A lot of interesting and perhaps relevant (for me) articles cited here.

Fingernails on a blackboard.

Snatiation and gargalesthesia are awesome fucking words. omg.

Spitting

Wikipedia tells me lots of things about spitting. I learned, from the article on expectorants, that I probably shouldn't bother with cough syrup, and that I definitely shouldn't combine antihistamines with expectorants.

Dammit, I want some decongestants, though. I'm not sure if I should use them or not. I feel the great desire to hack stuff up out of my lungs, but can't quite. I should probably just stop it, drink plenty, and rest.

"In London, transport workers who deal with the public have recently been given equipment to collect saliva when they are spat upon by irate passengers. The police can then analyse the DNA of the offender."

I wonder if they send them a ticket or something.

"Social attitudes towards spitting have changed greatly in western Europe since the Middle Ages. Then, frequent spitting was part of everyday life, and at all levels of society, it was thought ill-mannered to suck back saliva to avoid spitting."

Suck back saliva? Is that the same as swallowing your spit? Were you expected to spit constantly, every time your mouth filled up?

No wonder there were plagues.

That, and people must have gotten dehydrated way more easily.

This sentence, in isolation (actually, even in context) is great:

"Many people in the world spit for different reasons."

"Kudu dung spitting (Bokdrol Spoeg in Afrikaans) is a sport in some parts of Africa. In the competition small, hard pellets of dung from the Kudu (a type of Antelope) are spat, with the furthest distance reached being the winner.

Kudu dung spitting is popular enough to have an annual world championship competition, with the formal sport beginning in 1994. Unlike many similar sports, the distance is measured from the marker to the place the dung pellet comes to rest, rather than where it initially hit the ground."

"Spitting (or "gobbing") was a common practise among English punks in the 1970's. When the punk bands played live, it was seen as part of the punk ritual to spit on them."

That is disgusting.

LOL. I don't know why I find gleeking so amusing. Maybe it's the name. I cannot do it on command.

Children's Street Culture.

Oh, awesome: "Phlegm may be a carrier of larvae of intestinal parasites."

Cloud Appreciation Society

Hehe, there's a Cloud Appreciation Society.

From their manifesto:


WE BELIEVE that clouds are unjustly maligned
and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them.

We think that they are Nature’s poetry,
and the most egalitarian of her displays, since
everyone can have a fantastic view of them.

We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it.
Life would be dull if we had to look up at
cloudless monotony day after day.

We seek to remind people that clouds are expressions of the
atmosphere’s moods, and can be read like those of
a person’s countenance.

Clouds are so commonplace that their beauty is often overlooked.
They are for dreamers and their contemplation benefits the soul.
Indeed, all who consider the shapes they see in them will save
on psychoanalysis bills.

There's a cloud-shaped thing in between these manifesto-points, and when I copy and paste it it just says "cloud." And I am confused and want to know how to make it a cloud shape.

Also, this puts things in perspective.

Leck mich im Arsch

"Lick me in the ass," a canon in B-flat major, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

No, I am not fucking kidding.

The lyrics are:

"Lick me in the ass!
Let us be glad!
Grumbling is in vain!
Growling, droning is in vain,
is the true bane of life,
Droning is in vain,
Growling, droning is in vain, in vain!
Thus let us be cheerful and merry, be glad!"

Ahahahaha I think this is the best thing I have seen all week, at least.

The phrase "lick me in the ass," here, is "apparently a reference to anal-oral contact." Hmm, is that so? Wherever did you come up with that interpretation?

Limerence

Limerence.

A very cool-sounding word. Part of me wonders if we really need a "term" for this, but maybe we do.

"Further, in brain scan investigations, individuals who professed to be ‘truly, deeply and madly’ in love showed activity in several structures in common with in the neuroanatomy of OCD, for example the anterior cingulate cortex and caudate nucleus."

Weird.

I wonder what these "structures" pertain to, as far as OCD goes.

Oh, and another good word is "propinquity." It's just so perky-sounding.

"Nothing propinques like propinquity, Mondale would say after a few weeks in his new office...."

Propinques!

Beards

"Queen Elizabeth I, succeeding Mary, is said to have disliked beards and therefore established a tax on them."

"It has been noted that there is a close and consistent association of long standing in American film between facial hair and role—if one lead male character has more facial hair than another, he is far more likely to be the antagonist, and the man with less (or no) facial hair the protagonist."

"One stratum of American society where facial hair is virtually nonexistent is in government and politics. The last President to wear any type of facial hair was William Howard Taft, who was in office nearly a century ago. Virtually no current state governors or members of Congress have beards or mustaches."

