies from himself and proclaiming said: “This man was, of whom I said: He who came after me, before me was made, since he was before me.”

And from his plentitude we accept us all, and gratitude in return for gratitude; since the law through Jesus Christ was made. No one ever saw God; the only child of God, who is in the bowl of the Father, himself described.

And this is the testimony of John, when they sent to him Jews from Jerusalem priests and Levites, so that they interrogated him: “Who are you?” And was confessed and he did not deny; and was confessed: “I am not the Christ.” And they interrogated him: “Who therefore? Are you Elias?” And he said: “I am not.” “Are you a prophet?” And he responded: “No.” They said therefore to him: “Who is? So that this response alone, which they sent us. What do you say about you yourself?” He says:

“I the voice of a cry in the desert:
‘Turn toward the way of the Lord,’

as said the prophet Isaiah.” And they who were the envoy, were from the Pharisees; and they interrogated him and said to him: “Why therefore do you baptize, if you are not the Christ neither Elias neither a prophet?”

Post 201

2009-05-18T17:13:00.005-06:00

Okay, here's a fun game: I'll give you a picture; you come up with a caption. I just happen to have the best picture in the whole wide world; let's see how well you can caption it. Ready? Go ahead and scroll down a bit.
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Post 200

2009-05-17T17:01:00.004-06:00

My 200th post. Woohoo, look at me go.

When I wrote my 100th post, I discussed Mormon and how awesome he was--something we had been discussing in a Book of Mormon class I was taking at the time. Today I would like to discuss the Book of Mosiah, which is, I think, my favorite Book of Mormon book, if I'm allowed one of those. I haven't taken a religion class that has discussed the Book of Mosiah before, so what I've got for you is my collected personal thoughts on that book. [Translation: what I've got for you is a huge mess of thoughts that I've never sought to systematically present to anyone ever and that might, therefore, be totally unintelligible.]

I think when latter-day Saints think about the Book of Mosiah, they probably think about King Benjamin's sermon, Abinadi, and Alma the elder et al., so I’m going to breeze over those most popular parts very briefly and then dive into the lesser known stuff because, if anything in this post is going to actually be interesting, that's gonna be it because, let's face it: you've heard the rest a million times and aren't interested in my rehashing of it. It's okay; no need to be ashamed: I was raised a Mormon, too.

So, very briefly, my thoughts on King Benjamin:

1) Mosiah 3, which is perhaps the most popular chapter of the book, is often attributed to Benjamin, and I think that's unfair. Okay, sure, it's him speaking, but, aside from the first two verses, the whole chapter is Benjamin quoting an angel who spoke to him the night before.

2) The angel who spoke to Mosiah was sent to him "to declare unto thee that thou mayest rejoice; and that thou mayest declare unto thy people, that they may also be filled with joy" (3:4). That declaration goes for us, too: we are permitted to rejoice, and we really ought to because we know about the Atonement of Jesus Christ.

3) After the angel prophesied of Christ (3:6-10), listed very plainly the people who are saved by Jesus (3:11, 12, 16), declared that Jesus is the only way to salvation (3:17), and gave the ever-so-famous bit about casting off the natural man (3:19), he said that it’s important to teach the Gospel to everyone so that they will be "no more blameless in the sight of God, only according to the words which I have spoken unto thee" (3:22). This statement is fascinating to me, but I don’t really have much to say about it.

4) One very good statement from King Benjamin that did not come from the angel: "If you believe all these things see that ye do them" (4:10).

Moving on:

I think Abinadi is awesome. Of all the speeches in all of scripturedom, his is my favorite, I think--rhetorically, at least. What transpires between 12:20-24 and 15:14-18 really is a marvel. I hope that some day, after I've taken a handful of classes on rhetoric, I'll be able to write a very long paper on Abinadi's craft. It boggles my mind just how awesome he is. And he did it off the cuff while threatened with death? That's the power of the Spirit right there. If you have a decent attention span, you should spend some Sunday afternoon reading Abinadi's speech in a go: it's amazing. And I love the way it's recorded, too, because we can see that it isn't flawless (he has a bit of trouble getting started, it seems [check out 12:30-32]), but it is beautiful, and it is powerful--and I'll be darned if there wasn't a dramatic pause following Abinadi's amen.

A couple of favorite bits from Abinadi's magnificent tirade:

"Ye have not applied your hearts to understanding; therefore, ye have not been wise. Therefore, what teach ye this people?" (12:27).

"I perceive that you have studied and taught iniquity the most part of your lives" (13:11).

"But remember that he that persists in his own carnal nature, and goes on in the ways of sin and rebellion against God, remaineth in his fallen state and the devil hath all power over him. Therefore he is as though there was no redemption made, being an enemy to God; and also is the devil and enemy to God" (16:5).

As for Alma and friends, I actually wanna spend some time discussing them--just not the Waters of Mormon or the miraculous lightening of burdens because those are the parts everyone talks about. They're good parts, though; I highly recommend chapters 18, 23, and 24, but I'm not gonna discuss them here.

For the rest of this post, I'm going to just work through the Book of Mosiah in order by chapter. That means it won't be exactly chronological, but that's okay: one thing I really like about the book is the way it presents so many overlapping stories one at a time--not bothering trying to tell them simultaneously.

After King Benjamin speaks, gives the kingdom to Mosiah, and dies, we follow Ammon & Co. into the wilderness in search of the land of Lehi-Nephi, and he finds King Limhi. I love Limhi. I actually didn't realize how awesome Limhi was until I started pulling verses together to write this post. Why do we never talk about Limhi? The guy's amazing! Seriously, do you even know who Limhi is?

Limhi was the son of King Noah, who was a whorish tyrant, yet Limhi some how turned out to be a remarkably good person. Here are my favorite Limhi-isms with my bracketed responses:

"O ye, my people, life up your heads and be comforted; for behold, the time is at hand [...] when we shall no longer be in subjection to our enemies [...] yet I trust there remaineth an effectual struggle to be made" (7:18). [Just because you can see the light at the end of a tunnel doesn’t mean you’re there: don’t give up until the war is over.]

"Yeah, I say unto you, great are the reasons which we have to mourn; for behold how many of our brethren have been slain, and their blood has been spilt in vain, and all because of iniquity" (7:24). [Take-home message: don't be a martyr to your sins.]

"And now, because he said this [that is, because Abinadi told Noah and the priests that Christ would come to redeem the world and that they needed to repent], they did put him to death; and many more things did they do which brought down the wrath of God upon them. Therefore, who wondereth that they are in bondage, and that they are smitten with sore afflictions?" (7:28). [Limhi sees the punishment of his people, sighs, shakes his head and asks himself, "Well, what did we expect--I mean, really...."]

"…the effect thereof is poison" (7:30). [Sin is poison. 'Nuff said.]

"And now, behold, the promise of the Lord is fulfilled, and ye are smitten and afflicted. But if ye will turn to the Lord with full purpose of heart, and put your trust in him, and serve him with all diligence of mind, if ye do this, he will, according to his own will and pleasure, deliver you out of bondage" (7:32-33). [I love that Limhi uncomplainingly resigns himself to the fact that the pain his people suffer is the judicious wrath of God and yet maintains the hope that this same God will deliver them eventually.]

"Yea, they are as a wild flock which fleeth from the shepherd, and scattereth, and are driven, and are devoured by the beasts of the forest" (8:21). [Do we flee from the Shepherd? If so, we're doomed: there's no way out but through Him.]

After meeting Limhi, we learn about his grandfather Zeniff. Here's a quote from that righteous soul:

"Yea, in the strength of the Lord did we go forth to battle against the Lamanites; for I and my people did cry mightily to the Lord that he would deliver us out of the hands of our enemies, for we were awakened to a remembrance of the deliverance of our fathers. And God did hear our cries and did answer our prayers; and we did go forth in his might..." (9:17-18). [If you replace "the Lamanites" with "the hosts of hell" or "job hunting" or "school searching" or "those crazy teenagers" or whatever you might be up against (I replace it with "this insane Latin class I’m taking that seeks to fit a year's worth of material into a 7-week course--deary me what was I thinking?"), this scripture is pretty spectacular. Note that they went up in "his might" (meaning "God's might") and remember just how mighty the Lord is.]

After Zeniff, we learn about Abinidi, but I already covered him, so let's move on to Alma Sr.

[Side note: Alma Sr. "was a young man" when Abinadi came (17:2)--meaning ~45 years old (see 29:45--and then hook a time stamp footnote thinging in v44).]

Here are some cool words from this great man:

"...I myself was caught in a snare, and did many things which were abominable in the sight of the Lord, which caused me sore repentance; Nevertheless, after much tribulation, the Lord did hear my cries, and did answer my prayers, and has made me an instrument in his hands in bringing so many of you to a knowledge of his truth" (23:9-10). [Take-home message here is something akin to Luke 22:32, methinks.]

"...I desire that ye should stand fast in this liberty wherewith ye have been made free [from the bonds of iniquity]..." (23:13). [Once you’re freed from sin, don’t go back.*]

"...trust no man to be a king over you (23:13)." [I imagine Alma is probably friends with the Founding Father’s these days.]

"Yea, and as often as my people repent will I forgive them their trespasses against me" (26:30). [*However, if you do go back to sinning, God is always there fore you.]

Because we know Alma, we learn a bit about Amulon--but not a whole lot. Amulon was one of Alma's fellow priests of Noah, and he ended up joining the Lamanites and being made a taskmaster over Alma's group. I imagine that there was probably some Hollywood-worthy dramatic conflict between those two while Amulon drove Alma's converts like slaves. This part in particular was probably a real doozy:

"And Amulon commanded them that they should stop their cries; and he put guards over them to watch them, that whosoever should be found calling upon God should be put to death" (24:11). [This man used to be a priest!]

But one thing I really like about the Book of Mosiah is that we don't see a whole lot of apostasy, really. In the Book of Alma, we have a whole bunch of dissenters and anti-Christs who cause all kinds of havoc for the righteous, but in the Book of Mosiah, the good guys are the good guys, and the bad guys are the bad guys. Occasionally a bad guy converts to good guy-ism (both Almas, for example), but not much happens in the other direction, and, in the end, the good end happily, and the bad, uhappily.

That said, Mosiah's is the only book in the Book of Mormon where we get protocol for excommunication, so it isn't all skittles and rainbows, I guess. In chapter 26, the kids who were too young to enter into the covenant King Benjamin gave to the people have grown up and rebelled, and we learn very clearly how apostasy comes about:

(not understanding + not believing)[26:1]-->(separate + carnal and sinful state)[26:4]

Now, maybe an apostate apologist would say, "It wasn’t their fault: they didn't understand!" but this is not so. 26:3 teaches us that it was "because of their unbelief they could not understand the word of God...." Belief leads to understanding--not the other way around. This is a very important principle for us to know, I think, and it kinda reminds me of Abinadi's "Ye have not applied your hearts to understanding; therefore, ye have not been wise" (see above).

Anyway, Alma receives this great revelation on disciplining such folks, and then he teaches us something important by example:

"And it came to pass when Alma had heard these words he wrote them down that he might have them" (26:33).

Friends, when the Lord teaches you something, write it down!

Of course we know that Alma the younger was part of the rebellious generation, and you've probably heard his conversion story. Furthermore, I like his version (Alma 36) better, so I won't dwell on the story too much (which is in keeping with the parameters I set at this discussion's outset--or onset--or inception--or whatever). However, there is one thing that I understood for the first time when I read it this time around. I've often been puzzled by this comment from the angel:

"And now I say unto thee, Alma, go thy way, and seek to destroy the church no more, that their prayers may be answered, and this even if thou wilt of thyself be cast off" (27:16).

What on earth could that last bit mean? The rendition in Alma 36 ["If thou wilt of thyself be destroyed, seek no more to destroy the church of God" (v9)] was even more confusing to me. Now it seems perfectly clear to me: the words aren't hard; I'm not sure why I didn't understand them before. This is actually the sort of thing I've wanted to say to the few apostates I've met: "If you wanna go to hell, that's your prerogative, but don't you dare drag others down with you!"

Interesting doctrine. Not one we teach a lot, but it's the sort of level-headed smack some people need.

Other than that, all I have to say about Alma Jr. is that his first sermon, which is on repentance and forgiveness, can be found in 27:23-31.

And that pretty well sums up my favorite parts of the Book of Mosiah. I love this book because it really seems to me to be all about forgiveness of sins: it starts with King Benjamin's address about being cleansed through Christ; it includes the teachings of Limhi on the consequences of apostasy and words from Zeniff, Abinadi, and Mosiah on the subject of repentance; it has the conversions of both Almas and their consequent sermons; it talks about Church discipline--really, this book covers repentance very thoroughly. And to sum it up, at the end of this book, King Mosiah dissolves the monarchy (I wonder if Alma the elder influenced that decision) and establishes a democratic republic. Here's my favorite quote from this wise king who was this fine book's namesake:

"...thus doth the Lord work with his power in all cases among the children of men, extending the arm of mercy towards them that put their trust in him" (29:20).

Post 199

2009-05-15T16:07:00.003-06:00

You know what we all need? Something to make us a little more self-conscious about the way we look. Don't you agree? Go Wikipedia body proportions for a good time.

Post 198

2009-05-13T22:27:00.004-06:00

Howdy. I'm alive. There are a lot of things I could write about (since last writing, I've seen Strangers on a Train, Throw Momma from the Train, Snow Falling on Cedars, Stay, X-MEN Origins: Wolverine, Star Trek, and Taken, read Jane Eyre, The Prestige, and The Old Man and the Sea, acquired Billy Joel's Piano Man, Streetlife Serenade, and Fantasies and Delusions, discovered Mika, started learning Latin, given stand-up comedy a second try, been put in my Elders' Quorum Presidency, and started a new job), but I just gotta tell you real quick about this great new game I've learned.

So you all know the Kevin Bacon game, right? Well, this game is--well, it's totally unrelated I guess. One of the first days at my new job, I went into the little room where I work at a computer for ten hours a week and found that both of the computers in that room were in use: two of my coworkers were doing something with Wikipedia that was apparently giving them great joy.

The game is that you choose two apparently unrelated things (they used Bill Gates and Drāno) and, starting at the Wikipedia page for one, you find your way to the other by using links. All links on the page are fair game (if you can broaden by category, you'll do well) except, I assume, for the ones on the left hand bar (I think clicking on the main page or What Links Here might be considered cheating). They were playing strictly by speed, but when I asked them about efficiency, they both started clicking their back buttons and discovered that the loser (who had only been a couple of seconds late) had actually made it in fewer links.

