Vizsla Flashback - An open letter to Newborns

Today's Vizsla Flashback was originally posted back in May and was fairly openly for Jamie Gordanier.
However, I'm not entirely sure that his mom had time to read it just then as she was busy birthing.

So here it is again - today's blast from the relatively recent past -

An open letter to newborns

Hello there, Babies.

And by that I mean of course actual human newborns, not the adults who insist on behaving like them  That's a whole different letter for another day.

First things first.  Hi.  Welcome to the planet.  Sorry about the state of a lot of it, but what can you do, right?

Starting at the beginning, I am what is called a 'Dog'.  This is a fourth classification of being around you, following on from 'Mom', 'Not-Mom', and 'Peasants.'  You can identify a dog as being different from the peasants (or 'other people', as you might hear them referred to) in two key ways.

1:  They are much much better than people

2:  They pretty much stay on all four legs.

SO, now that you can identify 'Dog', there's a few things that 'Dog' would like you to be aware of from the outset.

1:  The ears and tail are not for pulling.  (Although we'll probably put up with it for awhile)

2:  We don't really ride well.  Attempts to do so are not going to end happily for anyone.

3:  That soft spot thing on  the top of your head?  It's creeping me out.  It's called a fontanel btw (Vizsla = Knowledge, as has been observed often before.)  But whatever you call it,  it's creepy.  There should be bone there.  Please deal with that as soon as possible.

4:  We are totally down with sharing food.  This info is going to come in incredibly handy in a few years time, so keep that one in your back pocket.

5:  No matter what happens, at the end of the day, your dog is the best friend that you're ever going to have.  They'll protect you, they'll tolerate you attempting to ride them, they will always be on your side, and they'll love you when you feel like no one could.  If you feel like the world is a cold and crappy place (and it is - a not-inconsiderable amount of the time) look for the warmest and most love filled place in your life and your dog will be there waiting for you.

But seriously - don't forget to share the food..

With love, and Yeti noises,

The Vizsla

So does that make him a good bad man or a bad good man?

So a few months back, the local fire department (city unnamed to protect...well, me from lawsuits actually) got a call to respond to one of the local motels (also unnamed, but mostly because I forget which one it was) to a woman having a seizure.

Now, this is in no way an uncommon call - happens all the time. And for the record, on the off chance that the bulk of you didn't already know, there isn't actually a lot you can do for seizures other than keep them from flailing into things and giving them some oxygen after they come out of it  (Now you can't say that you didn't learn something today.  Unless you already knew that and spent the rest of the day in a yurt, in which case - as always - your problems are your own)

The story however got a little more interesting when they got to the motel.  It was not merely a woman having a seizure.  It was more specifically an epileptic prostitute having a seizure.

I am reasonably certain that she was not there to teach a foreign language as she did not appear to be armed.

What's notable about this scenario, in case it wasn't obvious at first blush - the gentleman currently employing the young lady in question (I think his name was 'John') was there.  He was the reporting party. 

So, take a moment to imagine the day John is having-

Step One - You procure the services of a 'working girl' for the purposes of spending a cordial afternoon discussing poetry

Step Two - You make accommodations at the local Motel for a room in which you and your young lady companion can have this discussion

Step Three* - Your young lady companion collapses into epileptic seizure.

*I'm assuming here that the seizure came before the poetry reading as the woman in question was still dressed (well... more or less...) and I think that it's unlikely that John would have taken the time to reclothe her out of concern for her modesty.  Which means that on top of everything else John is out however much money a quick round of poetry costs these days.  Poor guy just can't catch a break.

What is Step Four....

Do You:

A:  With as much dignified calm as you can muster, check out, get back in your car and return home to your wife and children?  (I'm playing the odds here.)

or

B:  Report the incident to the front desk and then wait for the emergency responders to arrive so that you know she's all right.

John was a 'B' man.

My final observation on this tale is that if you do a google search for images of 'Epileptic Prostitute', you do not find anything that you feel good about posting,  Or having seen.

Vizsla heading out to attempt to gouge out my inner eye.

The Elephant Seal thing is probably going to have a negative impact on tourism...

The original intention for today was to do 17 orthographic thoughts about Limerick (The City), but I soon discovered that I didn't really have 17 orthographically themed thoughts about Limerick (The City) outside of the fact that in Irish it's name is Luimneach, and thanks to The Lord of the Rings everything written out in Irish looks like it's supposed to be sung by magical elves.

"Poguuuuuue MaHONE.....Ta lourahlourahlourah!"

*It's also apparently in the province of Munster, which is just neat

What I did however discover in my admittedly sparce  research, is that the center portion of the city is actually an Island (the river cuts around it on either side) which is now known as Kings Island.

But originally it was called Inis an Ghaill Duibh (insert singing elves here) which translates to 'The Dark Haired Foreigner's Island', which I'm choosing to interpret as evidence that at some point around 812 AD the island was visited by the Second Doctor.

The point that I'm trying to circle in on here - Before we started thinking about the naming of things as a formalized process, people just called things by whatever reference that they had on hand and everyone else was sort of ok with it.  And so you ended up with place names along the lines of 'The smallish hill next to that mean ladies house', or 'The beach where Joe got raped by that Elephant Seal'

Which reminds me a time a few years ago where someone was trying to publish a map of Olde London Towne circa the time of the Great Fire (That would be September 1666 for those Americans in the audience who might be forgiven for never having heard of the event as it didn't happen to us so why would we bother knowing about it.)

The problem that they ran into while putting the map together is that there were a number of streets whose names were a little more on the 'colorful' side than we modern folk are used to seeing.  'Shithouse Street' being one of the tamer examples that they actually were able to get away with printing.

