OMG this is amazing:

List of terms for gay in different languages.

I may or may not write more on this, but I am amused by the linguistic universality of [large vehicle]-[gay woman]. Like the equivalent of the English "diesel dyke," I guess, except it's like "tractor dyke" and "truck dyke." And then there's like "huge manly shoes", which apparently means "dyke" in portugese.

I'm not sure WTF is up with the word "towel" being a synonym for gay, either.

In any case, some are funny, many are inexplicable (ah, yes, a beechnut. I can see why that would mean "guy who likes guys"), and most of them are derogatory, or at best, neutral. Only a couple of "positive" ones.

"Researchers have hypothesized that foot fetishism increases as a response to epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases. In one study, an increased interest in feet as sexual objects was observed during the great gonorrhea epidemic of twelfth century Europe and the syphilis epidemics of the 16th and 19th centuries in Europe. In another study, the frequency of foot-fetish depictions in pornographic literature was measured over a 30 year interval. An exponential increase was noted during the period of the current AIDS epidemic. The researchers noted that these epidemics overlapped periods of relative female emancipation. Sexual focus on female feet was hypothesized to be a reflection of a more dominant posture of the woman in sexual-social relations."

Huh.

"Hair whorls on the head (parietal whorls) have been intensively studied because of the association indicated between brain development and abnormal hair whorls. (Both brain cells and skin cells are derived from an embryo's ectoderm tissue.) Abnormal hair whorls are used as a preliminary predictor of abnormal temperament in most domesticated animals, especially cows, but also in evaluating the mental status of apes and humans. A recent study found that homosexuals are more likely to have the less common counter-clockwise hair whorl phenotype than heterosexuals. Right and left handedness have also been linked to clockwise and counter-clockwise whorls, respectively."

Way fucked.

random wikipedia pages

There is a page on wikipedia about Adolph Hitler's sexuality.

I wonder how many [famous person's] sexuality pages there are, actually.

I was going to make this post about more weird-sounding wikipedia pages but I couldn't find enough good ones in a short span of time. But some other random shit I found:

Lists of ambiguous human names

Mr. Floppy's Flophouse

"Mr. Floppy himself was said to be an elusive archeologist from Finland who while not excavating an inverted pyramid that is thought to house the knowledge of all mankind, was hosting late night events in the bowels of one of Oakland's most notorious districts."

"At dawn it was not uncommon for George, the owner of the property to appear in a wizard cape serving shrimp cup of noodle soups from behind his piano."

Mr. Floppy owns.

Myco-heterotrophs

Symbiosis

Like I said, fungi kind of freak me out and I should learn more about them.

Now I think I am going to go home and sleep.

some links

Dumping some links here.

This woman wrote a memoir about how she was raised by wolves after becoming a Holocaust orphan. Now, after the book has made millions of dollars, been translated into 18 languages, and become a feature film, it turns out it was kind of not exactly true. Who could have imagined?

That still sounds like a rad story and I totally want to read that book.

Mel's Hole.

Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter.

Frogs sealed in stone.

There we go.

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

Fingernails on a blackboard.

Snatiation and gargalesthesia are awesome fucking words. omg.

helium, color

"Most of the world's helium supply comes from underground fields in the United States."

Man, it must be hard to mine a gas, wtf. And why/how is it there?

spectral line

"Many atoms emit or absorb visible light. In order to obtain a fine line spectrum, the atoms must be in a gas phase."

"All atoms absorb in the Ultraviolet (UV) region because these photons are energetic enough to excite outer electrons."

"inelastic scattering of light"

photoelectric effect

Color

Why frequency gaps? Tetrachromats. Berlin and Kay

"In the 1969 study Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay describe a pattern in naming "basic" colors (like "red" but not "red-orange" or "dark red" or "blood red", which are "shades" of red). All languages that have two "basic" color names distinguish dark/cool colors from bright/warm colors. The next colors to be distinguished are usually red and then blue or green. All languages with six "basic" colors include black, white, red, green, blue and yellow. The pattern holds up to a set of twelve: black, grey, white, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, and azure (distinct from blue in Russian and Italian but not English)."

qualia

"The distinction between warm and cool colors has been important since at least the late 18th century but is generally not remarked in modern color science or colorimetry. The contrast, as traced by etymologies in the Oxford English Dictionary, seems related to the observed contrast in landscape light, between the "warm" colors associated with daylight or sunset and the "cool" colors associated with a gray or overcast day."