This game is really impractical as a competition outside of, say, a computer lab, but I was just playing by myself and found it passingly amusing. It really makes me wonder whether you can make an impossible pairing. I just connected glasses to Jakob the Liar and then Billy Joel to the number 68.

It's a fun game. You should try it. You know you wanna.

Post 197

2009-04-25T09:36:00.002-06:00

You should be really happy that you read this blog. Perhaps sometimes you wonder whether it's worth it, but today I give you a marvelous gift of knowledge as a reward for your faithful readership:

The creation of the world began at 9AM on Sunday October 23, 4004 BC.

The Second Coming will be on Friday October 21, 2011.

Now you know.

Post 196

2009-04-14T11:14:00.004-06:00

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! Oh man! Ohh man! Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaaa!

Funiest!
Thing!
EVER!

Hahahahahahahaaa!

*gasp*

*gasp!*

ahem

Okay. So. I have this professor who's always telling us that, if we start harping on people for grammatical mistakes, people will just lie in wait to pounce all over us should we ever slip up. And that's true; I think we see that sort of thing all the time. In my mind, usage ain't no thing in casual speech: if I can understand you, you're probably speaking well enough. In writing, you have to be more careful because it's easier to have multiple interpretations of written stuff, but in speech, whatever whatever, ya know?

On the other hand, I occasionally watch stuff on YouTube, and I'm always dismayed at just how poorly people write comments. I'm fairly liberal in a lot of ways, but sometimes people totally appall me.

Today, these two things collided when I found people correcting each other's grammar in the comments of a Mitch Hedberg video. I've copied the string 'cuz I think it's pretty hilarious. I'm saddened at how vulgar people can be (seriously, folks, if you're going to cuss, the least you can do is be good at it!), but that's the interweb for you.

Here's the string:

DuckwalkSupreme
Unfortunately, the spelling leaves a bit to be desired....But go ahead, continue to animate, but no comic strips because that involves spelling.

NihilisticEye
lol @ DuckwalSupreme.

DuckwalkSupreme
My lot in life is to point out the assholes and stupid people, occasionally both can be used to describe the same person, as in this case. Just look at his username, nothing to seperate the individual words....

psychadelic1967
I'm really enjoying your hypocrisy. You're "lot" is pointing out someone's gramatical errors. However there are 3 errors in the two sentences that you wrote:
"assholes and stupid people, occasionally both..." They are independent clauses that should be separated by a semi colon rather than a comma.
"username, nothing..." This is the same mistake as above.
And you spelled "separate" as "seperate".
You see, I get kicks out of pointing out stupid people, and assholes. I'm lucky. You are both.

DuckwalkSupreme
I didn't realize I was flexible enough to get my foot all the way into my mouth...Plus, commas are my weakest point in writing and separate is one of the words I've never been able to spell. Among this list is definitely (recently rectified this) not sure about rectify, though. Oh well, this is youtube and not a college essay and it was Mr. Nirvana that started out as an asshole; (see, semicolon, probably used incorrectly) I was just coming to the defense of a fellow Youtuber. Party on dudes!

RuthmcEvoy
Watch out , there's grammar nazis about !!!

Bobbajoowop
Correction: There are...

RuthmcEvoy
Touché Sir , Touché

liquilux9
I believe you meant to write "Your 'lot,'" not "You're 'lot.'" Also, you misspelled "grammatical."

Sorry -- I couldn't resist. :)

polompon1
To the fuckhead that noes howto spell and shit,,I hope you die in your loft space above your mothers house where you have lived till forty six,,yes people are not perfect on here,,bur at least they try,,you my sad friend ,,well,,your a self wanking prick,,i would bet all i have you have not been with a woman/man..for fucking years.
Very sad to think,,but it's shit like you that runs and ruins this earth,,go away and just die sad bastard,,,get it..spelled loads wrong,,get it though,??????????

Post 195

2009-04-07T13:33:00.003-06:00

Ah, the random things I encounter by virtue of my academic pursuits....

Behold. Here you will find a very humorous transcript--humorous not because of the number of words, not the words themselves. Look at it and read the quick exchange between speaker 1 and speaker 2 (this is an actual transcript, mind you, from a Heat and Mass Transfer Discussion Section at a Michigan university)--a quick exchange between speaker 1 and speaker 2 and then an inordinately large block of rhetoric from speaker 1 (who, evidently, is a TA or some such), and then a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful response that demonstrates just how much students comprehend.

Maybe this can only be appreciated by those who have ever taught, but I think, if nothing else, the amount of work speaker 1 puts into this for such a useless yield is funny enough to be appreciated by most folks.

Post 194

2009-04-06T16:14:00.002-06:00

I'm not an avid fan of The Daily Show--really! I'm not! I promise! I honestly don't watch it very often. I've actually been holding off on this post because I don't want you thinking that I'm going to become a DS blog, ya know? Cuz I really don't like this show as much as I might seem to lately. But this bit was too awesome to pass up--for very different reasons than the last go around. This is one of those funny-but-it-makes-you-think bits.

Now, I can't vouch for the first half of this video--I didn't see that part when it was airing, and I'm currently using an on-campus computer that doesn't have any headphones (though I could easily walk to the desk and get some, I'm too lazy for that). So just grab the little progress bar thing and drag it to 2:30. I really have no idea what happens in those first 150 seconds, and, because I'm not a fan of the show, I'm unwilling to assume (or even hope) that they're worthwhile. However, if you hop to 2:30, you'll get some pretty fantastic awesomeness that really says a lot about where we are and where we're headed--and it's pretty funny stuff.

Here it is:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

Carmageddon '09 - Lemon Aid

comedycentral.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

Political Humor

Post 193

2009-04-01T16:48:00.002-06:00

A juxtaposition of two quotes:

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” --Aristotle

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”--Einstein

I'm sure there's the potential for a connection there somewhere, but I'm not feeling clever enough right now to fabricate it.

Post 192

2009-03-31T17:52:00.007-06:00

I think history is fascinating. I hate the discipline of history, and I severely doubt that I will take any more history classes than what I already have, but I love history. Because I am, in my intellectual pursuits, distrusting and cynical, I avoid reading history books of any kind as much as possible. But because I love history, I really enjoy reading historical books--that is, books from a given era talking about that era. Fewer degrees of separation that way. I think that's why my research assisting is so interesting to me.

Remember back in November when I quoted that old article that talked about the New Deal? Today's post is in a similar spirit, though the parallels with our day are not so obvious--are not, in fact, apparent, to my mind, at least I, for one, am oblivious to any that may exist. Today I will be quoting a book called The Web, written by Emerson Hough and published in 1919. The title page calls it, "A Revelation of Patriotism: The Web is published by authority of the National Directors of the American Protective League, a vast, silent, volunteer army organized with the approval and operated under the directions of the United States Department of Justice, Bureau of Investigation."

"What is the American Protective League?" you ask? It was an organization that was active in America during WWI. On page 163 of The Web, Hough says that "the American Protective League had no governmental or legal status, though strong as Gibraltar in governmental and legal sanction." That's all the introduction I feel inclined to give you.

And now I will proceed to quote a lengthy bit from the book. Why am I doing this? Am I feeling really political right now? No. Really, I just feel I have found proof of things I was ranting about nearly a year ago, namely that we don't need fiction to fill the role of producing shock because real life has way more wow-me to it. So next time you feel inclined to pick up a dystopic novel, don't go for 1984 or Fahrenheit 451 or Brave New World--pick up The Web and open your eyes to the fact that reality is far more interesting than fiction.

I don't know how easily you'll find this book in a library (it is very old, after all), but it can easily be downloaded in a variety of formats from archive.org, so no excuses.

Now, a long quote. Pages 163-166, to be precise.

-----

It is supposed that breaking and entering a man's home or office place without warrant is burglary. Granted. But the League has done that thousands of times and has never been detected! It is entirely naive and frank about that. It did not harm or unsettle any innocent man. It was after the guilty alone, and it was no time to mince matters or to pass fine phrases when the land was full of dangerous enemies in disguise. The League broke some little laws and precedents? Perhaps. But it upheld the great law under the great need of an unprecedented hour.

A man's private correspondence is supposed to be safe in his office files or vault. You suppose yours never was seen? Was it? Perhaps. It certainly was, if you were
known as a loyal citizen a true-blood American. But the League examined all of the personal and business correspondence of thousands of men who never were the wiser.

How could that be done ? Simply, as we shall see. Suppose there was a man, ostensibly a good business man, apparently a good citizen and a good American, but who at heart still was a good German as hundreds of thousands of such men living in America are this very day. This man has a big office in a down-town skyscraper. He is what the A. P. L. calls a "suspect." Let us call him Biedermacher.

About midnight or later, after all the tenants have gone home, you and I, who chance to be lieutenants and oper atives in the League, just chance in at the corridor of that building as we pass. We Just chance to find there the agent of the building who just chances also to wear the concealed badge of the A. P. L. You say to the agent of
the building, "I want to go through the papers of Biedermacher, Room 1117, in your building."

"John," the agent says to the janitor, "give me your keys, I've forgotten mine, and I want to go to my office a while with these gentlemen."

We three, openly, in fact, do go to Biedermacher's office. His desk is opened, his vault if need be it has been done a thousand times in every city of America. Certain letters or documents are found. They would be missed if taken away. What shall be done?

The operative takes from his pocket a curious little box-like instrument which he sets up on the table. He unscrews a light bulb, screws in the plug at the end of his long insulated wire. He has a perfectly effective electric camera.

One by one the essential papers of Biedermacher are photographed, page by page, and then returned to the files exactly--and that means exactly--in the place from which each was taken. The drawers and doors are locked again. Search has been made without a search warrant. The serving of a search warrant would have "queered" the whole case and would not have got the evidence. The camera film has it safe.

"Pretty wife and kids the fellow has," says the agent of the building, turning over the photographs which the simple and kindly Biedermacher, respected Board of Trade
broker, we will say, has in his desk. He turns them back again to exactly--exactly--the same position.

"Good night, John," he yawns to the janitor, when they meet him on the floor below. "Pretty late, isn't it?"

The three men pass out to the street and go home. Each of them in joining the League has sworn to break any social engagement to obey a call from the League headquarters at any hour of the day or night. Perhaps such engagements have been broken to-night by some or all of these three men. But no one has "broken and entered" Biedermacher's office.

In Central office some data are added to a card, cross-indexed by name and number also, and under a general guide. Some photostats, as these pictures are called, are put in the " case's " envelope. Nothing happens just yet. Biedermacher still is watched.

Then, one morning, an officer of the Department of Justice finds Mr. Biedermacher in his office. He takes from his pocket a folded paper and says, "In the name of the United States, I demand possession of a letter dated the 12th of last month, which you wrote to von Bernstorff in New York. I want a letter of the 15th of this month which you wrote to von Papen in Berlin. I want your list of the names of the United Sangerbund and German Brotherhood in America which you brought home from the last meeting. I want the papers showing the sums you have received from New York and Washington for your propaganda work here in this city. I want the letter received by you from seven Lutheran ministers in Wisconsin telling of their future addresses to the faithful."

"But, my God!" says Biedermacher, "what do you mean? I have no such letters here or anywhere else. I am innocent! I am as good an American as you are. I have bought a hundred thousand dollars' worth of Liberty bonds, some of each issue. My wife is in the Bed' Cross. I have a daughter in Y. W. C. A. I give to all the war charities. I am an American citizen. What do you mean by insulting me, sir?"

"John," says the officer to his drayman, "go to that desk. Take out all the papers in it. Here's the U. S. warrant, Mr. Biedermacher. Rope 'em up, John."

John ropes up the files, and the papers go in bulk to the office of the U. S. attorney on the case. Now, all the evidence is in possession of the Government, and the case is clear. Biedermacher is met quietly at the train when he tries to get out of town. Nothing gets into the papers. No one talks secrecy is the oath. But before long, the big Biedermacher offices are closed. Biedermacher's wife says her husband has gone south for his health. He has--to Oglethorpe.

You think this case imaginary, far-fetched, impossible? It is neither of the three. It is the truth. It shows how D. J. and A. P. L. worked together. This is a case which has happened not once but scores and hundreds of times. It is espionage, it is spy work, yes, and it has gone on to an extent of which the average American citizen, loyal or disloyal, has had no conception. It was, however, the espionage of a national self-defense. It was only in this way that the office and the mail and the home of the loyal citizen could be held inviolate. The web of the A. P. L. was precisely that of the submarine net. Invisible, it offered an apparently frail but actually efficient defense against the dastardly weapons of Germany. It must become plain at once that secret work such as this, carried on in such volume all across the country three million cases, involving an enormous mass of detail and an untold expenditure of time and energy, were disposed of meant system and organization to prevent over-lapping of work and consequent waste of time. It meant more than that there was needed also good judgment, individual shrewdness and of course, above all things, patience and hard work.

Post 191

2009-03-25T10:15:00.002-06:00

The Daily Show is not my favorite thing: Jon Stewart is often crude and rarely funny; when I catch a snippet here and there, I find myself giggling at his facial expressions and then chagrined as soon as he opens his mouth. Nevertheless, Mr. Stewart may be the most no-nonsense interviewer of this generation, and I always love to see him tearing holes in the deserving. So I give you Jon Stewart's interview with Jim Cramer--because it's pretty great.

One thing I'll say for Cramer: he had serious gumption to go up against the world's toughest interviewer and mediadom's most amazing team of footage collectors in front of a crowd that would only boo and hiss his every utterance. It took balls--balls I'm pretty sure he doesn't have any more.

Here's the unedited interview in three parts:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 1

comedycentral.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

Political Humor

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 2

comedycentral.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

Political Humor

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 3

comedycentral.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

Political Humor

Post 190

2009-03-18T10:19:00.002-06:00

Google's technology frightens me--and I like it.

A couple days ago, for the first time ever, I bothered to glance at Google Reader's recommendations for me, and I found this blog. It is awesome.

And I'm going to end this post now so you don't tell yourself, "Oh, Schmetterling rambled on for so long, I just don't have time to follow any links right now!"

So go, my people, and enjoy literalness.

