In Defense of -Ismlessness

“Isms” in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an “ism”, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon: “I don’t believe in Beatles, I just believe in me.” Good point there. After all, he was the Walrus. I could be the Walrus. I’d still have to bum rides off of people.  – Ferris Bueller

I have struggled for some time with how to describe myself. I have finally concluded that no single “-Ism” defines me. If you want to know what I believe or what my stance is on a given issue, you are going to have to ask me.

Joe Flintham [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)], via Flickr

I’m not interested in any ideology that doesn’t think lambs are cute.


Photo credit: Joe Flintham [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Flickr.

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What’s the Opposite of Curmudgeonly?

I was going through posts on my old law blog, and found a post from about 3½ years ago in which I tried out something called the AgeAnalyzer. Using what I’m sure are extremely advanced socio-dynamic algorithms, the site examines a website and guesstimates the age of the writer. Back in 2012, it estimated my age, based on my law blog posts, as 51-65 years of age. I was 37 at the time.

My last post to that blog was in 2012 sometime. Now that I have moved my erstwhile blogging activities to this site, and refocused my efforts much more towards animal GIFs and WTF moments, I thought I’d see how this site compares, in terms of computer-estimated age.

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Yup, AgeAnalyzer thinks the author of this blog (who is the same person as the author of the other blog, plus three years) is 26-35 years old.

A 26 year-old would have been born in 1989. I was in high school in 1989. People born in 1989, based on a quick and lazy Google search that made me realize how little I know about anyone who became famous after roughly 1999, include:

I hadn’t heard of anyone else.

Meanwhile, famous people sharing my birth year include: Continue reading

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Who Watches the Watchmen Watching the Watched?

Think about it.

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Bathophobia (UPDATED)

Bathophobia:

An abnormal and persistent fear of depths. Sufferers from bathophobia experience anxiety even though they realize they are safe from falling into or being consumed by depths. The feared object may be a long, dark hallway, a well or a deep pool or lake.

(Via Imgur / Reddit)

See also: Continue reading

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Sometimes a joke is just too obvious

Case in point:

Giant Methane Storms on Uranus

Heh heh. You said “meth.”

[A]ll we have previously known about the atmosphere of Uranus has been ’thrown to the wind’ with observations made last year.

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Stop! Grammar Time! Flapjacks vs. Pancakes

I’m sitting in a hotel in Shreveport, Louisiana (long story as to why) at the moment, and I noticed that the room service menu uses a term I haven’t seen in quite some time:

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“Flapjacks.”

Where I’m from, we call them pancakes. Just about everywhere I’ve ever been, and everywhere everyone I’ve ever known is from or has been, they are known as pancakes. Is there actually a difference between a flapjack and a pancake? Continue reading

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Dracarys

Here’s an interesting bit of trivia about the Valyrian language in Game of Thrones (via Wikipedia):

To create the Dothraki and Valyrian languages to be spoken in Game of Thrones, HBO selected the linguist David J. Peterson through a competition among conlangers. The producers gave Peterson a largely free hand in developing the languages, as, according to Peterson, George R. R. Martin himself was not very interested in the linguistic aspect of his works. The already published novels include only a few words of High Valyrian, including valar morghulis (“all men must die”), valar dohaeris (“all men must serve”) and dracarys (“dragonfire”). For the forthcoming novel The Winds of Winter, Peterson has supplied Martin with additional Valyrian translations.

Peterson commented that he considered unfortunate Martin’s choice of dracarys because of its (presumably intended) similarity to the Latin word for dragon, draco. Because the Latin language does not exist in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire, Peterson chose to treat the similarity as coincidental and made dracarys an independent lexeme; his High Valyrian term for dragon is zaldrīzes. The phrases valar morghulis and valar dohaeris, on the other hand, became the basis of the language’s conjugation system

I’m intrigued by the discussion of the word dracarys and its relation to the English word “dragon,” or the Latin word draco. I’d like to posit an alternate theory, just for the heck of it. Continue reading

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Fear Leads to Anger; Anger Leads to Marmots

A friend posted this bit of wisdom to Facebook the other day:

'Angry is just sad's bodyguard.' Liza Palmer

Via Mentors Channel / Facebook

While I like the sentiment, I don’t think it tells the entire story. Anger and sadness are linked, most certainly, but anger is also a byproduct of fear. That’s the sort of anger that is most dangerous. Even Yoda agrees with me. Actually, I probably stole the idea from him.

I thought I’d expound a bit, in the form of a meme and a Big Lebowski reference: Continue reading

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You Say “Potatoe,” I Say…

File this one under “Funny Quirks of Google.”

While doing a Google Image search for “misspell” (for work, I swear), I noticed that the results, when filtered for photos available without a license, were rather heavy on a certain spellingchallenged former Vice President of the United States:


Well, maybe 3 out of the first 20 results isn’t exactly an overwhelming majority, but considering that the only search parameters were “misspell” and “free to use, even commercially,” I’d say that’s still a lot.

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Poe’s Law in Action

Was “Sounds of Sodomy” a serious campaign by some sort of Christian organization in Ireland, or a particularly deviant devious bit of satire?

Who can even tell anymore?

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