"The Bible states in Leviticus 19:27 that "Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard." Talmudic rabbis understood this to mean that a man may not shave his beard with a razor with a single blade, since the cutting action of the blade against the skin "mars" the beard. Because scissors have two blades, halakha (rabbinic law) permits their use to trim the beard, as the cutting action comes from contact of the two blades and not the blade against the skin. For this reason, most poskim (Jewish legal decisors) rule that Orthodox Jews may use electric razors to remain cleanshaven, as such shavers cut by trapping the hair between the blades and the metal grating, halakhically a scissor-like action. Some prominent contemporary poskim maintain that electric shavers constitute a razor-like action and consequently prohibit their use."

Apparently "vermillion" is an alternate term for the upper lip.

Encourage its use!

Why you don't hear about "ice milk" any more

Names are important. Who knows how many industries have thrived or failed because of the associations of words. :P

"Ice milk or iced milk is a frozen dessert with less than 10 percent milk fat and the same sweetener content as ice cream. Ice milk is typically priced lower than ice cream and is typically sold as a generic product.

In the United States, the term is now virtually unknown. A 1994 change in Food and Drug Administration rules allowed ice milk to be labeled as low-fat ice cream. Within months, the term "ice milk" virtually disappeared from store shelves.

Products containing less milk fat but higher sweetener content are sold as sherbet, and products with no milk fat or dairy analogues are sold as sorbet. Products which use nonfat or lowfat yogurt or dairy analogues are sold as frozen yogurt."

I also now know what "malt" is. Thanks wikipedia! This search brought to you by the fact that I want to make a chocolate ice cream soda:

"The technique is 1, 2, 3. You put 2 tablespoons of syrup or flavoring in the bottom of the largest glass you have. Add seltzer water stirring as you pour to within 2 inches of the lip of the glass. Add 1 large scoop of very firm ice cream trying to get it to straddle the rim of the glass, yet still submerged in the seltzer enough to touch the seltzer deep enough to begin reacting with the bubbles to create a foamy heat. If the ice cream is to deep in the mixture, it will over flow. If it doesn't touch the seltzer at all you don't have a soda. With a little practice you will reach a perfect balance."

I will try this. Thanks internet!

Slime Mold

"Slime moulds (or Slime molds), are protists that normally take the form of amoebae, but under certain conditions, such as those harmful to the organisms, change into globular sluglike beings, for mobility, which then develop fruiting bodies that release spores, superficially similar to the sporangia of fungi. They should not be confused with true moulds, which are actually fungi. Although cosmopolitan in distribution, they are usually small and rarely noticed. There are several different groups. Slime moulds can be found in damp and dark forest floors. Slime moulds tend to grow on rotted wood after rainfall. Slime moulds generally move only about 1 millimetre per hour, although some can reach 2 centimeters per minute."

"Most notable are the plasmodial slime moulds or myxogastrids (also known as acellular or true slime moulds), where the feeding stage takes the form of a giant amoeba with thousands of nuclei, called a plasmodium. It is not divided by cell membranes, but rather is enclosed by a single outer one, and is thus like a single large cell. Most are smaller than a few centimetres, but the very largest reach areas of up to two square metres."

"In the early 16th century. the Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch depicted an estimated 22 species of slime mould in The Garden of Earthly Delights."

"It has been observed that they can find their way through mazes by spreading out and choosing the shortest path, an interesting example of information processing without a nervous system."

"In 2006, researchers at the University of Southampton and the University of Kobe reported that they had built a six-legged robot whose movement was remotely controlled by a Physarum slime mould. The mould directed the robot into a dark corner most similar to its natural habitat."

Thanks, Wikipedia!

I need to figure out how to tell these things apart from fungus, or discarded pieces of pink gum (which evidently they can sometimes resemble). The one in the picture I included (from google) looks like melted ice cream. I'm digging the artful pink border.

Tip-Of-The-Tongue Phenomenon

"The tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon is the feeling of knowing something that cannot be immediately recalled. TOT is a near-universal experience in memory recollection involving difficulties retrieving a well-known word or familiar name. Despite the word-finding failure, people have the feeling that the word to be remembered (the blocked word) is figuratively on one's "tip of the tongue." It is felt that the blocked word is on the verge of imminent discovery. Inaccessibility and imminence are two key features of an operational definition of TOTs."

Mentioned by Anton Chekhov in his 1885 short story, "A Horsey Name," but mentioned a lot earlier by Aristotle.