Post 189

2009-03-12T18:32:00.002-06:00

I'm in a hurry, but I collected these tidbits while I was scanning today so I could post them here. I have no time to comment on them, but I hope you see their value anyway. These are from various issues of THE INDEPENDENT in 1915:

Post 188

2009-03-10T16:17:00.006-06:00

Howdy.

So, I keep emailing myself the interesting things I come across while scanning articles, and I'm tired of them sitting in my Gmail inbox, so I'm posting them here.

First up, interesting surnames I've encountered: Popcorn, Raper, Wellborn.

Next, words that I encountered in the first 20 years of the 20th century that I assume I never would have encountered otherwise: concomitant, recrudescence, suffraget, mortifications, manufactory.

Now that that's out of the way, here's the really interesting stuff:

I thought that English spelling was standardized back around the time that the printing press was introduced to the British Isles, but I have found that that isn't exactly the case (though it's true for most things, I think). A magazine called The Independent used a lot of spellings in the early 1900s that nowadays would be considered wrong. The first I noticed were things like tho and thru, so I figured it was just some kind of spelling (like telegraphic syntax in newspaper headlines), but then I noticed that it wasn't just -ough sorts of words that were spelled differently. Here are all the ones I noticed:

tho, altho, thoro, thoroly, thorofares, thru, thruout

every one (used in a context where we would now use everyone)

surprize

My favorite spelling difference was the -t past tense. We still have it today in words like kept, but back in pre-WWI America, it was a lot wider spread. Here are words I found:

imprest, publisht, exprest, represt, drest, fixt, whipt, prest, wrapt, developt, equipt, trapt, mixt, discust, addrest, possest

Lest you think that this is some kind of ancient history, that the language is no longer changing because the rules are set, let me move us into a more recent time frame:

A few weeks ago, I was scanning articles from U.S. News and World Report in the 1980s (remember the Honda ad I posted?). I was shocked when I realized that USNWR didn't standardize its title capitalization until 1986. In the early '80s, the capitalization of words in article titles was totally arbitrary (for example, in an issue dated 15 July 1985, they printed an article called "TV: Does It Box In President in a Crisis?" Note that in is capitalized the first time but not the second time--isn't that crazy?? I find it fascinated that the first one gets capitalized by virtue of being an adverbial particle [I assume] and the second one is not capitalized because it's obviously a preposition. Amazing). But starting January 1986, the made a rule: just capitalize the first word unless you have a proper noun in the title (1986 titles include "How far will the price of gasoline drop—and how soon?" and "The new shape of Hollywood").

Cool, huh? Anybody? Anybody?

...nobody understands me....

Of more general interest, perhaps, are these quotes I lifted from various 1908 issues of The Independent:

"Into the office of District-Attorney Jerome there came one day a grief-bowed, broken-hearted old man." (Weird, weird, weird construction, I say.)

"He said little, being a dumb fellow by nature"

Have the United States Judges Adequate Salaries? (Article title. Would we ever write such an article these days?)

"That is what we need in fiction—more manual labor and less indecent mental dexterity." (Here here! Are you listening, Hollywood? I am talking to you!)

"There are the familiar roadside signs: 'Town limit. Motor vehicles limited to twelve miles an hour." Has any motor party ever taken such a warning seriously? The maximum placed by the inexperienced authorities is low, and no pretense of obeying is made.

"And what if violators are arrested? Some inconvenience, a few dollars' fine —and that is all, as a rule. It is part of the game. [...]

"It is certainly an absurd thing for the lawmakers to consume their gray matter in constructing statutes designed to prevent automobiles from going more than twenty miles an hour on the public roads, while at the same time and in the same jurisdiction manufacturers are permitted openly to - urge every one to buy their cars, war-ranted to maintain a speed of sixty miles an hour on those very roads!" (Hehe. We might say the same today, no? Are you listening, Ferrari? I am talking to you!)

And that's all I've got.

Don't you wish your job was cool like mine?

Post 187

2009-03-04T17:08:00.004-07:00

I've always admired the brainwork accomplished by those who are good at the Kevin Bacon game, but I've never been able to join in because I don't know that I've ever actually seen a Kevin Bacon movie and I'm pretty terrible and remembering who's been in what anyway. But today I caught the vision of it as I played with some guys at work. Even though I'm still Kevin-Bacon retarded, I know enough to connect him to Tom Hanks in Apollo 13, and I know a few tricks that allow me to connect Tom Hanks to just about anybody--but only so long as nobody enforces a set number of degrees. I can now fully appreciate just how awesome it feels to make the connection between seemingly unrelated celebrities, which I never really got before.

The only reason I bring this up, though, is this chain I came up with (there is probably a shorter way, if any of you who a more movie savvy than I am want to undertake it, but this is good enough for me):

Kevin Bacon was in Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks, who was in Cast Away with Helen Hunt, who was in As Good as It Gets with Greg Kinnear, who was in Little Miss Sunshine with Alan Arkin, who was in Marly&Me with Owen Wilson, who was in Cars with Cheech Marin, who was in Oliver&Co. with--you guessed it!--Billy Joel.

The Seven Degrees of Billy Joel--now there's a game worth playing!

Post 186

2009-03-04T10:35:00.003-07:00

I've been thinking about habits lately, and I've decided that there's no such thing as a good habit. I can't think of one, at least. It seems like, once something becomes a habit, it can't be really good any more. I mean, I see it all the time in Mormon culture--even in my own life--that when, say, praying becomes a habit, you find yourself blessing the food when you're going to bed and praying by name for a prophet who died more than a year ago. When scripture study becomes a habit, it ceases to be study and is reduced to staring unseeingly at a word-covered page.

I suppose one might argue that something like exercise doesn't depend on ardent attention: if you get up every morning and go for a run, it'll do your heart some good regardless of how much you put your heart into it. [I intended that to be clever, but I think I missed my mark. Any suggestions on that?] But I disagree. If I set a goal to be able to do 100 push-ups in a go (ha! that'll be the day...), and I hop out of bed every morning and crank out some push-ups, I may very well see the day when I can do 100, but if, once I have achieved that goal, it becomes a habit for me to hop out of bed every morning and do 100 push-ups, then I cease to progress and merely maintain a new status quo. If I go out and habitually run every morning, my running will probably decrease in zeal over time until it is no sort of exercise at all.

I guess my biggest beef is with that motivational poster I see from time to time--something about thoughts becoming words becoming deeds becoming habits becoming destiny-defining character--because it's naught to me but a pretty little platitude, an emerald slippery-slide argument, charming fatalism. Furthermore, I've had a lot of thoughts that sublimated directly into actions without bothering to become words, and actions can similarly impact destiny without bothering to become habits or characteristics: just drive drousily one time and run over a young mother--you don't have to make a habit of it, you'll still go to jail.

And those are my thoughts for the day.

Post 185

2009-03-03T10:33:00.002-07:00

Bored? Do a Google Image search for 'carbage' and feel happy that you have better things to do with your time than some folks.

Post 184

2009-02-12T16:01:00.002-07:00

If only. If only....

Post 183

2009-02-10T18:09:00.003-07:00

In 1982, Honda ran this ad in the US:

We're still not listening.

Post 182

2009-01-31T17:13:00.002-07:00

So I decided a while ago that I was sick of having a link to a profile at the top of my blog (you'll notice that I didn't bother with it on my newer blog), but I like that butterfly so much that I just couldn't part with it. Today I decided it was time for it to go, but I made the butterfly into a banner to put with my blog's title and description so it could stick around. Unfortunately, because of the nature of the B/W-ness of the picture, it looked really goofy on my old template, so I put it on this white background where it's more at home.

And now my blog looks really bland and boring.

But that's okay. I mean, you come here for the words, not the look, right?

I dunno.... I hope this is temporary, but I don't feel like putting any serious effort into making it look nicer, so it may not be.

Post 181

2009-01-22T12:24:00.002-07:00

This is pretty much the coolest thing I've ever encountered. It gives me so much hope for me and my future endeavors. I give you "How Ballad Writing Affects Our Seniors" by the late, great Ernest Hemingway, age 19:

Oh, I've never writ a ballad
And I'd rather eat shrimp salad,
(Tho' the Lord knows how I hate the
Pink and scrunchy little beasts),
But Miss Dixon says I gotto-
(And I pretty near forgotto)
But I'm sitting at my table
And my feet are pointing east.

Now one stanza, it is over-
Oh! Heck, what rhymes with "Over"?
Ah! yes; "I'm now in clover,"
But when I've got that over
I don't yet know what to write.
I might write of young Lloyd Boyle,
Sturdy son of Irish soil,
But to write of youthful Boyle
Would involve increasing toil,
For there is so much material
I'd never get it done.

Somewhere in this blessed metre
There's a crook. The stanzas peter
Out before I get them started
Just like that one did, just then.
But I'll keep a-writing on
Just in hope some thought will strike me.
When it does, I'll let it run
Just in splashes off my pen.

(Wish that blamed idea would come.)
I've been writing for two pages,
But it seems like countless ages,
For I've scribbled and I've scribbled,
But I haven't said a thing.
This is getting worse each minute,
For whatever I put in it
I shall have to read before the English class.

'Know where I would like to be-
Just a-lyin' 'neath a tree.
Watchin' clouds up in the sky-
Fleecy clouds a-sailin' by
And we'd look up in the blue-
Only me, an' maybe you.
I could write a ballad then
That would drip right off my pen.
(Aw shucks)

For the future I shall promise
(IF you let me live this time),
I'll ne'er write another ballad-
Never venture into rhyme.

Post 180

2009-01-13T16:00:00.001-07:00

This comes at you from an article called "A Public Servant of the Northwest: The Fruitful Career of the Late Governor John S. Pillsbury, of Minnesota" in the December 1901 issue of The American Monthly Review of Reviews:

his impulse always was : " Act ; act now ; act effectively ; act for the greatest good." He belonged to the type of man who "does things."

Post 179

2009-01-11T14:44:00.002-07:00

From Hong's translation of Kierkegaard's Works of Love, pg 20:

But you shall love God in unconditional obedience, even if what he requires of you might seem to you to be to your own harm, indeed, harmful to his cause; for God's wisdom is beyond all comparison with yours, and God's governance has no obligation of responsibility in relation to your sagacity. All you have to do is to obey in love.

Post 178

2009-01-08T18:15:00.002-07:00

I love--love!--my job. And my life. And Outlook magazine. Love! Love I say!

Last post, I gave you a little tidbit. This time, I can't resist--I'm giving you almost an entire article. I'm not really sure what this means as far as copyright laws, but Outlook is, I assume, defunct (near as I can tell, Wikipedia hasn't even heard of it: it has several Outlook magazines in its Outlook disambiguation page, but the one I'm making copies of was a weekly magazine published somewhere in the US on a weekly basis, and that doesn't match any of Wikipedia's descriptions, so I can only assume that the Outlook I know and love doesn't exist anymore), so I can't really ask permission. See, the last one was over 100 years old, so it's probably public domain, but this is coming at you from June 1913, so I'm not sure what that means--and don't really care enough to look.

AHEM!

Anyway, this is excerpts from "Aircraft and the Future" by Waldemar Kaempffert (see? given the date, the title is exciting, and you've gotta love a name like Waldemar Kaempffert, so I hope you're as intrigued as I was):

HOW THE LIMITATIONS OF THE AEROPLANE WILL AFFECT THE FUTURE

An aeroplane is like any soaring bird of prey in this: It cannot leap into the air straight from the ground. A cage completely open at the top will serve to confine a vulture. Before he can fly he must be in motion. In other words, he must run along the ground at constantly increasing speed until the pressure of the air beneath his wings becomes great enough to support him. He is in no better position than a boy's kite, which can be raised on a calm day only by much assiduous running against the breeze. Consider the aeroplane as a motor-driven kite, in which the pull or the thrust of a screw takes the place of the string, or consider it as a mechanical vulture, and it becomes apparent that it cannot leap straight up into the air, that it must first be propelled along the ground at automobile speed. Add to the necessity of acquiring rapid preliminary motion not only the disadvantage of size—most flying-machines have a spread of about thirty to forty feet—but also the enormous difficulty of rising above tall buildings in the teeth of the inevitable eddies and maelstroms of air, which, could we but see them, would seem fearfully like the torrents that boil and rage in the Whirlpool Rapids of Niagara, and even the man who has never ridden on the atmosphere, and who has only a vague notion of the incessant vigilance and the acrobatic skill required to keep a machine on an even keel, will realize that municipalities must adapt themselves to the limitations of the aeroplane, if we are to fly from the heart of one city to that of another. Even were it possible to utilize the broadest avenues, the hurricane set up by a propeller that whirls around at a speed of twelve hundred revolutions a minute, so that it seems like a solid glittering disk, would be intolerable. You ask, Why not turn to the lawns of our public parks? Because the few green open spaces provided for a population of a million or more, even if they could be encroached upon without encountering stubborn resistance, would be neither numerous nor large enough to meet the requirements of hundreds of aviators waiting for an opportunity to vault into the air, or, wheeling in wide circles, ready to snatch the first chance to alight. If streets cannot be used because the aviator may be buffeted by treacherous currents against stone walls, and if park lawns are too few, obviously only the roof is left. Housetops, then, must be adapted to the needs of aerial navigation. That end will be achieved far more easily than may be supposed.

STARTING AND ALIGHTING ROOFS FOR AEROPLANES

In the first place, the chasms that separate buildings on the opposite sides of streets and yards will be bridged by gratings, which will cut off but little light and air; and, in the second place, the chimney-pots and ventilating-pipes that now adorn housetops, designed before the aeroplane arrived, will be surmounted by wooden platforms, each carried on a light steel framework. New buildings will be constructed to meet the special requirements of the aviator. In the metropolis of the future, therefore, those quarters in which structures are of approximately equal height will be covered by single roofs, each perhaps a square mile in area and more. Equally simple of solution is the problem of housing the thousands of flying-machines that will throng the air. Some of the many-floored automobile garages of the present city could be employed for the storing of flying-machines. If a military machine of our own day can be taken apart and packed in a motor van in less than ten minutes, no remarkable prophetic gift is required to foresee a machine which, when collapsed, will occupy less room than a seven-passenger touring car of 1913, and which can be lifted to the roof by an elevator of the type now to be found in every city garage.

