Light Snack

“I’ll have a baby back ribs. Wait, on second thought, I’ll just eat the whole baby.“

Let me explain. Did you know that words are subtracted from the English language every year? They’re called “lost words“, and there’s a whole website dedicated to them at The Phrontistery (Yeah, I get lost in the middle of THAT word).

Being the complete nerd that I am (AND PROUD OF IT, thank you very much), I was greatly interested in these lost words, and immediately started browsing the list. Shortly, I came across what I believe to be the strangest word I have ever seen.

And here it is:

brephophagist (n): one who eats babies
.

Ok, there just HAS to be a story behind that somewhere. And I don’t want to hear it.

According to The Phrontistery, one of the five requirements a word has to meet to be considered “lost” is: The word may not appear in its proper English context on any readily accessible web page. Well folks, now that it’s on my blog, I guess it’s not a lost word anymore. Good thing too… I don’t know how I’ve survived so long without a word to describe the consumption of babies! Geez.

By the way (for those who doubt the reliability of this blog), another requirement of a lost word is that it must be in the 150-pound(!) Oxford Unabridged Dictionary (which never throws out words). This is to prove that it was indeed a word to begin with. I know you all have one of those lying around the house (the cornerstone, perhaps?), so you can go ahead and check me on this one.

Apparently people stopped eating babies in the year 1875, which is when the word became “lost.” So all you pregnant women who read my blog can breathe a sigh of relief.

 

When I Own the World (Part 2)

It has come to my attention that sifting through the 30 MILLION CRAP BLOGS created THIS YEAR ALONE will take a bit of time. I mean, if I set aside a mere 20 seconds for each blog to determine whether to nuke it or not, the cleansing process will take more than 19 years! And by then, there will be at least 570 million more crap blogs to browse. However, this is only a minor setback, and I’ll soon have it straightened out…

On another dissonant note, if there’s one thing that annoys me more than blog feces, it would have to be people that forward chain messages EVEN WHEN THEY KNOW that the message is a hoax. I mean, there are people out there that are going to fall for these things (“Bill Gates giving away his fortune!”, “Make your dreamdate fall for you!”, etc) out of pure stupidity, and that’s ok. What gets to me is when people with half a brain see a chain email, KNOW that it’s false, and waste five minutes forwarding it to everyone in their address book anyway!

So this morning I opened my inbox to find a message from a friend titled:

Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: i KNOW this isnt real, but gotta be on the save side

I kid you not. Six Fwd:s. Upon opening this potential dung pile I found a warning that Hotmail would shut down my e-mail address if I didn’t forward this to at least 30 people.

I’m sorry, please forgive me, but may I say WHAT THE FRICKING CRAP?!?!

First of all, if he really did “KNOW this isn’t real“, why the HECK did he send it to me?!

Secondly, he didn’t capitalize I, missed an apostrophe in isn’t, and mis-spelled safe. (Don’t even get me STARTED on punctuation and spelling. *FUME*)

Thirdly, this is at least the 4th time I’ve gotten an email like this from the SAME PERSON!

Finally, and most horrendously imbecilic of all: my e-mail address does, in fact, end with “@GMAIL.COM“! Why the crap is he sending me this hoax e-mail about Hotmail closing down!?

Upon calming down, I realized that there is really only one plausible cure for such madness: the Electric Chair. Therefore, when I own the world, I will pass a law that states:

Chain e-mails MAY NOT be forwarded by any citizen who has knowledge that the message within is fake. Failure to comply to this law is punishable by death. Anyone with any common sense should be able to discern whether a chain e-mail is real or not. This includes ANYONE AND EVERYONE, with the exception only of blondes, senior citizens, children under the age of three, mental hospital patients, and MOST WOMEN DRIVERS.

The rest of you have been warned.

 

Cywyddau! Gesundheit.

Here’s a word for you Scrabble players: cywyddau.

Don’t believe me? Well, if you care to whip out your standard 150-pound(!) Oxford Unabridged Dictionary (you do have one, don’t you?), you’ll find it right there between cytosol and czar.

Cywyddau is actually the plural form of cywydd: (n) “one of the twenty four traditional Welsh poetic meters, the most important metrical element in Welsh traditional poetry.“

Even stranger is how it’s pronounced: “KEE-oo-uh-thy”. No joke. The -ddau says “thy”.