"Any color can be made to appear warm or cool by its context with other colors."

red-green color blindness

"Anomalous Trichromats are often able to readily spot camouflage clothing, netting, and paint that has been designed for individuals with color-normal vision."

Cerebral achromotopsia.

""Mr. I. could hardly bear the changed appearances of people ("like animated gray statues") any more than he could bear his own changed appearance in the mirror: he shunned social intercourse and found sexual intercourse impossible. He saw people's flesh, his wife's flesh, his own flesh, as an abhorrent gray; "flesh-colored" now appeared "rat-colored" to him. This was so even when he closed his eyes, for his preternaturally vivid ("eidetic") visual imagery was preserved but now without color, and forced on him images, forced him to "see" but see internally with the wrongness of his achromatopsia. He found foods disgusting in their grayish, dead appearance and had to close his eyes to eat. But this did not help very much, for the mental image of a tomato was as black as its appearance."

steganography

Steganography

Fictitious entry (rhinogradentia, Borges)

funereal violins

I should incorporate false documents into SDN and then have a website or something which will let people know which of the information in the book is legitimate.

Maybe stuff with deniable encryption or plausible deniability with TD:LP?

dres, shivs, calques

Apparently for some reason there is a Polish equivalent to Chavs.

Dangerous Beauty: The Art of the Shiv.

We are consummate toolmakers. This shiv might be my favorite.

Calques are interesting. Examples: flea market, skyscraper.

Wikipedia's list of unusual deaths

Wikipedia list here. Some ones that stood out to me, organized by category. I was trying to have there be a cut after each section, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. Stupid tricksy blogger; I need something that works like lj-cut in livejournal. Ah well, you can still see what the categories are.

Lame Deaths:

1884: Allan Pinkerton, detective, died of gangrene resulting from having bitten his tongue after stumbling on the sidewalk.

1911: Jack Daniel, founder of the Tennessee whiskey distillery, died of blood poisoning six years after receiving a toe injury when he kicked his safe in anger at being unable to remember its combination.

1923: George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon became the first to die from the alleged King Tut's Curse after a mosquito bite on his face became seriously infected.

1941: Sherwood Anderson, writer, swallowed a toothpick at a party and then died of peritonitis.

1945: Anton Webern, the Austrian composer, was accidentally shot dead by an American Army soldier on 15 Sept. 1945, during the Allied occupation of Austria. Despite the curfew in effect, he stepped outside the house to enjoy a cigar without disturbing his sleeping grandchildren.

Ultra lame:

1947: The Collyer brothers, extreme cases of compulsive hoarders were found dead in their home in New York. The younger brother, Langley, died by falling victim to a booby trap he had set up, causing a mountain of objects, books, and newspapers to fall on him crushing him to death. His blind brother, Homer, who had depended on Langley for care, died of starvation some days later. Their bodies were recovered after massive efforts in removing many tons of debris from their home.

And The Lesson Is:

Hypatia was cool. Too bad she was killed by a Christian mob.

1277: Pope John XXI was killed in the collapse of his scientific laboratory.

Jesus is clearly not a fan of math or science.

1559: King Henry II of France was killed during a stunt knight's jousting match, when his helmet's soft golden grille gave way to a broken lancetip which pierced his eye and entered his brain.

Do not use golden armor, no matter how good it may look.

Kind of Cool Deaths:

1923: Frank Hayes, jockey, suffered a heart attack during a horse race. The horse, Sweet Kiss, went on to finish first, making Hayes the only deceased jockey to win a race.

1967: On Dec. 17 Harold Holt, Prime Minister of Australia, went for a swim at Cheviot Beach near Portsea, Victoria, Australia. He was never seen again. Rumors and theories include suicide, kidnapping by submarine, and shark attack; the true cause remains unknown.