FLORIDA BECOMES A WINTER CONEY ISLAND FOR THE CITY OF NEW YORK

The railway created the modern suburb—made it a residential part of the city on the outskirts of which it is built. Similarly, the flying-machine will bring the city and country measurably nearer each other. Let us not forget that even in our own time, with machines that will seem childishly crude a century hence, speeds of more than one hundred miles an hour have been attained. It is not too daring to predict that farm-houses will become suburban cottages; that the scattered population of rural districts will become direct customers of the city merchant ; that the lecturer, the virtuoso, the lawyer, the banker, will all be able to increase their clientele. Because of its great speed and its radius of action, the future aeroplane will be able to cover the distance between and Chicago in a few hours. It is not inconceivable that a man may breakfast in New York or London and dine the same evening in St. Louis or Rome. The inhabitants of towns far inland will spend their summer holidays at the seashore. Florida will become a kind of winter Coney Island for New York. When the age of the aeroplane and the air-ship really comes, new political problems will arise. What, for example, will become of our present tariff laws ? Can we prevent smuggling in a machine that travels in three dimensions ? When Selmet flew from London to Paris, some months ago, he entered the French capital above the clouds and saw only a sea of mist with no sign of a spire or roof. When he landed at Issy-les-Moulineaux, on the outskirts of the city, he had to explain at length who he was. Even in this twentieth century, when flying-machines are still novelties, he was mistaken for the pilot of an ordinary school aeroplane returning from a short outing. En route he had made two landings. No one had noticed them. Nor was his course through the air more narrowly observed, simply because he was hidden by clouds. When the atmosphere becomes in truth a highway, and the whirring of an aeroplane's propellers as common as the chugging of an automobile motor, will it be possible to prevent the smuggling of jewels, laces, and silks, and those smaller, easily carried articles of luxury, now subject to an import tax by many countries? Or will it be possible, by policing the atmosphere above the border line, to prevent violation of the customs laws?

POLICING THE AIR

Policing of some kind will surely be necessary above European fortifications, now jealously guarded from the eyes of the military spy. It is not likely that the long line of fortresses on either side of the boundary that separates France from Germany may be sailed over without calling forth a warning signal from a sentinel wheeling with clock-like regularity over that region, which a hostile eye may not study. Over cities, too, the aerial sentry or policeman will be found. A thousand aeroplanes flying to the opera must be kept in line and each allowed to alight upon the roof of the auditorium in its proper turn. In giant circles you can imagine them soaring in a huge flock. Signals will be made by a policeman in a swift monoplane (on his arm he wears the orange wings of the aerial traffic squad), and one by one the machines of the boxholders will separate from the great spinning cluster and glide down. A liveried attendant will assist the passengers as they clamber out. So every hotel, office building, and drygoods store must see to it that its roof is utilized in an orderly way by the flocks of aerial taxicabs and private machines. If a faulty motor compels an immediate descent, an emergency signal will be given; by day, a rocket that leaves a trail of black smoke; by night, a flash of light conspicuous in color. How can the man in the air pick out the roof for which he is bound? A dozen ways of disentangling roof from roof immediately suggest themselves. Colors and numbers will probably be employed in some distinctive way, and perhaps painted geometrical designs (squares, circles, and triangles) will serve to distinguish public aerial garages, hotels, and theaters from one another. The elevator platforms on which machines will be lifted will surely be painted a vivid color, contrasting with that of the roof itself, and an attendant will be constantly on duty to signal to those in the air when they may descend and use the elevator. Quick to awaken to the possibilities of the roof will be the advertiser. He will plaster it, whenever he can do so without misleading the airman, with pictures and legends, proclaiming the virtues of his pills and soaps, his breakfast foods and his safety razors. The signs which now flank every railway, and which inform the passenger that the particular marsh at which he is languidly gazing is “ten miles from Bloomer's Emporium," will find their counterparts in huge advertisements that lie flat on their backs and stare up at the population of the atmosphere. In their horizontal position they will be as useful as the vertical sign erected for the benefit of the railway traveler, for they, too, will indicate the proximity of a town, and serve as guideposts for the aerial navigator.

GUIDING THE MAN WHO SAILS THE ATMOSPHERE

Indeed, the guiding of the airman will become so highly important that governments will set about the task of mapping the ocean of air as carefully as ever the waters about a rocky coast have been charted. With the aid of a compass and an official map (a band, perhaps a hundred feet long, which can be unrolled from one cylinder upon another beneath a sheet of transparent celluloid, and which will clearly indicate the position of church spires, telegraph and telephone wires, forests, railways, and tall factory chimneys) the aerial navigator will pick his way through the blue. But suppose that it is night, or that a dense fog veils the terrain below? Is he helpless? Not when a really efficient set of wireless instruments has been invented for the use of aviators. He will clap his wireless receiver to his head and listen for the guiding signals of the nearest government transmitter of aerial waves. Every little village will have its wireless station, electrically controlled from a central weather bureau or geographical office hundreds of miles away. Only in the droning central station will operators be found, for automatic instruments will send out the signals from the smaller stations, instruments that are mechanically or electrically controlled, just as United States Naval Observatory time is now transmitted from a master clock to hundreds of timepieces. All this applies to the air-ship as well as to the flying-machine. For, although the giant Zeppelins of our time were destroyed with disheartening regularity, it must not be supposed that the aeroplane will completely displace the dirigible. Count von Zeppelin's leviathans have come to grief, not in the air, but when anchored near the ground in a gale. A stranded schooner, battered by huge waves against a reef, is in a predicament only a shade worse than that of a Zeppelin anchored in a hurricane. The Zeppelin is not simply hammered and twisted, but is also exposed to the dangers of static electricity generated by friction. A single electric spark has been known to ignite the highly explosive buoyant gas with which the envelope compartments of a Zeppelin are filled, and to reduce a vessel costing one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to a chaos of twisted metal.

TETHERING THE GIANT DIRIGIBLE OF THE FUTURE

To guard against such accidents, steel towers have been latterly proposed (a small one has even been erected in), from the tops of which the ships may swing with the wind like so many weather-vanes. High above the roofs of the future city, higher even than the tallest office buildings of the present, these towers are destined to loom—Eiffel towers padded at the top to prevent injury to the ships in possible collisions. They will not be erected haphazard, with no regard to their location in the city, but, lest they interfere with aerial traffic, they will fringe the city like the steamship wharves of the present. In your mind's eye can't you see the elevators conveying passengers upward through the maze of steel girders to the great ships tethered above, casting enormously long shadows on the roofs and streets below? Can't you see a transatlantic air-liner starting on its voyage simply by floating off with the wind or by backing off with reversed propellers? Can't you see another approaching a tower very closely against the wind? Can't you see the first thin rope cast from the ship uncoiling like a long serpent? Can't you see the hawser tied to that rope hauled in? Can't you hear the gong that tells the engineer to reverse his propellers, so that the ship may be stopped almost instantly and made fast? Surely the mooring of a future air-liner will be fully as impressive, fully as spectacular, fully as ceremonious as the mooring of a Lusitania. It will even be exciting in a gale; for, if the wind is blowing with a velocity greater than the maximum speed of the ship, it is not difficult to imagine the captain approaching the tower stern first on the windward side, slowly drifting back with the gale, against which he is running with the propellers revolving at full speed. As they disembark the passengers will all pass up into the tapering nose of the envelope, out through a door, and step upon a platform which swings with the ship in the wind. All the experience of the present justifies the assumption that both aeroplanes and airships will cleave the air. How big will they be? To the size of the air-ship there is no theoretical limit. Indeed, the bigger it is the more economically can it be operated. If there were any good reason for doing so, and if the passenger demands of the present were great enough, Count von Zeppelin could no doubt design a dirigible longer than any transatlantic liner, and drive it from Sicily to Liverpool and back on a schedule that could be maintained with fair regularity, even with the imperfect meteorological data at present supplied by weather bureaus. But the aeroplane, on the other hand, is not capable of unlimited magnification. It is not likely that it will ever carry more than five or seven passengers. High-speed monoplanes will carry even less. Compared with them biplanes and triplanes—both good weight lifters and carriers—will seem as lumberingly slow as a sightseeing automobile.

Post 177

2009-01-06T19:27:00.002-07:00

I got a job as a research assistant this semester. I'm helping to create a 100-million-word corpus of historical American English--which means I get to spend 10 hours a week pulling old magazines off of the periodicals and then digitizing them.

Today I was working with century-old collections of Outlook Magazine. Interesting stuff being published back in 1900 and 1901. Take, for example, this bit of news from 16 March 1901:

"Next to primary election bills and tax bills, measures directed against the sale of cigarettes have occupied the most prominent place before the Legislatures that have been in session this winter. Last week the House of Representatives in New Hampshire passed one of these measures, providing that hereafter no person, firm, or corporation shall make, sell, or keep for sale 'any form of cigarette.'"

Huh. Way to go New Hampshire.

Wonder how long it lasted....

Post 176

2009-01-02T09:38:00.002-07:00

So, have you heard about Erin McKean? "Dictionary Evangelist" has been in my side column thing for quite a while now. Unfortunately, she posts very irregularly on that blog, but she's still awesome. If you're in the mood to read something, read this; if you're in the mood to watch something, watch this. They're each a rollicking good time.

Post 175

2008-12-31T17:23:00.004-07:00

What is the difference between a safety net and a comfort blanket?

100 words. Go.

One must never mistake a comfort blanket for a safety net, nor vice versa; a net will never keep you warm, and a blanket will never break your fall. It is always nice to have a comfort blanket, but safety nets are, on the whole, a good deal more useful. A blanket, I suppose, merely gives the illusion of safety or strengthens what confidence we have. A net, on the other hand, is what you really want to have around should you ever have to walk that line alone. It’s okay to take the blanket with you when you get

Revise.

50 words. Go.

Safety blankets are for a placebo sort of effect; safety nets can really save your life. Everyone should work to not need either, but you should probably always keep a safety net handy even long after you don’t feel you need it anymore. No one doesn’t need a safety net.

Revise.

25 words. Go.

Comfort blankets make you feel better about yourself, but safety nets actually protect us from real dangers. While everyone must eventually outgrow their blanket, no

Revise.

5 words. Go.

You never outgrow safety nets.

Post 174

2008-12-29T23:17:00.005-07:00

So, I've been cuddling with my parents' dictionaries again. I love these things, man. 1984 World Book Dictionary--if you can get your hands on 'em, they are so much fun! Every time I go to look up a word in them, I get distracted by some other word, and then I get lost in all the awesome words I'm learning.

For example, this evening I was looking up prolix because I was a little unsure of the way Hong was using it in his translation of Kierkegaard's Works of Love. After reading its definition ("using too many words; too long; tedious") and being satisfied, I permitted my eyes to wander around the page, whereupon I noticed prolegomenon ("preliminary material in a book, teatise, or the like; preface; introduction"), prolegomenous ("of or having to do with prolegomena"), and prolegomenary ("=prolegomenous"). Just above them, I found prolapsus, which is the same as prolapse, which means to slip out of place but is only used when speaking of bodily organs. Cotinuing to the other half of the open spread, I found prolongate (which is merely a prolonged form of prolong) and prolusion (which is yet another word for an introduction and has it's own adjectival partner prolusory). I also learned that Prom (like in high school) is short for promenade, that pro memoria is Latin for "for a memorial or remembrance," and that Promoter of the Faith is the same as devil's advocate.

Now, all of these things may be the sort of stuff you can find in a normal dictionary; it was when I took my que from Promotor of the Faith and headed over to D that I remembered just why I love this particular two-volume dictionary so much.

I have to wonder what sort of standard the editors of this great work used to establish what a word really is. Now, I'm all for including any utterance that communicates something in common usage in a dictionary, but that's more feasable now that we have online dictionaries; back in 1984, space constraints were certainly a big deal, so how do you decide what makes the cut?

And how common was the word demothball back in '84? Especially meaning "to return (military or naval equipment) to use by removing the preservative coating in which it has been stored"?

But that's not the best one. My new favorite word--the one of all of these that is, I hope, most likely to become commonplace in my vocabulary--is deux-chevaux. Literally, it's French for "two horses," but my dear, dear 1984 World Book Dictionary defines it as, "an automobile with a badly worn-out engine with only as much power as one would suppose a two-horsepower engine to have."

Lookout, world: I'ma gonna be insulting your cars in French now! Deus vult!

(Deus Misereatur....)

Deus vorbiscum.

Post 173

2008-12-23T13:24:00.004-07:00

I picked up Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman from the Provo library before heading home for the holidays. I was intrigued by the book's subtitle ("A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary"), and when I saw that William Safire called it the "linguistic detective story of the decade," I figured I couldn't go wrong. But it's that darn voice thing again, you know? This is a fascinating account of modern British history, but I just don't like the way Winchester writes.

Some examples:

In talking about the sacrifices of some Connecticut soldiers in the Civil War, Winchester writes, "The world, President Lincoln was to say six months later when he consecrated the land as a memorial to the fallen, could never forget what they had done there." Wow. Way to break up a simple and very direct quote with an unnecessarily lengthy reporting clause. (Page 51, btw)

A couple pages late (53), Winchester gives this lengthy editorial paragraph:

"Given what we now know about the setting and the circumstance of his first encounter with war, it does seem at least reasonable and credible to suppose that his madness--latent, hovering in the background--was triggered at that time. Something specific seems to have happened in Orange County, Virginia, early in May 1864, during the two days of the astonishingly bloody encounter that has since come to be called the Battle of Wilderness. It was a fight to test the sanest of men: Some of the occurrences of those two days were utterly beyond human imagination."

I dunno. This just sounds like a chintzy, "Cower in fear, O reader, for the horrors our hero is about to face far surpass what he has hitherto known." Yeah, yeah. How 'bout we just move on with the story, huh? Don't tell me that you're about to tell me something really great--just tell me!

Also, this guy really loves dashes. I mean, I like dashes a lot, but look at this from page 55:

"The fighting therefore was conducted not with artillery--which couldn't see--nor with cavalry--which couldn't ride. It had to be conducted by infantrymen with muskets--their guns charged with the dreadful flesh-tearing minie ball, a newfangled kind of bullet that was expanded by a powder charge in its base and inflicted huge, unsightly wounds--or hand-to-hand, with bayonets and sabers. And with the heat and smoke of battle came yet another terror--fire."

I dunno. I'll probably finish the book because it's short and I'm on vacation and I wanna know how this story unfolds, but I really don't like the way this guy writes.