But what the heck is it, really? Let me ponder…

Ah yes, it is Welsh. Hence the lack of vowels. I figured that as an up-and-coming writer, I should have a crack at writing a cywydd poem. So, I looked it up at Wikipedia to find out more about it. Ah, here we go: “Every line in a cywydd poem must be written in cynghanedd.” Holy crap, another one! It only went downhill from there…

Rules of the cywydd poem

1. Cywyddau consist of rhyming couplets. (No sweat.)
2. Each line in a couplet must have seven syllables. (Ok.)
3. In each couplet, one line must end with a stressed syllable, and the other with an unstressed syllable. (Hmmm…)
4. VOWELS ARE NOT IMPORTANT. All consonants in the first line of a couplet MUST be repeated IN ORDER in the second line. (HOLY CRAP!)

It’s that fourth rule that threw me. Wait, so the consonants matter but the vowels don’t? But it still has to rhyme? What the… how… but… Can this thing even WORK in English?!

Apparently it does, as proved by my very own composition:

What is this weird poetry? / Who taste has word pet are ye.

It is confusing I know / To scan foes, no geek in woe.

Ok, so it doesn’t make any sense. Call it a riddle. Call it abstract. Heck, call it crap for all I care. I wanna see YOU try. If you think you can do better, write your own cywydd poem and post it in the comments. You have the rules. The only thing needed now is the will to try (and of course, the time to waste). Good luck!

And by the way, even if you’re not into poetry, cywyddau can still get you a good 75 points on a triple word score in Scrabble. *wink*

 

Work of Art

Click to enlarge…

Ok, so I wasted a lot of time to edit together that image. Y’all better comment. There is more depth in this artwork than you might find at a glance.

 

Reading What? AGAIN?!

My little sister recently informed me that she owns the entire Redwall series by Brian Jacques, has read each book at least twice, and half of them three times. This totally blew me away, and after twitching for a few seconds, the only response I could manage was HOLY CRAP.

I wasn’t sure how much opportunity she had so foolishly thrown to the dogs (or in this case, talking mice and beavers), but I was determined to find out, so I did a little digging and this is what I came up with:

The average Redwall book is 387 pages long. There are eighteen of these suckers. If she has read all of them twice, and half of them three times, that makes a whopping 17,430 pages. This means that after having completed ALL EIGHTEEN BOOKS once through, she went ahead and re-read 10,449 pages of material that she had ALREADY READ.

This is just SHOCKING to me! 10,499 pages! That is a LOT of wasted reading!

For instance, in exactly 10,499 pages of classic literature, my sister could have read the following in entirety:

1984, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Call of the Wild, Crime and Punishment, David Copperfield, East of Eden, Emma, Frankenstein, Great Expectations, Gulliver’s Travels, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Invisible Man, Jane Eyre, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Last of the Mohicans, Little Women, Lord of the Flies, The Man in the Iron Mask, Of Mice and Men, The Old Man and the Sea, Oliver Twist, Persuasion, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, The Sign of Four, The Sound and the Fury, A Study in Scarlet, A Tale of Two Cities, The Three Musketeers, Through the Looking Glass, The Time Machine, Treasure Island, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The War of the Worlds, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Wuthering Heights.

Goodness freaking gracious, have any of you read all those books? I’ve read maybe six of them. Had my little sister planned this out beforehand, she could, as a middle schooler, be THE AUTHORITY on Classic Literature. But alack and forsooth, she just knows a lot about talking mice.

Or you know what? Assuming that she reads at an average rate of one page per minute, my sister could have used that extra time and gone bowling one hour every day… FOR SIX MONTHS! A formidable bowler she would have become indeed! OR, she could have learned the basics of the flute, trumpet, clarinet, french horn, saxophone and drums! But no, she just knows a whole freaking lot about talking mice.

And looking at it from a purely financial point of view, did she really have to go out and BUY the whole set? Consider, if she had simply checked the books out from the local library for free, she would be up a good 180 dollars! That’s kind of a lot of money.

But horror of horrors, the past cannot be changed, and what has my sister learned from all of this?

…A whole freaking dang lot about imaginary talking mice.