Kidnapping by submarine. :D Awesome.

1975: On 24 March 1975 Alex Mitchell, a 50-year-old bricklayer from King's Lynn literally died laughing while watching an episode of The Goodies. According to his wife, who was a witness, Mitchell was unable to stop laughing while watching a sketch in the episode "Kung Fu Kapers" in which Tim Brooke-Taylor, dressed as a kilted Scotsman, used a set of bagpipes to defend himself from a psychopathic black pudding in a demonstration of the Lancashire martial art of Ecky-thump. After twenty-five minutes of continuous laughter Mitchell finally slumped on the sofa and expired from heart failure.

Ew:

4 BC: Herod the Great suffered from fever, intense rashes, colon pains, foot drop, inflammation of the abdomen, a putrefaction of his genitals that produced worms, convulsions, and difficulty breathing before he finally gave up. Similar symptoms-- abdominal pains and worms-- accompanied the death of his grandson Herod Agrippa in 44 AD, after he had imprisoned St Peter. At various times, each of these deaths has been considered divine retribution.

Oh ew wtf. What would produce that, just rot in the genital area w/ maggots?

1983: A diver on the Byford Dolphin oil exploration rig was violently dismembered and pulled through a narrowly opened hatch when the decompression chamber was accidentally opened, causing explosive decompression.

Food and Drink:

1135: Henry I of England died after gorging on lampreys, his favourite food.

Are those eels, or is it different?

1478: George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence reportedly was executed by drowning in a barrel of Malmsey wine at his own request.

That's style. If you could choose your method of execution, what would it be?

1771: King of Sweden, Adolf Frederick, died of digestion problems on February 12, 1771 after having consumed a meal consisting of lobster, caviar, sauerkraut, smoked herring and champagne, which was topped off with 14 servings of his favourite dessert: semla served in a bowl of hot milk. [citation needed] He is thus remembered by Swedish schoolchildren as "the king who ate himself to death."

Just posting this because semla sound really delicious. Mmmm.

Oops:

1687: Jean-Baptiste Lully, composer, died of a gangrenous abscess after piercing his foot with a staff while he was vigorously conducting a Te Deum, as it was customary at that time to conduct by banging a staff on the floor. The performance was to celebrate the king's recovery from an illness.

1978: Janet Parker, a British medical photographer, died of smallpox in 1978, ten months after the disease was eradicated in the wild, when a researcher at the laboratory Parker worked at accidentally released some virus into the air of the building. She is believed to be the last smallpox fatality in history.

1981: Carl McCunn, in March 1981, paid a bush pilot to drop him at a remote lake near the Coleen River in Alaska to photograph wildlife, but had not arranged for the pilot to pick him up again in August. Rather than starve, McCunn shot himself in the head. His body was found in February 1982.

Miscellaneous:

270 BC: The poet and grammarian Philitas of Cos reportedly wasted away and died of insomnia while brooding about the Liar paradox.

69: The short-time Roman emperor Galba was killed after becoming extremely unpopular with both the Roman people and the Praetorian guard-- however, 120 different people claimed credit for having killed him. All of these names were recorded in a list and they all were later themselves executed by the emperor Vitellius.

260: According to an ancient account, Roman emperor Valerian, after being defeated in battle and captured by the Persians, was used as a footstool by the King Shapur I. After a long period of punishment and humiliation, he offered Shapur a huge ransom for his release. In reply, Shapur had the unfortunate emperor skinned alive and his skin stuffed with straw or dung and preserved as a trophy.

Holy shit. I can't decide whether to say that people took their conquests more seriously back then, or that they took them less seriously. I mean, using a guy as a footstool, then skinning him and keeping him as a trophy? These days it would be all speeches and platitudes.

869: Al-Jahiz, an Arab scholar from Basra and author of works on literature, history, biology, zoology, Mu'tazili philosophy and theology, and politico-religious polemics is reputed to have been killed by his own library when shelves fell over on him.