This has been a problem for me lately with the non-fiction I've been looking at. During Thanksgiving, I picked up Theric's copy of Hooligan by Douglas Thayer, and I was so annoyed by the way he dropped his verbs that I had to put it down (unfortunately, I didn't take note of any examples of that, so I can't really tell you what I mean, but I remember thinking, "Dude, who do you think you are, Michel Thaler?"). A week or two before that, I picked up Prozac Diary by Lauren Slater because I had heard such good things about her engaging and distinctive voice, but here I ran into the opposite problem because, even though I did find her writing fairly engrossing, the subject matter was a bit disturbing to me, so I walked away from it too.

*sigh* What's a poor boy to do?

Post 172

2008-12-17T17:31:00.002-07:00

I finished my finals yesterday--and already I'm going through academic withdrawls. I suppose the next couple weeks will find me striving to become inured to ennui. Oh well. At least I have my vocabulary to keep me warm....

Post 171

2008-12-13T21:24:00.003-07:00

And now for a poem I wrote on my mission. Enjoy!

---

Christmas comes, and Johnny's sure
To remember what it's for,
So writes his prayer out on a list,
And, just to make sure he's not missed,
He leaves an off'ring for his god
(A greedy being, so it's not odd):
A plate of cookies and some milk,
Then goes to bed wrapped in a quilt.
He stays awake (he cannot sleep)
And so a silent vigil keeps
To see if he can hear a sound
When his god comes roaming 'round.
Then Santa Claus, his Christmas god,
On Johnny's snowy rooftop trods,
Goes down the chimney, to the table,
Eats all the cookies he is able
Then picks up Johnny's little list
And holds it tightly in his fist.

Now if you don't obey the laws
Set up by fat ole Santa Claus
You'll end up like Johnny, who
Got just old coal and nothing new.
I don't believe in Santa Claus;
If you must know why then it's because
He's a false god, and that is bad--
Don't worship him: it makes me sad!
If you love Santa and his bells
More than Jesus, you'll go to hell!

---

I'm not quite that bitter any more, but the sentiment always makes me smile. And whenever I hear that "Grown-up Christmas List" song, I think, "Wow, you really do pray to Santa, don't ya?"

Anyway, I realize I haven't posted very regularly lately, so I thought I'd put something up to say, "Merry Christmas!" and "I'm still kickin'!"

Post 170

2008-12-05T18:25:00.002-07:00

I have been enjoying pretty much the coolest sickness ever these past couple days. I've never known a sickness to be so--convenient. But this one ROCKS! Check it out:

This coming Monday (December 8th) I have two research projects, a four-page assignment, and an oral report due. I, of course, figured I could slap them all together this week, but such was a poor decision, and I was pretty stressed out when I went to bed Wednesday night.

And then a glorious thing happened: I woke up early Thursday morning, choking and hacking and nearly asphyxiating because my throat was sore sore and congested. I had no voice. Recognizing that I couldn't possibly work in such a condition (Tuesdays and Thursdays I work eight-hour days), I texted a work friend of mine saying something like, "I'm sick so I can't come to work and I don't have a voice so I can't call in. Please tell them I'm not coming," and then turned off my alarm clock and went back to bed.

I slept till sometime between 11 and noon and then got up. I felt physically weak, but my brain was clicking just fine, so I spent about 12 hours working on final projects, so now I'm all caught up.

Thank you, sickness.

I woke up this morning and realized very quickly that I had forgotten to turn my alarm clock on and had therefore overslept. I looked at my clock and learned that I had slept through my first two classes--one of which I had a test in. Luckily, that teacher teaches another section of that same class a couple hours later, so I hurried off to campus, found her class, and went to talk to her.

Kinda. Ya see, I still didn't have a voice, and power walking through the chilly air had only made it worse. As I tried to explain what had happened, she said, "Kyle, you sound sick. Take the test on Monday when you're feeling better."

So this sickness helped me get my projects done and pushed a test back!

Thank you, little sickness. Thank you so much.

Post 169

2008-11-30T21:36:00.002-07:00

A month or so ago, my New Testament professor made some passing reference to something Robert Frost wrote about God speaking to Job about the trials he had to endure. I didn't think much about it until a week or so ago. Turns out, this is a really hard thing to find. Near as I can tell, it isn't on the internet anywhere. Luckily, I live walking distance from one of the largest collegiate libraries in the nation, and I was able to find a dusty old copy there.

Anyway. Here it is: God explaining stuff to Job. Enjoy!

I've had you on my mind a thousand years
To thank you someday for the way you helped me
Establish once for all the principle
There's no connection man can reason out
Between his just deserts and what he gets.
Virtue may fail and wickedness succeed.
'Twas a great demonstration we put on.
I should have spoken sooner had I found
The word I wanted. You would have supposed
One who in the beginning was the Word
Would be in a position to command it.
I have to wait for words like anyone.
Too long I've owed you this apology
For the apparently unmeaning sorrow
You were afflicted with in those old days.
But it was the essence of the trial
You shouldn't understand it at the time.
It had to seem unmeaning to have meaning
And it came out all right. I have no doubt
You realize by now the part you played
To stultify the Deuteronomist
And change the tenor of religious thought.
My thanks are to you for releasing me
From moral bondage to the human race.

Frost, Robert. A Masque of Reason. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1945. 4.

Post 168

2008-11-23T17:44:00.003-07:00

Well, I'm rearranging things here in my little corner of blogdom again. Most of the changes are things you probably won't notice or care about (I made my labels more consistent and concise; I changed my "About Me"), but here is one thing you may care about: I've made a second blog.

This blog is The Eccentric Sage. I called it that because I didn't want this to be the sort of blog that is dedicated to the life and drama of its author; I wanted the posts to be things that would appeal to a much broader audience than people who know me personally. I like to think I've done an okay job at that. However, occasionally I do things that are so crazy that they deserve to be shouted into cyberspace, so I have created a place for them to go. The posts on my second blog will probably tend to be longish, but my hope is that they'll be worth reading. I don't really care if they aren't, though: I mostly just wanted a repository for my insanity. There isn't much there yet, but I will be adding to it a lot, I'm sure.

Enjoy!

Post 167

2008-11-17T16:04:00.001-07:00

And now this amazing prophecy from the February 1959 issue of Time magazine:

Owlish Cellist Pablo Casals, 81, ventured a hopeful thought on a species of U.S.-bred cacophony scarcely ever ventured on his mellow instrument: " Rock' n' roll is a disease that shall pass away as quickly as it was created. It is a sad thing for your country. It is nothing, nothing. "

Post 166

2008-11-15T16:11:00.002-07:00

If the sentence I presented to you in Post 164 was the single greatest sentence in the history of the English language, then the sentence I here present to you may well be the worst:

It might have been being used to try to help avoid having to slide stuff across the floor.

NINE VERBS, YO; WHAT NOW?

Post 165

2008-11-07T15:01:00.004-07:00

So, a little while ago, there were these posts that people I know were putting on their blogs that listed their quirks. Cunfuzzled was first, and I thought, "Dude, Schmetterling, you totally got this," but when I started a new post, I came to the realization that I have no quirks.

(I can sense your eyebrows raising, dear readers, even as I type this.)

But I've been thinking about it some more, and I've decided that, yes, I do have a few quirks, and now I've managed to come up with a few that are worth mentioning, so here they are.

Quirk #1: I can't kill creeping things.

This quirk irks me occasionally because, frankly, it's pretty inconvenient. The worst thing is that I brought it on myself: when I was in high school, I decided that there was no reason for brazenly killing things on the sole basis of their number of legs, and so I stopped stepping on bugs. Somehow, that simple decision exploded into a condition that is now bigger than I am. For example, the last place I lived had this crazy flying ant infestation--no drone ants anywhere to be found, but flying ants all over the place! But I couldn't kill them. Nevertheless, their incessant buzzing got on my nerves, so I resorted to trapping them in a harmonica box and taking them outside. Very inefficient and fairly difficult, but I just couldn't bring myself to kill them.

A couple of days ago, a ginormous spider came out of nowhere while I was using my computer and scared the crap out of me (figuratively speaking). The thing was huge and I was chagrined to see it coming out from behind my monitor because that is right beside my bed, and I don't want fuzzy creepy crawlies sleeping with me. But I couldn't kill it. Spiders are faster and smarter than ants, so catching it was tricky, but I couldn't kill it and I didn't want it living in my room, so I persisted until I had successfully released it into the wild.

The strange thing is, I'm pretty sure I could kill a cow or a deer or even a cute little bunny if I needed the food--certainly wouldn't do it for sport, but for food, I really think I could. But I can't kill bugs. This, I think, makes me completely backward in modern American society.

Quirk#2: My eating habits lack luster.

I have eaten French toast virtually every morning that I've made myself breakfast (easily above 90% of the time) for more than three years now. I never get sick of it. I thought I would a long time ago, but I never have. In fact, sometime, as I'm drifting off to sleep, I think, "Oh boy! I get to have French toast in the morning!" and that thought actually makes me so excited that I have trouble falling asleep.

I am not the sort of man who requires much culinary variety in general, come to think of it. It is not unusual for me to eat the same thing for lunch and dinner in a given day, and that's generally the meal I've been making for dinner every day for weeks on end. Right now, this is chicken and rice. A couple of months ago, it was pasta with chicken and sauce. I'm considering a return to pasta. But chicken is always the same--always.

French toast every morning, chicken for lunch and dinner. Is it any wonder I got salmonella? Just a matter of time, really.

While we're talking about my strange eating habits, were any of you my readers when I talked about my drinking problem? We'll call that Quirk#3.

And now you know that I'm not so normal as I seem. Whoda thunk, huh?

Post 164

2008-11-05T20:48:00.002-07:00

Yesterday, while I was cleaning dorm bathrooms, my mind wandering as it is typically wont to do in such times, I composed the single greatest sentence in the history of the English language. It's true! I'm not being prideful, just honest. And so I'd like to share this sentence with you, but what's a sentence without context, right? Right. Ergo the following fictional story:

So there were these two roommates, and one of them had a dolly--ya know, the kind you use to haul boxes and stuff. And he always kept it in the same place. Well, one day, he got home from classes, and he noticed that his dolly was missing. But he was a pretty chill sort of kid, so he didn't freak out or anything. Later that night, he noticed that his dolly had returned, so he said to his roommate, "Hey, do you know where my dolly's been?"

"I dunno," his roommate said. "It might have been being used to help move stuff."

CHECK IT, BABY: SIX CONSECUTIVE VERBS! I ROCK!

Post 163

2008-11-03T21:33:00.002-07:00

This comes from an essay written by H. L. Mencken in 1936. It's called "The New Deal Mentality," and it really is very timely (also, I really love the language used; why don't people write like this anymore? Nevermind--it's because people wouldn't give the effort to read it). The moral of the story is beware the quick fix! (And if you can't take time to read the whole thing, at least take a gander at the second to last paragraph--though it'll make a good deal more sense in context, so I'd like you to read the whole excerpt--especially since I'm taking the time to type it by hand!) This was originally published in The American Mercury (whatever the crap that was); I am copying it from a book called the Anxious Years, edited by Louis Filler:

At every time of stress and storm in history one notes the appearance of wizards with sure cures for all the sorrows of humanity. They flourished, you may be certain, in Sumer and Akkad, in the Egypt of all the long dynasties, and in the lands of the Hittites and Scythians. They swarmed in Greece, and in Rome some of them actually became Emperors. For always the great majority of human beings sweat and fume under the social system prevailing in the world they live in--always they are convinced that they are carrying an undue share of its burdens, and getting too little of its milk and honey. And always it is easy to convince them that by some facile device, invented by its vendor and offered freely out of the bigness of his heart, all these injustices may be forced to cease and desist, and a Golden Age brought in that will give every man whatever he wants, and charge him nothing for it.

There is thus no actual newness in the so-called New Deal. Its fundamental pretension goes back to the dark abysm of time, and even its most lunatic details are not novel to students of world-saving. If it differs from the other current panaceas--for instance, Communism, Fascism, and Nazi-ism--it is only in its greater looseness and catholicity, its more reckless hospitality to miscellaneous nonsense. It is a grand and gaudy synthesis of all the political, economic, social, socio-political, and politico-economic quackeries recorded in the books, from the days of Wat Tyler to those of Bryan, the La Follettes, Lloyd George, Borah, Norris, and Debs. Indeed, it goes far beyond Wat to the Republic of Plato, and on the way down the ages it sucks in the discordant perunas of Augustine, Martin Luther, J. J. Rousseau, Robert Owen, Claude Henri Saint-Simon, Karl Marx, Sockless Jerry Simpson, Thorstein Veblen, and Henry George. This mess, boiling violently in a red-hot pot, is now ladled out to the confiding in horse-doctor's doses, to the music of a jazz band. Let them swallow enough of it, so they are assured, and all their sorrows will vanish. Let them trust the wizards manning the spoons, and they will presently enter upon fields of asphodel, where every yen that is native to the human breast will be realized automatically, and all the immemorial pains of doing-without will be no more, and what goes up need never come down again, and two and two will make five, five and a half, six, ten, a hundred, a million, [sic]

It is hardly necessary to rehearse the constituent imbecilities of this grandiose evangel--its proposal to ease the privations of the poor by destroying food and raising the cost of living, its proposal to dispose of the burden of debt by laying on more and more debt, its proposal to restore the impaired common capital by outlawing and demolishing what is left, and so on and so on. The details are of no more significance that they were when an oldtime doctor sat down to write a shotgun prescription. It is, in fact, only by accident that this or that crazy device gets out in front. Each wizard roots with undeviating devotion for his own, and a large part of the money wasted so far has gone into helping Wallace to prevail against Hopkins, and Hopkins to upset and flabbergast Ickes. Whenever one of the brethren gets a new hunch, there is a sharpening of activity, and the taxpayer goes on the block for another squeeze. And whenever one of them comes to grief, which is almost every day, the others rush into the gap with something worse.