 

The Death of Harry Potter

I hate to say “I told you so”, and the fact is, I really can’t. But two years ago when I picked up the insanely popular Harry Potter novels, I was mid-way through the fourth book when I JUST KNEW that Harry Potter had to die. I mentioned the idea to some of my friends, and had to flee to the government for protection. Just Kidding. But speaking of JK, I just read an interview with J.K. Rowling that may classify me as a prophet! And it’s title, believe it or not, is:

>WHY HARRY POTTER HAS TO DIE

This article is crushingly depressing, and after reading it, naturally, I was ecstatic! But of COURSE Harry Potter has to die! If he doesn’t bite the dust in the final installment of the bestselling 7-part series (due summer 2007), there is no way Rowling will be able to pull him off as a hero in my eyes.

I mean really, guys, come on. Is Harry Potter not the stupidest, most immature and selfish “hero” ever put on paper? Perpetually throughout the series he displays that his most honed skills are hurting his friends and acting like a jerk. Sure, things always turn out alright in the end, but seriously, this guy has some SERIOUS puberty problems. More often than not, it’s his ever-forgiving friends who turn out to be the real heroes. No joke, Harry Potter will NEVER acheive hero-dom in my eyes unless he selflessly sacrifices HIS OWN LIFE to save the world.

J.K. Rowling’s reasons run along different lines:

“I can completely understand . . . the mentality of an author who thinks, ‘Well, I’m gonna kill them off because that means there can be no non-author-written sequels’.”

and

“I admire authors who go out when people still want more.”
.

The first reason seems a bit selfish to me, but I’m totally behind the second reason, and I believe that’s what makes Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (stopped after three) so much better than Jordan’s Wheel of Time (planned on three and wrote FOURTEEN). When an author hits gold and digs more than originally planned, that’s called “selling out”, and most artists look VERY DOWN on it. For the record, when I’m a famous author, I will never “sell out” to my adoring fans. *wink* But back on topic, Rowling said seven, and sticking with seven will earn her the respect of book lovers everywhere.

And yes, thousands of adoring fans may commit suicide if Harry Potter kicks the bucket, but, well, what makes a hero worth loving? What made Braveheart a legend, and why will we never forget Gladiator? When it boils down, it’s because a true hero is someone who will make the ultimate sacrifice, their own life, for their cause. Harry’s cause just happens to be saving the entire freaking world, which makes his ultimate sacrifice that much greater.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Harry Potter. His errant ways let us relate to him, because we’re all human (except, well, he’s a wizard). With his stupid teenage personality problems, Harry is viewed as believable to us, and we love it when he overcomes his own selfish pride to help others. He reminds us of ourselves! But we’re not heroes, are we? And neither is he… yet.

Hero or no hero, I still can’t wait for Harry Potter 7.

 

When I Own the World…

They say that without purpose, a life is not worth living. Well, I’m covered there. But some people say that a life with an unacheivable purpose is worse off than a life with no purpose at all.

If that’s the case, I’m screwed.

But looking on the bright side… When I finally own the world, the first thing I’ll do is clean up the pile of blog dung that so odorously intrudes on the Internet.

Did you know that a new blog is created EVERY SECOND? That’s, like, 85,000 new blogs PER DAY, over TWO AND A HALF MILLION every month! And guess how many of those blogs are actually ever updated? A measly 15%, that’s all. That leaves well over 25 MILLION BLOGS each year left abandoned as litter around the Internet. And of the five million per year that are regularly updated, less than a million are worth reading. Don’t believe me? Go to Blogger and surf five random blogs, I GUARANTEE you won’t find more than 1 in 5 worth your time. Go on, try it!

If we could take the 30 million crap blogs that are generated every year and turn them into free gigabytes for useful websites, the Internet would be a much cleaner, more enjoyable, and altogether more bearable place!
Therefore, when I own the world, I will personally visit every blog site ever created and run each one through a strict set of qualifications. If any of these qualifications are not met, the blog will be deleted from cyberspace, and the owner’s PC will be nuked. With a nuke, yes.

Luckily for all of you, I have decided out of the goodness of my heart to post these “blogging guidelines” here, so that you may have a chance to repent in the face of oncoming judgment. If you refuse to comply to these rules, I suggest that you keep your computer at a relatively safe distance from your house… and rent some radiation suits in case of nuclear fall-out.

These indecencies will be destroyed!

1. All blogs whose owners refuse to make a pass at correct punctuation and/or simple rules of capitalization.

2. Any blog that frequently makes references to violent plotless movies and mindless video games (especially MMORPGs!)

3. Blogs with color schemes that defy any shred of beauty or logic.

4. The thousands of blogs that never made it past ONE FREAKING POST.

5. Blogs with no sense of up or down. (This includes MOST MYSPACERS).

You have been warned…