1753: Professor Georg Wilhelm Richmann, of Saint Petersburg, Russia, was struck and killed by a globe of ball lightning while observing a storm.

Man, ball lightning is fucking sweet.

2002: Richard Sumner, a British artist suffering from schizophrenia, disappeared and was not located again until three years later when his skeleton was discovered handcuffed to a tree in a remote forest in Wales. Police investigators determined the death was a suicide, with Sumner securing himself in the handcuffs and throwing the keys out of reach.

o_O

Cladogram of extant sauria

Huh, I did not realize the relationships were like that, with crocodiles being much more closely related to birds than they are to say, lizards or snakes. I guess the layman categorization of "reptile" is really pretty iffy :)

Yep. Birds are sort of arbitrarily scooped out, because uh, they're birds, dammit, not reptiles!

This chart is really cool. Look at how us mammals branch off from our fellow vertebrates after amphibians but BEFORE reptiles and birds! We are strange creatures.

Yap

Whoa.

The stone money thing, and the inter-village caste shifts with imposed dietary taboos is interesting to me.

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."

neo-hippie tangent

Anyway, read the neo-hippie article, because it's lol. And obviously written by hippies. Like, the word "hippie" is occasionally misspelled.

Mildly-amusing quote:

With the death of the electric car, the reeling in of social freedoms and the various attempts to ban LGBT relationships; coupled with the growing religious impact within the government, the neo-hippie was born.

Electric cars :D Dig the inappropriate use of the semicolon. But correct punctuation is probably just a way for The Man to keep people down, so hey.

Another quote:

In holding to the past, neo-hippies remain pure-earth. [whatever the fuck that is. I'm skeptical about the degree to which someone living in an industrialized society can completely avoid attributing to non-biodegradable waste products.] They forgo many comforts to protect and save the planet for future generations. They live waste-free; recycling, reusing, and composting most, if not all of their discarded materials. They hold the belief that all that has been made can be unmade.

I'm a level five vegan; I don't eat anything that casts a shadow.

In the United States, some hippies refer to themselves as "Rainbows," a name derived from their tie-dyed T-shirts, and for some, from their participation in the hippie group, "Rainbow Family of Living Light".

This may just be proof of my cynicism, but, ahaha. I don't think I could be part of a rainbow family of living light, because that would make me gag.

Anyway, I am SO having neo-hippies in my novel. Maybe I can get travel grant money to go to Eugene or something. Or go to Asheville with K, as apparently that is also a hippie center!

And I'm having transhumanists. LOL, transhumanism.

the form that dare not speak its name

I wrote some more on my retarded novel. It's kind of "bad" right now for the most part, but I basically have the plot arc, and after that's done, it's time for shitloads of digression. I think I will have a manifesto somewhere in the middle. What other random things should I include? Perhaps recipes. I want it to be fractacular (fractal-like and spectacular. Okay, maybe it's not actually that fractal-like, since I don't really comprehend fractals, but fractals are so cool.)

And apparently fractals appear on "neo-hippie" shirts. I'm not sure what a "neo-hippie" is, although I will soon find out thanks to Wikipedia, but I'm pretty sure they have to make an appearance in my novel.

Oh god, why didn't I think of that before? The connection is so obvious!!!

Oh, and there's my other "novel" which in my head has characters, a plot, complex interpersonal relationships, hilarity, etc., but in practice pretty much all I've written is snippets of inane dialogue that might be amusing to no one but me.

Anyway, it amuses me, and that's what's important, right? My goal is 2,000 words a day on it, which will give me over 50,000 words in a month, which is... I dunno. But I think that's "novel length." That ought to be enough to get across the gist of the plot.

I sat next to B today at a reading, and she had some poetry. She secretly writes poetry. I secretly write fiction. Okay, it's not so "secret," but bah, we get shunted into our little genres.

The reading was great. But at the end the guy read a poem (also great) which he refused to call a poem. It was a "verbal thingamajig" or something. Ahhh, the form that dare not speak its name!

I also came up with a horrible/brilliant opening title for a book:

It was the best of mimes, it was the worst of mimes.

If you steal this and write a novel let me know.