That under all this furious medication there lies a sub-stratum of veritable pathology may be accepted without argument. Even the dumbest yokel does not succumb to even the most eloquent hawker of snake-oil on days when his liver and lights are ideally quiescent. It takes a flicker of pain along the midrifff [sic] to bring him up to the booth, and something more than a flicker to make him buy. In the present case there are qualms and tremors all over the communal carcass, for the whole world was lately mauled by a long, wasteful, and fruitless war, and the end of that war saw many millions of people reduced to poverty, terror, and despair. Immeasurable values had been destroyed, and the standard of living had declined everywhere. There was, of course, only one way to restore what had been lost, and that was for all hands to return to work, and earn it over again by patient industry. But in the post-war years any such scheme seemed too slow and painful, especially to romantic Americans, so resort was had to what appeared to be quicker contrivances. One of them, as everybody knows, was the anticipation of income by credit buying, and another was the accumulation of bogus values by gambling. These contrivances appeared to work for a while, and we were assured by high academic authority that a New Economy had come in; but suddenly they ceased to work, and there ensued a great bust, with the losses of the war multiplied two or three times, and every participant in the joy-ride rubbing his pocket, his occiput, and his shins. Nor did the spectators fare much better. Indeed, some of them were hurt even worse than the joy-riders.

What to do? The old prescription was still indicated--patience, industry, frugality. A few austere souls began to preach it, albeit somewhat timorously, and some even ventured to take it, but for the majority it was far too unpalatable to be endured. They craved a master elixir taht would cure them instantly and without burning their gullets, a single magical dose whose essences would run up and down their legs like electricity, and purge them of all their malaises at one lick, and waft them whole and happy to the topmost towers of Utopia. In brief, what they craved was quackery, and that is precisely what they got. Fro all points of the compass "the astrologers, the Chaldeans, and the soothsayers" came galloping--some from near and some from far, some from college classrooms and some from chicken-farms, some from the voluptuous dens of Rotary and Kiwanis and some from the chill crypts of the Y.M.C.A., some in glittering military uniforms and some in the flapping chemises of prophets and martyrs--but all busting with enlightened self-interest, all eager to grab favorable spots and loose their spiels.

For a while it was very confusing, but gradually something resembling order began to emerge from chaos. Upon the troubled face of the waters there appeared the shine of a serene and benignant Smile, the calming influence of a Master Mind. Why should inspired men fight like cats and dogs? Why should the Uplift be pulled to pieces on the very day of Armageddon, with an unparalleled chance for Service in front of it? Why not gang the suckers, and take them en masse? Why not, in Hopkins' immortal words to his stooge Williams, "give everyone a job"? To see the way was to consummate the dizzy deed. There and then the New Deal was born.

Post 162

2008-11-01T09:37:00.003-06:00

Last night, I went to a little Halloween party, and we watched Disturbia.

Lame, lame, lame, laaaaaaaaame.

It's nice to see a movie like this every now and then, though, because I'm not torn over whether or not I liked it, and I can point to specific details as to why it was bad.

The movie starts out with a father and son fishing, having a nice time, and then, on the ride home, they get in a car wreck, and Dad dies. This is to establish angst in our teen protagonist because, as we all know, teenagers have to have some kind of terrible trauma in order to have angst: generally, teens are a mature, sensible, and, above all, level-headed group on the whole.

But you should have seen this wreck. It was pretty spectacular. They were driving a car down a highway, and they ran into the back of a similar sized car that was stopped on the highway. Did you know that when one car plows into the back of another, the moving car gets airborne, flips upside down and sails a few hundred feet before hitting the ground and then skidding and spinning to a stop? (When I got rearended, the car behind me just disappeared into my trunk--I totally got gypped!) And then some guy cruising along in a little pickup somehow didn't see this inverted car in the middle of the road and runs into it at full speed. More spinning and sliding. Dad is now dead.

Six months later, kid is in Spanish class, and he obviously hasn't done any work. He has no idea what's going on. He's sleeping in class. He isn't doing his homework. Teacher says, "What would your father think?" and kid punches him in the face, earning himself a summer vacation of house arrest. He's given a little ankle tracker thing and isn't allowed to leave the property. To compound the injustice, his mom discontinues his X-Box Live subscription and iTunes membership. So what's a boy to do but spy on his neighbors?

A pretty girl (I guess; am I the only one who finds nothing attractive about seductively dressed teens?) moves in next door. He doesn't even see her face: he sees her from behind as she's carrying a box. Of course it's love. A few days later, she notices he and a friend spying on her as she's swimming, so she comes over and they all become friends.

This--doesn't make any sense....

Later, she comes over all angry and asks why he spies on her, and he tells her, when he's watching her, he sees how she's different from other people: she reads books instead of magazines; she looks out her windows at the world, contemplating how to make it better; she looks in the mirror, not cockily, but pensively, wondering, "Who am I really?"

(Funny, every time he looked out the window at her, the camera gave us a close up of her butt.)

"That's either the creepiest or the sweetest thing anybody's ever said to me," she says, and then they dive into perhaps the longest make-out session in teen movie history (though I don't doubt there have been longer, I have thankfully avoided them).

Of course, in the meantime, the guy and the girl and the goofy-friend character (every movie needs one of those) are spying on the man they think is a murderer. They have nothing to go off of except for the kind of car he drives. But they are sure he's a murderer, so main character dude sets up a stake-out in his house and sends girl and goofy to follow this guy around and break into his house and stuff. One time, goofy gets locked in the house, so main character guy crosses the property line, which brings his parole officer running. The police, at main character's insistence, poke around serial killer's house, but they don't find anything suspicious, and then they leave.

And then serial killer--who is so methodical that he has built a surgery room behind a secret door in his hallway--suddenly goes crazy and starts attacking main character's mom and goofy friend and main character himself. Goofy gets homerunned in the face with an aluminum bat--full wind-up swing from a grown man--but, don't worry, he's okay: no permenant damage, just a little bruise on his temple.

Ya know, I hear that, if you're gonna get hit with a bat, the temple's a good place to go because it's so--strong--and not fragile.

Long story short, there's a chase that ends with main character stabbing serial killer with gardening sheers and pushing him into a sess pool full of the remains of murdered women.

This, of course, doesn't affect him too badly: the next day, he's back to making out with his girl friend and hanging out with goofy friend, and the police decide to take off his tracker because, hey, he killed a murderer, let's forgive his punching a teacher in the face, ya know?

Crappy, crappy movie.

And it was full of cheap shots, too. Knife-weilding murderer approaches a woman while the music swells tensely--haha, he just cut a price tag off of her dress; bet you didn't see that coming! I'm pretty sure it's never been done before. Pretty sure it wasn't horribly obvious. Or when the camera man walks with a staggering step toward the main character, appearing to be a POV shot from the antagonist but--nope--it really is just the camera man. And when goofy gets locked in the crazy man's house, he has a video camera. The cops show up and don't find goofy. Then main character starts getting video feed of goofy--and he's dead! But wait, that looks like my closet; better go investigate--haha, goofy, funny joke, man.

Anyway, if your a budding movie critic like me who occasionally enjoys watching a move that is easily lambasted, this is a good one for you. I haven't told you everything that's wrong with it because, if you do want a movie whose problems are numberless and ubiquitous, this is the movie for you, and I'd hate to ruin all the little flaws. But if you're looking for an enjoyable, worthwhile movie with character development and reasonable plot progression, this is not a good choice. Perhaps you could pick up Rear Window instead.

But you know what you really ought to do? Call off watching this movies to spend your time drafting a novel. Happy NaNoWriMo, everyone!

Post 161

2008-10-25T09:44:00.003-06:00

Strange how these movie reviews always come in groups....

Last night I watched Lady in the Water. I am not a fan of M. Night Shyamalan--Signs doesn't really do it for me; The Village was interesting but nothing I'd watch again; The Sixth Sense I remember virtually nothing about except that it scared me silly for a ridiculously long time--so knowing that this work was his, that he would be playing a crucial role, and that it was supposed to be some sort of demented bedtime story--I went into it with a lot of reservation.

But I really enjoyed this movie--really enjoyed it. I loved how it believed in itself so unfailingly and yet managed not to take itself overly serious--it was very refreshing some how. The whole thing was so different, so fun that rejecting it would be something akin to kicking a puppy, ya know? It was just so datgum lovable!

Don't think I've ever felt this way about a movie before. Kinda nice, actually.

While I'm reviewing movies, I finally got around to seeing The Sting last weekend. It was pretty good. I like that flavor of movie--the heisty double-cross--it's a good time most any way you slice it. And Paul Newman and Robert Redford are a powerhouse of a team, man. I didn't really like Butch Cassedy and the Sundance Kid too much, but I enjoyed them in it; The Sting was all I could have hoped for from them and more. Robert Redford is, like, our parents' generation's Brad Pitt; Paul Newman is just Paul Newman--there will never be a person who is all that is man the way he is. No one else could have pulled off Cool Hand Luke--no one. Not that I really like that movie, either, but it is the quitessential Paul Newman, and when Paul gives that smile--whether it be in The Sting or as Butch--you know he's gonna come out on top, and it just gives you hope for manhood, ya know?

Maybe I'm crazy, but that's probably why you're here reading my blog, now, isn't it?

Post 160

2008-10-23T21:26:00.003-06:00

How long's it been since I did a movie review? Too long, my friends--too long, I say!

So here we go:

I just watch K-PAX. Funny story, there, but I've unfortunately forgotten most of the details. But on more than one occasion (though perhaps not more than two), I've had someone who didn't like the movie recommend it to me. They'd say something like, "I saw K-PAX," and I'd say, "Was it good?" and they'd say something like, "Meh. I dunno. You'd probably like it."

I think I've mentioned this in a previous post, come to think of it.

...scanning...
...scanning...

Yup. Post 138.

Anyway, I finally saw it tonight. And I--I'm not sure whether I liked it or not. I can see why people who know me and my taste in movies would think I'd like it--it really is the sort of movie I would like--but, despite its overall goodness, it had a few major problems that I'm just not sure I can overlook.

But first, the good: Kevin Spacey is awesome. I think the only other movie I've ever seen him in was Superman Returns, which I didn't like really at all except for his portrayal of Lux Luthor, which was, again, awesome. At first, I was thinking, "What's the big deal? Anyone can keep a straight face," but then the hypnosis and murder scenes came and, man, that guy's good! I mean really good!

Also good: the unresolved finish. That is the thing everyone always recommended to me. Because I knew that the movie wasn't going to answer its central question (viz. Is Prot human?), I was watching for the end. I was so afraid that he'd just disappear and they'd say, "Hum. It's a mystery!" I was pleasantly surprised by what actually occured. Well done.

Last good thing: the movie's concept and the way it's presented. I really did like it. In fact, I liked it so much that I kinda wish someone would repackage it and do it right.

"Now, hold up there, little butterfly," you say to me, "if you liked the concept and its presentation, what didn't you--how would--what's to repackage?"

"Ah," I respond, "the devil's in the details, dontchya know."

Ya see, K-PAX is apparantly a place that is so advanced that they have transcended the need for families. I have a problem with that. Also, K-PAXians evidently don't look like humans, which some how bothers me (something about a combination between Ephesians 4:6 and Genesis 1:27--but that is, of course, my own personal opinion and no sort of doctrine worth discussing; I only brought it up to explain why I feel the way I do). Furthermore, K-PAXians believe that the universe explodes and collapses repeatedly ad infinitum, but we humans abandoned that notion several years ago when we realized that the universe seems to be accelerating in its expansion rather than slowing down--and I'm pretty sure we figured that out before this movie came out, so this seems like a pretty serious faux pas for a semi-scifi flick. Lastly, the movie moved too slowly, I think. Now, I like moves that move at a deliberate pace--the 3-hour saunter that is Meet Joe Black is much more riveting to me than the 3-hours of nonsense that is any of the LOTR movies--but this movie didn't have enough weight to move so laboriously (although I think it thought it did).

So those are the holes, and they're enough to make me not love the movie, which is sad, as I said, because I think the concept has so much potential, all of which would have been realized if Prot had just not said a few of the things he said.

The end.

Post 159

2008-10-19T15:12:00.003-06:00

As one who is sometime not very careful in the way he chooses his words, I really appreciated this bit from John Taylor. This is coming to you from the Journal of Discourses, Volume 26, Discourse 10.

(And I'm not just including this because it's kinda funny the way he says it--I really do believe this.)

You have drank from the river the streams whereof make glad the city of our God. The light of eternal truth has beamed upon your minds, and your hearts have been glad in the hopes of eternal life which have been presented to you when under the influence of the Spirit of God. You have rejoiced in the hope that blooms with immortality and eternal lives. Filled with this Spirit you feel that you are an eternal being having the principles of the everlasting Gospel within you; that you have received the everlasting Priesthood, that you are associated with principles that will exalt and ennoble man in time and throughout the eternities to come. There is something pleasing about it.

And when these miserable “dogs” howl and the coyotes yelp and exhibit their folly and nonsense—I was going to say, who the devil cares? Some people would think it is impious to say a thing like that. Yes, and the same people think it very honorable to lie in order to oppose the truth. No matter what men think of these things. I am not very precise in choosing my words in reference to such matters.

Post 158

2008-10-17T14:13:00.005-06:00

[Disclaimer: If you just stumbled onto this blog, please don't judge me based on this or the past three postings because I'm trying--by request--to say something disagreeable.]

Euthanize the elderly, enslave racial minorities, subjugate women, burn the Constitution, guillotine the politicians, and eat all the babies!!!!!!

Poat 157

2008-10-17T14:13:00.001-06:00

Hooray for the expansion of Poatdom!

Poat 156

2008-10-17T14:12:00.002-06:00

Hey, you Poats, can I join the Poat club, too?

Poat 155

2008-10-17T14:12:00.001-06:00

Hello, Poat 154! I'm Poat 155. Let's be friends!

Poat 154

2008-10-15T21:50:00.002-06:00

Hey everybody--it's been a while, and I have BIG NEWS!

So, I was down and out for a couple of weeks because I had (get this:) salmonella poisoning! Isn't that great? I always thought salmonella was an imaginary disease invented by mothers to keep their kids from eating cookie dough, but I guess it's real after all: I got it!

And, as if that isn't great enough, I ALMOST DIED!

I don't know much about vital signs, but when I had my roommates take me to the ER because my limbs were going numb, they were really worried about my vitals. Today I got a printout of my medical record; turns out my blood pressure when I was admitted to the ER was 72/42 and my pulse was 126.

That's baaaaaaaaad.

Isn't it great! This is so exciting: I almost died but, here I am, still alive! Go me!

Post 153

2008-09-27T19:56:00.001-06:00

Prepositions are not bad things to end a sentence with. Those who are against ending sentences with prepositions must be put down. Their objections to terminal prepositions are the most baseless (not to mention heartless) things I can think of. There is no reason they should be put up with. We need to tell them to shut up! We need to force them to sit down!