"Cognitive psychologist Bennett Schwartz examined fifty-one languages and found that forty-five of them include expressions using the word tongue to describe the TOT state. Some languages use multiple metaphors. In Korean, the metaphor "sparkling at the end of the tongue" is used, as well as "caught in the mouth and throat." French speakers use the "tongue" metaphor and the expression "memory hole". In some languages, eg. Danish, and possibly others as well, tongue is often replaced by lip, "I got it(word) right on my lips", the concept remaining identical, and having an obvious relation to the tongue. The results of the language survey suggest that the use of the "tongue" metaphor is not idiomatic to English but instead a commonality of the TOT phenomenon... TOTs occur most frequently for names of people, but for common words as well."

Thanks, Wikipedia! *salutes*

Commodus: one fucked up dude.

More fascinating facts:

The lead-drinking thing, and possibly inbreeding, might be why Commodus
looks like that. I figure, the man was the fucking emperor. If a commissioned sculpture of "He Who Spared None" looked like that, can you imagine how he really must have looked? He ordered someone to be thrown in the furnace when his bath was too cold.

At the age of twelve.

(This is the same Commodus of Gladiator movie fame, by the way.)

Apparently his relatives were also dumbasses:

The task of slaying him was assigned to Claudius Pompeianus, a kinsman. But he, as soon as he had an opportunity to fulfil his mission, strode up to Commodus with a drawn sword, and, bursting out with these words, "This dagger the senate sends thee," betrayed the plot like a fool, and failed to accomplish the design, in which many others along with himself were implicated.

Crafty.

Okay, the picture in this post is the best I could find. Boy ain't right. And he looks like that in EVERY statue, adult as well. Bovine, half-asleep, dull, eyes not quite pointing the same direction. Oh Commodus. :D Even your Hercules costume and marble-chiseled abs couldn't hide it. He was succeeded as emperor by a slave. Of course, said slave was also a prefect of the city. Slavery was a bit different then.

MAN I need to study Latin again. Because I am absolutely positive that the original Latin of the text I linked is even more bluntly depraved than the 1920s translation makes out. For instance, the Latin word "subactor," which apparently means the uh, "catcher," was translated as "his partner in depravity." (And I think the word "procurer" is a euphemism for "pimp" or something. Apparently Commodus acted like a pimp's servant. Which is presumably not nearly as respectable as a pimp. This makes us wonder: what did an ancient Roman pimp wear?)

And in truth, on the occasion when he laid before the senate his proposal to call Rome Commodiana, not only did the senate gleefully pass this resolution, but also took the name 'Commodian' to itself, at the same time giving Commodus the name Hercules, and calling him a god.

What?:

Certain men who were lame in their feet and others who could not walk, he dressed up as giants, encasing their legs from the knee down in wrappings and bandages to make them look like serpents.

Also:

In his humorous moments, too, he was destructive. For example, he put a starling on the head of one man who, as he noticed, had a few white hairs, resembling worms, among the black, and caused his head to fester through the continual pecking of the bird's beak — the bird, of course, imagining that it was pursuing worms.

(Was there a cage over his head or something? Why would it stay there? I don't think starlings are that dumb.)

Oh my god, read it. It just keeps topping itself and getting more and more ridiculous:

He displayed two misshapen hunchbacks on a silver platter after smearing them with mustard, and then straightway advanced and enriched them.

Ahahahaha.

So in conclusion, Commodus was one fucked up dude. And "He displayed two misshapen hunchbacks on a silver platter after smearing them with mustard" is a strong contender for "incredible phrase of the month," because really, it can't get much more incredible, and the month is almost over.

Vanilla

Today's fascinating fact:

Vanilla comes from orchids (more specifically their fruit pods). It's native to Mexico, but is now cultivated elsewhere; Madagascar apparently grows a lot. When New Coke was introduced, the economy of Madagascar collapsed, because Coke is the biggest user of vanillin, and they had switched to an artificial one for New Coke.

According to some cookbook I make cakes from, real vanilla extract and the fake phenol-derived stuff are totally indistinguishable to humans. I'm not sure if they're actually chemically different or what. But we're talking the taste experts whose actual job it is to taste things, and identify like fourteen distinct ingredients in the most quotidian mouthful, and eat off gold spoons because regular ones affect the taste for some reason and I guess gold spoons don't.

What other metals would affect the taste of foods, and would this have a positive or negative effect? What about platinum? Electrum? Copper? (Okay, I think copper would oxidize or something, it does that easily, doesn't it? Actually, how the hell do iron and copper pans not just like, turn to rust/whatever the copper equivalent of rust is called? Is it because they're "seasoned," i.e. covered with oils or something to prevent direct metal-to-air contact? The more I find out, the more I wonder! These things are inexhaustible, I think.

Oh, and apparently in ancient Rome people were lead-poisoned in a number of ways. Through the pipes that conducted water, through their drinking vessels, through face-powder that was basically powdered lead, and, most amazingly, through actually sprinkling it into their wine on purpose because they liked the taste.