I just thought I’d give you something to think about. I really had to think this through. It’s a tough subject to speak on. For listening to me, I give you my thanks many times over.

Post 152

2008-09-19T12:26:00.003-06:00

I was completely unaware of the Prescriptivist vs Descriptivist debate at the beginning of 2008: I (like this web browser's spell check) hadn't even heard the terms before. But then, sometime in the fuzzy period between winter and spring (I forget when exactly), one of my roommates gave me a copy of David Foster Wallace "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage" to read, and I found myself diving headfirst into this glorious new can of worms.

(I regret that I do not, at this very moment, have my copy of that essay handy; perhaps on some future day, I will give you some lovely excerpts.)

That essay changed me: when I started it, I had no idea what Prescriptivism was; by the time I gave it back to my roommate, I considered Prescriptivism foundational, a quintessential part of my being, and I was horrified to realize that the dictionaries that take up such a large portion of my bookshelf were mostly compiled by hell-bound Descriptivists who were leading the language to ruin. I was a bonafide Snoot (Wallace's word, not mine).

(At this point, I really wish I could tell you that I'm exaggerating, but for once in my life, I feel I'm extreme enough without exaggeration. I suppose that completely honest would encourage me to say that, rather than changing me, "Tense Present" really just opened my eyes to an issue that I already had a solid opinion about even though I had no idea that an actual debate was raising, but having empowered me with such awareness, it also ignited my indignation against the evil Descriptivist.)

Not very long at all after this intellectual epiphany, I began taking my first course in Linguistics. Were I to pull out the notebook I used in that class and show you the first page, you would see where I wrote on the first day of class BEWARE: LINGUISTICS IS STRAIGHT UP DESCRIPTIVISM and circled it several times.

But then the unthinkable happened: I fell passionately in love with linguistic descriptivism, and I realized that, from a strictly historical standpoint, language did just fine for a few thousand years before the advent of Prescriptivism a few hundred years ago. Nevertheless, I remained ideologically aligned with the Prescriptivist camp because I felt we had to have an academic standard, a right and wrong for every question, and I clung tenaciously to these notions while immersing myself in my linguistics class--sorta like trying to swim with a 25-pound weight (I've done that before; it's excellent exercise but hard to do for very long).

Then summer came, and I enrolled in a Philosophy of Language class, and that's why I am the way I am now. Despite the fact that my professor was a self-proclaimed Prescriptivist, the course made me realize that utterances can only have meaning so long as a community agrees on some kind of association between sounds and intentions, and I came to the conclusion that, though I really like clear-cut right and wrong, language is a very liquid thing, which is why (I think) it's so effective (and also why it's so hard to nail down).

This semester is my first in the English Language program here at BYU. I left summer term a repentant Prescriptivist, now solidly rooted in the Descriptivist camp. Looking at my schedule that included classes such as "Modern American Usage" and "The Grammar of English," I was afraid that I'd be alone in my major: a newly converted Descriptivist in the midst of a hundred Snoots. I felt a little leary as I looked ahead to a couple of years of headbutting with closeminded Prescriptivist.

I have been pleasantly surprised: not only is the ELANG department's allignment decidedly Descriptivist, they also unilaterally hate Chompsky--and I'm all for that! Whereas I feared I was going to war in this new major, I now find myself feeling quite at home.

I have finally found my intellectual niche.

Post 151

2008-09-12T18:24:00.003-06:00

I’m about to say something that is, I think, the sort of thing that could cause people to hate me forever. It’s been milling about in my head for the past week or so, and I’ve been trying to devise some way to present it little by little and build up to my slap-in-the-face conclusion, but I’ve decided that that really just isn’t my style. So I’m gonna bank on the assumption that most people who read this blog are accustomed to my bluntness and then hope that that assumption doesn’t cause problems. Please understand that your first impression of what I say will most definitely be incorrect, so read the whole thing before you settle into your opinion.

There was one question I got on my mission that I was never really able to answer very clearly even though it never seemed particularly complicated to me. I’d heard the question from time to time before my mission, and I’ve heard it a few times since; I don’t imagine it is a new question, and I don’t think it’s ever going to stop plaguing humanity, but I have an answer that I am quite satisfied with.

The question: Why do bad things happen to good people?

My answer: They don’t.

Now, see? There you go getting all uppity. Why are you so easily offended? I’m telling you, you’ve jumped to a conclusion that is just plain wrong. I didn’t say that good people have easy lives, I said that bad things don’t happen to good people. Hopefully, by the time you finish reading this post, you’ll believe me.

I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve had a rough couple of weeks. I moved from one apartment complex to another, but my contracts didn’t overlap, so I had about a week and a half of homelessness. During that time, I went home to my parents’ house for a few days, where I learned that the skin cancer my dad has is worse than he’d been telling me. Shortly after I returned to Provo, a girl in a Passat rear-ended me, totaling my car twice over and screwing up my neck a bit. Less than a week after that, I in all my social suavity sort of blew to smithereens (again) a friendship I had been thoroughly enjoying. All this in the midst of the first week of my first real semester in my new major and while adjusting to a new place.

Now, this may shock some of you, but I actually consider myself well within the category of ‘good person.’ I feel I must be because, to my recollection, nothing bad has ever happened to me—ever. Oh, sure, I know what it’s like to have physical pain so intense it makes me scream or just shake, and I have experienced emotional pains such that I’ve been debilitated by sobbing for hours at a time; I have helplessly witnessed the mortal suffering of those I love, and I have seen those I care about make mistakes. I have tasted hate, been adamantly wished to hell, spit on, pushed around; I know what it is to be frozen with fear. I’ve made mistakes and writhed with guilt and regret. I’ve been rejected. I have felt shunned at times. But I really can’t think of a time when something really bad happened to me.

I list all these unpleasant things I’ve endured from time to time not because to try to convince you that my life has been hard: quite to the contrary, I think that all of those things are fairly typical and that you each could make a similar list. I mean, maybe you’ve never had physical pain so bad it made you shake, but perhaps you’ve been beaten by someone or struggled with a serious addiction or—or whatever other sorts of things people suffer in life. All I’m getting at here is that suffering doesn’t make somebody special: we’re all in this mortality thing together, and we each get our share.

You see, I’m just not convinced that bad things can happen to good people. Paul said that all things work together for the good of those who love God; Brigham Young said that he didn’t feel he had ever had to sacrifice anything for the Gospel because what he ended up with was always better that what he lost. And I say that nothing bad has ever happened to me.

I heard a story once that allegedly came out of ancient China; I think it will be helpful in this discussion (I’m setting it off not because it’s a quote but so people who’ve heard it can skip it if they like):

A man and his son caught a wild horse, brought it home, and corralled it. Their neighbors all came over to see it.

"What a beautiful animal!" the neighbors said. "You are so lucky to have caught it."

"Maybe," the man said.

A day or two later, the horse broke out of the corral and ran away. The neighbors came over to give their sympathies.

"Those damages will take a long while to fix," the neighbors said. "What an unfortunate loss."

"Maybe," the man said.

The next morning, the man and his son discovered that the horse had returned, and with it had come the rest of the herd, all grazing in the pasture. The man and his son barricaded the hole in the fence to keep the animals inside. The neighbors came over to give their congratulations.

"What good fortune!" they said.

"Maybe," the man said.

A day or two later, the man’s son tried to ride one of the horses, fell off, and broke his arm. The neighbors came over to give their condolences.

"He won’t be able to work the rest of the season," they said. "What bad luck."

"Maybe," the man said.

The next morning, a representative from the Emperor came and announced that all able-bodied young men were being drafted into the army, so all the boys of the village went off to war—except for the man’s son because he had a broken arm. Soon thereafter, a horrible battle killed all of those boys. The neighbors came again to the man.

"Our sons!" they lamented. "You are so lucky that yours could not go to war."

"Maybe," the man said.

The point of the story, I think, is that it is impossible to know immediately whether anything that happens to you is good or bad. I have often been amazed at God’s ability to take really horrible circumstances and consecrate them for my good. Also, if you really pay attention to what Moroni actually says in Ether 12:27, I think you’ll find his choice of verbiage (viz. "give") quite interesting. It’s hard to think of trials (and particularly our own weaknesses) as gifts or of humility as much of a reward, but God knows what He’s doing, I’m pretty sure.

Now, I’m not so wise as to be able to see the good in everything; for example, I’m not really sure why it was necessary (or even that it was necessary) for me to have only one kidney. Furthermore, I’m really not sure what good came out of spending the first 12 years of my life wondering why I was in so much pain while it quietly withered away (not that I knew it was withering away: that took the doctors an awfully long time to deduce). Also, I don’t really know what good comes of my occasional social casualties (sure, I learn from them, but isn’t there a better way?). Still, I believe wholeheartedly that bad things don’t happen to good people, and every unpleasant thing I ever encounter will one day be counted a blessing.

So that classic question—why do bad things happen to good people—is really a poor question, if you ask me, because the only acceptable answer is, "They don’t; can you please rephrase the question?" My question is this: Do bad things happen to bad people? I honestly don’t know: I’m not a bad person. I suppose bad people eventually wind up in hell, but I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing because, as we learn in Mormon 9:4, they’ll be happier there than they would be in heaven anyway. (Perhaps that’s taken a wee bit out of context, but I think the sentiment is fair enough.)

Do bad thing happen at all?

Certainly evil is real, and people make bad choices sometimes, but this notion of bad things just happening—I really don’t buy into it much.

Any thoughts?

Post 150!

2008-08-29T21:30:00.002-06:00

It's been, I realize, a goodly while since I've been able to post. Because of this (furthermore, because this is my 150th post), I figured I'd go for the knock-their-socks-off approach, and I therefore offer the following disclaimer:

I ASSUME THAT MOST OF YOU READ THIS BLOG WHILE SITTING DOWN; IF THIS IS UNTRUE OF YOUR CURRENT STATE, I BEG YOU TO REMEDY THAT BEFORE READING ANY MORE OF THIS POST.

Everybody sitting down? Good. Here we go.

I--

uh

I--

(Good heavens! This is more painful than I expected! Confessions generally are, though....)

I read a book--a fictional book--a fantasy novel! And I read it--all the way through! Wretched, wretched, escapist literature--and I enjoyed it! Oh woe is me! What have I done? I was such a nice fellow; how could this happen?

*sigh*

Well, I believe the worst is behind us now. I will now proceed to tell you about this book and my experience with it:

I must admit, I found myself honestly suffering through this story at times. You must understand, I am not the sort of man who feels a moral obligation to finish things I start (especially books--especially fantasy novels), but I felt I had to make it through this one. It was a pride issue, really: you see, there are a handful of fictional books (perhaps as many as three or four) that I'd kinda like to read, but they've all either been recommended to me by Confuzzled or Thmazing, and I can't have either one of them feeling the right to gloat over having persuaded me to indulge myself with lies, so I figured I go with a book that neither one of them have recommended to me (to my recollection), a book that (with any luck) neither of them have read.

Ha! Take that, my literary tormentors!

The book is Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson, and (this is the part where my pride really takes a beating:) I think I'd actually recommend it fairly unilaterally. But you must remember, this recommendation comes from a guy who doesn't like fiction.

I just finished reading Alcatraz today. As I was reading it on the couch in my living room, one of my roommates walked in and asked what I was reading.

"Stupid, wretched, escapist fiction, I'm afraid," I said: "Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians."

"Do you like it?" he asked.

"Well," I said, "the plot is fairly uninteresting, and I don't really like any of the characters...."

He laughed. "But the font is nice?"

"Oh yes," I said, laughing also. "The font is very nice."

But I lied. I don't like the font. I mean, it was mostly a pretty standard font with unobtrusive serif, but the author chose to put hand-written notes in a sloppy, san-serif font that was supposed to look like handwriting, and I think that's dumb.

So that's pretty much my recommendation: I didn't really like the characters much, though they were occasionally entertaining, and I didn't really enjoy the plot, though it was occasionally interesting, and I didn't even like the fonts all that much. But I did enjoy the book as a whole.

Now you may find yourself wondering what's left to enjoy in a novel once you take away its plot, characters, and font(s); if that is the case, you and I are not very much alike because I say that, once you take away a story's plot and characters, you have only the most essential part left: the voice.

My friend Schlange is in the off-and-on conceptual stages of writing his first novel. I, being a red-pen nut, thoroughly enjoy attacking his comma usage when he sends me partial drafts. The last time he thus employed my services was about a month ago. Here is an excerpt from the email I sent him (I think it will help you to understand my recommendation for Alcatraz):

I am officially an English Language major. Basically, I'm getting my BA in grammar and punctuation. These things are kind of a big deal to me. I tell you this, not because I think you don't know, but because it will be necessary for you to bear in mind as you read the following that I am a BIG fan of good grammar etc.

One of the reasons that I love to read what you write so much is that you have a very distinct voice when you're telling a story, and it's a good one. Remember that one night when I printed off a couple of your blog posts and proceeded to tell you why the one about pastries was better than the one about speaking good? It's because of that happy, I'm-telling-a-story-I'm-excited-about voice that you get when you're writing in your element. I have a friend from back home who occasionally sends me stories that he's working on, and I always dread reading his stuff because, even though his stories are generally very good, his voice is so flat that I have the darndest time musceling through. But you have a great voice; your voice makes your writing worth reading. So this little grammar lesson I'm about to give you, you can take it or leave it, but just don't let it screw up your voice!

With that said, all I really have left to say regarding Alcatraz is, though the plot is fairly conventional and the characters are occasionally a bit too quirky to be truly lovable, the story telling is A-grade fantastic! The novel is in 1st person, and at the beginning of almost every chapter, Alcatraz stops telling the story and goes off on random tangents. I, being the sort of person who would rather read a well-written essay than any book-length fiction, enjoyed these so thoroughly that, rather than seeming to get in the way of the story, I felt the story detracted from the tangents! I mentioned above that I occasionally found myself suffering through the story at times, but that was only because I wished Al would stop telling me his stupid story and go back to the good stuff.

Strange, no?

But even when he was telling the story, his descriptions were always really entertaining. Also, if you ever do read this book, be sure to pay attention to the way he spells pterodactyl--I thought it was an especially subtle and clever running joke.

So that's pretty much my review, but I'm not done yet. This'll make for a kinda lengthy blog post, so if you're tired, you can stop reading now, but I'd like to include some little excerpts from the book just so you can get a feel for the voice that I'm so enamored of. (Just a sidenote, I found myself laughing out loud at times despite my telling myself over and over, "Hey, kid, it really isn't that funny!" So if you don't find these funny, that's probably because they aren't.) The first of these excerpts is directed at anyone who has ever recommended a book to me; the rest are just fun little excerpts that caught my attention.

FROM PAGE 49-50:

{Open Quote}

I'd like to take this opportunity to commend you for reading this book. [...] [M]y experience has been that people generally don't recommend this kind of book at all. It is far too interesting. Perhaps you have had other kinds of books recommended to you. Perhaps, even, you have been given books by friends, parents, or teachers, then told that these books are the type you "have to read." Those books are invariably described as "important"--which, in my experience, pretty much means that they're boring. (Words like meaningful and thoughtful are other good clues.)

If there is a boy in these kinds of books, he will not go on an adventure to fight against Librarians, paper monsters, and one-eyed Dark Oculators. In fact, the lad will not go on an adventure or fight against anything at all. Instead, his dog will die. Or, in some cases, his mother will die. If it's a really meaningful book, both his dog and his mother will die. (Apparently, most writers have something against dogs and mothers.)

Neither my mother nor my dog dies in this book. I'm rather tired of those types of stories. In my opinion, such fantastical, unrealistic books--books in which boys live on mountains, families work on farms, or anyone has anything to do with the Great Depression--have a tendency to rot the brain. To combat such silliness, I've written the volume you now hold--a solid, true account. Hopefully, it will help anchor you in reality.

So, when people try to give you some book with a shiny round award on the cover, be kind and gracious, but tell them that you don't read "fantasy," because you prefer stories that are real. Then come back here and continue your research on the cult of evil Librarians who secretly rule the world."

{Close Quote}

FROM PAGE 68:

{Open Quote}

Remember, despite the fact that this book is being sold as a "fantasy" novel, you must take all of this things it says extremely seriously, as they are quite important, are in no way silly, and always make sense.

Rutabaga.

{Close Quote}

FROM PAGE 143-4:

{Open Quote}

You may think those above paragraphs are some kind of foreshadowing. You're right. Of course, those thoughts weren't foreshadowing when they occurred to me. I couldn't know that they'd be important.

I tend to have a lot of ridiculous thoughts. I'm having some right now. Most of these certainly aren't important. And so, I usually only mention the ones that matter. For instance, I could have told you that many of the lanterns in the library looked like types of fruits and vegetables. But that has no real relevance to the plot, so I left it out. Likewise, I could have included the scene where I notices the roots of Bastille's hair and wondered why she dyed it silver, rather than letting it grow its natural red. But since that part isn't relevant to the -

Oh. Wait. Actually, that is relevant. Never mind.

{Close Quote}

FROM PAGE 183:

{Open Quote}

People can do great things. However, there are something they just can't do. I, for instance, have not been able to transform myself into a Popsicle, despite years of effort. I could, however, make myself insane, if I wished. (Though if I achieved the second, I might be able to make myself think I'd achieved the first....)

Anyway, if there's a lesson to be learned, it's this: Great success often depends upon being able to distinguish between the impossible and the improbable. Or, in easier terms, distinguishing between Popsicles and insanity.

Any questions?

{Close Quote}

FROM PAGE 250-1:

{Open Quote}

Now, I would like to take this opportunity to point out that I didn't take the opportunity to point out anything at the beginning of this chapter. Never fear; my editorial comments were simply delayed for a few moments.

You see, that last chapter ended with a terribly unfair hook. By now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this book when you should have got to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for falling into my trap. It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of his books. It foes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others. Plus, we get a kickback from the caffeine industry.

Regardless, because of how exciting things were, I didn't feel comfortable interjecting my normal comments at the beginning of this chapter. So, I shall put them here instead. Prepare yourself.

Blah, blah, sacrifice, alters, daggers, sharks. Blah, blah, something pretentious. Blah, blah, rutabaga. Blah, blah, something that makes no sense whatsoever.

Now back to the story.

{Close quote}

There are also a goodly number of allusions in this book, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Most were very brief, so I'm not sure I caught them all, but I did catch one to To Kill a Mockingbird, on to "The Raven," one to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, one to Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail, and one to something like but not necessarily The Count of Monte Cristo.

So there you have it. As a parting shot, I've got to tell you that the thing that really sold me on this book was (of all things!) the teaser on the inside flap:

A HERO WITH AN INCREDIBLE TALENT... FOR BREAKING THINGS.

A LIFE-OR-DEATH MISSION... TO RESCUE A BAG OF SAND.

A FEARSOME THREAT FROM THE POWERFUL SECRET NETWORK THAT RULES THE WORLD... THE EVIL LIBRARIANS.

Post 149

2008-08-11T18:41:00.005-06:00

It's been a while since I've posted anything--long enough that Confuzzled's been complaining, at least--so here we have something totally unprecedented, something, in fact, that flies completely in the face of some of my most precious credos: a post wherein I'm nice to Confuzzled. Kinda. Actually, this is something that I've been meaning to do for quite a while, but it happens to be in response to something she said a couple months ago, so it might appear that I'm being nice to her, I dunno. If I am, in fact, being nice to her, we'll just call it an anomaly--me stirring the waters just to make sure we don't get stuck in a rut (er--canal, I guess, if we want to avoid mixing metaphors)--or something like that.

Rest assured, Confuzzled: I will, no doubt, be returning to the lambasting that we are all so much more accustomed to here shortly.

Anyway, anybody remember my review of Kung-Fu Panda? That post is an interesting one because I basically claimed that I laughed so hard while watching that movie that my brains fell out and I had no more desire to be a gloomy, pensive individual. In the comments section, my dear, naysaying brother questioned whether such a change could be made all at once, and I honestly didn't know.

Well, it's now been just over two months since I made that declaration, and, though I still find myself being isolationistic in my pensive habits on a regular basis, I think that I've generally become a more happy-go-lucky sort of individual. So take that, causality--er--whatever--!

I've actually wandered far away from where I intended to be, so let me back up: the reason I bring up that post is because Confuzzled commented and said, "Also, you should start writing jokes. Because I don't know any. And you could help me!" Though I responded to the rest of her comment, I purposely avoided that part of it because I wanted to do then what I was about to do now.

Ya see, just a week or two before the historic Kung-Fu Panda Post, I had auditioned for a stand-up comedy club here at BYU, and I had just found out a few days before writing that post that they had decided that I was not funny enough to be in their club. Meh. Whatever. I wasn't terribly interested in being in the club: I mostly just auditioned for the sake of giving stand-up a try. I would've liked being in the club now, but I have different interests developing now that would probably conflict anyway, so 'sall good.

ANYway, what I wanted to do in response to Confuzzled comment that I haven't been able to do just now is to post my audition here. It took me longer than I expected to get that video file from the club, and it's taken me a few weeks to get around to using a campus computer that had the wherewithal to take the video from DVD to computer to blog, but I finally did it today, so here it is. This is me trying (and evidently failing) to be funny. I dunno, you be the judges of funny, I guess:

So there you have it. I generally consider myself a situationally humorous kind of guy: I ain't no performing monkey here to make you giggle on demand, no sir! But, if nothing else, I hope you can find humor in the attempt.

I have another, more melodramatic video I'd like to post sometime, but this has taken me a lot longer than I expected it to, so that will have to wait for another time, I guess.

Post 148

2008-07-31T22:32:00.000-06:00

One year ago today, I started this blog.

I wish I had something to say on such an occasion, but I don't, so forget it.

Post 147

2008-07-30T22:49:00.002-06:00

(For those of you with short attention spans, you can skip down to the bolded heading below because that’s where things get interesting: what precedes that is mere exposition because I think what I’m about to say warrants some kind of context.)

I am currently enrolled in a Philosophy of Language class. It’s fascinating stuff, really, and my professor is ridiculously enthused about it all, so I generally enjoy the course. But this past Friday, we had a debate that left me feeling furious! It put me in such a bad mood that I had trouble sleeping throughout the weekend and ditched class on Monday (it’s a MWF-type class, by the way), and it was with great reluctance that I dragged myself to class today because I was still so angry about the whole thing.

What was this debate, you ask? It was whether meaning is in what someone literally says or in their intent. My professor said we had to choose a side and that we weren’t allowed to be middling on the issue—we had to pick a side and argue for it. The class split perfectly in half, so it was 3 on 3 (and people told me horror stories about the huge class sizes at BYU! Ha!). I wasn’t convinced that all the way on one side or the other was very wise, so I considered the extremes: on one side, we have absolutely no wiggle room because every utterance is taken absolutely literally; on the other—wow, I shudder to think. It seemed to me that, if meaning is entirely in the intention, then structured language is totally unnecessary because people ought to just automatically know what I mean by this gesture or this facial expression and, if they misunderstand, that’s their problem. This latter prospect frightened me to death, so I argued in favor of absolute literalism and analyticity.

The class ended before the argument was really able to reach any sort of denouement, but I was happy to escape because the other side was driving me crazy with all these fluffy-bunny arguments that couldn’t be argued against because they were so insubstantial, and then we’d say something smart that they’d turn on its head because, I dunno, because nonsense always comes out on top.

So I was furious, as I said. Fury isn’t really something I’m naturally inclined toward, but I was positively livid about the whole ordeal because it seemed to me that linguistic anarchy had won against formal structure via stubborn belligerence, and I couldn’t take it.

But today I manned up to facing the class again, and I’m very glad I did because today I came to my own theory of meaning. It was mostly during the walk home from class that I refined it, but today’s discussions got my juices flowing in happy rivers again, and I’m sure that precipitated the brilliance that I am about to share with you.

The Schmetterlingian Theory of Meaning

Sentences mean;
People intend.

I have decided that my notion of language is words organized into sentence structures that are governed by set rules. Gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice &c. are not parts of language (except, I suppose, in, say, ASL, which is strictly gestures, or, like, Chinese, in which tone is a part of pronunciation). But if I say, “That’s terrific,” the sentence “That’s terrific” has a literal meaning, and that meaning is not negotiable.

However, I, the speaker, may intend to convey that the antecedent of “that” is not, in fact, terrific—the exact negation of the meaning’s truth value—and perhaps I successfully convey this intention to my audience via a deliberate combination of vocal qualities, hand gestures, and facial expression. These are certainly elements of communication and augment the conveyance of my original intention, but they have no linguistic value and do not change the actual meaning of the sentence, though they may (and, I hope, will) help you to understand my intent in uttering them.

“Oh,” you might think, “so, while he said, ‘That’s terrific,’ he meant, ‘That’s not terrific.’”

NO!!! You aren’t paying attention! I did not mean anything: sentences mean; people intend! So, while I said, “That’s terrific,” I intended to convey my opinion that “that” is not, in fact, terrific.

I was tossing this idea around with my philosophy-major roommate, and I realized that I don’t really know what function words perform. Certainly, words can mean, but I think that meaning in words is more of an exception than a rule. The only evidence I can offer for this is that, if you translate a sentence from one language to another, you have to take the sentence as a whole: if you translate the individual words one at a time, you’re never going to get a very good translation. My roommate suggested that I can simply define words in terms of sentences, viz. “Words are the building blocks that we put together to create sentences.” This, to me, is, for now, at least, a satisfactory explanation, but I hope to come up with something better soon because that definition really makes me wonder how dictionaries can exist.

Post 146

2008-07-15T23:40:00.002-06:00

When was the last time I opened up a can of worms?

Correct answer: too long ago.

So today's topic is art. I know few topics that is so innately volatile: I mean, just trying to nail down a solid definition of art can cause offense to some people. One of the problems we run into immediately is the difference between Art Perceived and Art Intended. I submit that Art Perceived is a null phrase. Art, to me, has a lot to do with creative process. If I discard a creation of mine as worthless, and some other guy finds it and thinks it's fantastic and beautiful and (dare I say it?) artistic, I don't think that makes it art. I'm not sure we have (in English, at least) a good name for that, but I think calling it "art" would be erroneous.

I got in a pretty exciting debate with a girl about this a few weeks back. She's a music major and a big fan of such things as John Cage's 4'33", which is hard for me to have a solid opinion on. I ran this girl in circles until, in a huff, she told me that anything a person wants to accept as art is art, which struck me more as a surrender than a definition--but whatever.

My problem with something like 4'33" is that I think an artist ought to manipulate in some way what it is the audience experiences. Perhaps John Cage intended his audience to simply appreciate the ambient sounds of their current environment; whether that be the buzzing of lights or the breeze through the bushes, certainly the audience could find something to listen to. This seems to me less of an artistic accomplishment and more of an exercise in meditative stillness--which I'm all for but cannot consider any sort of music. The argument is, of course, that silence plays a significant role in most any piece of music, so why not have it the dominant (or, in this case, sole) factor? I say because music is the organization (or, if we wanna be really liberal, the manipulation) of sounds to some end. A musician telling his audience to appreciate whatever ambient noises may be present is essentially the same as a photographer to tell his fans to look out their bedroom window--certainly not a bad idea but not really any semblance of art.

I am not opposed to the concept that anything can be art, though. Perhaps if I constructed or encouraged the instruction of a room in which absolute silence existed and then had people come in to experience the audible void, then we would be approaching art, I think, but more architectural than musical, though perhaps some amalgamation of the two.

Well, I feel I've rambled enough. Here is the definition of art I have created--the most satisfactory one I can think of--for you to support or refute; I thought it up myself so feel free to support it heartily or oppose it brutally--the latter being so much more the fun:

Art is the careful and honest expression of a sentiment.

Post 145

2008-07-14T13:41:00.003-06:00

A couple of quotations for yehs:

First, 2 Nephi 26:24 - "He doeth not anything save it be for the benefit of the world; for he loveth the world, even that he layeth down his own life that he may draw all men unto him. Wherefore, he commandeth none that they shall not partake of his salvation."

Last, Brother Joseph: "God will not command any thing, but what is peculiarly adapted in itself, to ameliorate the condition of every man under whatever circumstances it may find him, it matters not what kingdom or country he may be in."

So when God tells you to do something that you don't wanna do, just suck it up and remember it's just like your mother always told you: IT'S GOOD FOR YOU!!!

Big bowl of saurkraut every single morning, if that's what it takes....