In the Continental US things are a little different.  We don't have a thousand odd years of living here to have gotten used to the old names just sticking around.  Place names in the US are typically a zesty mixture of ridiculously optimistic praise selected by settlers who were just happy to have finally freakin' arrived at the damn place ( 'Eden Prairie', 'Golden Valley', 'New Hope', etc.), and adopted titles from the Athapaskan of Algonquin names for the region ('Shakopee', 'Keewatin', et al., which by and large probably are along the lines of 'the smallish hill by that mean woman's house', but since we don't speak the languages in question we simply don't notice.  That said, Shakopee could equally well be Ojibwe for 'Look at me, I'm a stupid pale moron who like to eat butt' and they just told the settlers it was someone's name as some sort of elaborate practical joke.  In fact, I kind of hope it does, now that I think of it.)

Look out for those elephant seals

-Vizsla Out

17 limericks about orthography

Today, because I am totally willing to discuss the subject at the drop of a hat and because I have the vaguest of feelings like I'm supposed to be celebrating something today but have forgotten what, I hereby declare today to be that most important holiday on the Vizsla calendar -

Celebration of Orthography through Limericks day!

 It's the study of the systems by which a spoken language is represented in written form, 

me laddies and lassies!  Ta loo rah loo rah loorah!

1

There once was a study of writin'

into which your teeth really could bite in

It's Ortheographic

How words move like traffic

And I for one find it delightin'

2

Poetry's long been around

As a story form it's main renown

-you can eas'ly relate

 Keeping all your facts straight

Without writing anything down

3

The Egyptians, they took some papyrus

they said 'One day all folk will admire us

Our Cuneiform 

will take off like a storm

And then spread through the world like a virus!'

4

One day the Romans invaded

Into Britain, but found themselves jaded

The Saxons could speak

But their contracts were weak

without having writing like they did.

5

For the spoken to written transition

every language must take a position

if your language's just oral

you're certain to quarrel

and have no way to take a petition

6

I can hear what you're saying, it's true

But I feel that I'm certain to rue

Without getting it written

I'm telling you, Kitten

You'll forget it by quarter to two.

7

Slavic Language is wrote in cyrillic

An alphabet not quite idylic

cause when I write a 'P'

it's an 'R' that they see

And that makes me feel like quite a pillock

8

Our alphabet's root are phoenecian

But Cyrillic's are found to be grecian

The differences lie

to be found by and by

in the width of the Caspian Sea-shin.

(I apologize for that one.  I really do.  I'm sorry you had to read that)

9

Our relationship, you must agree

Can be compared linguistically

In Voiced/Voiceless despair

of our consonant pair

I'm am clearly the P to your B

(OK - you probably have to be a huge linguistics geek to appreciate that one, but trust me - It is some funny shit.  I swear)

10

Our system of writing is Roman

But when looked at, might make you say 'Whoa, man,

The H and the T

In no way line up to be

The 'th' sound that we use it it show, man!'

(This has bothered me for some time.)

11

Contracts once were recorded on clay

To be kiln dried and stored for the day

That the terms had been gleaned

then the pot could be cleaned

and then used to store Oil of Olay

(Ok - this one is in no way true.  Outside of the fact that such clay pot contracts did, in point of fact, predate the este lauder company by some three thousand years, they simply wouldn't have done such a thing.  Fun fact though - they did actually write the contract out on two clay pots and seal one inside the other, so that if there was any accusation of it being changed they could crack open the outside pot and double check it on the inner one.  Suck it, Dan Brown!)

12

Of all of the forms of linguistics

to have fascinated fakirs and mystics

Orthographical study

Is my favorite buddy

And I'm sorry, but that sounded too sad to even continue on with a last line, even if I had come up with a second rhyme for 'Linguistics'

13

There once was a scribe from Nantucket...

uhm... never mind that one...

14

To write was once just for the priesthood

It allowed them to document feasts good (ouch... sorry about that...)

Now we're all out of joint

But there once was a point

when our high school graduates at least could.

(Note: I didn't say they were 17 good Limericks about Orthography.)

15

Fricative, labial, or glottal

They could all drive a man to the bottle

But at least I can say

at the end of the day

that I totally got away with a legitimate use of the term 'labial' a few lines ago.  

Boom.  That just happened.

16

Though it might make you say 'la di dah'

I've a keyboard fact stuck in my craw

I could sit here all day

but would still have no way

to correctly type in a nice Schwa

(it's the the upside down 'e' thing.  It's derived from a Hebrew notation and refers to the vowel sound you make when you just don't care anymore.)

17

Orthographic variations are neat

Modern language is, with them, replete

there's still much more to show

but my British fans know

that this limerick list is compleat.

(And today we learned that 17 limericks is too many to try to write on any particular topic.)

Tomorrow, one hopes, sanity returns.

You're Awesome, Christopher Lee. Please don't kill me.

First of all it should be acknowledged that he is properly called Sir Christopher Lee.  He was knighted in 2009.

Secondly it should also be acknowledged that he probably killed Nazis with his bare hands in World War II.*

*He was part of something sinisterly titled the 'Special Operations Executive' during the War and is still forbidden to speak about anything that he might have actually done.  It should however be noted that on at least one occasion during the filming of Lord of the Rings he actually stopped director Peter Jackson in order to correct him on precisely what it sounds like when you stab a man through the ribcage from behind.  Just take a moment with that.

Outside of the knighting and stabbing portions of his resume (Or c.v. if you're European) some other fun facts to know about Sir Christopher include

-He's Step Cousins with Ian Fleming (creator of James Bond)

-He can claim to have been personal friends with J.J.R. Tolkien

-In 2010 he recorded a heavy metal album about Charlemagne at the age of 88.  You know, like one does.

-He's the only person on the planet to have been main villains in Dracula, James Bond, Lord of the
Rings, and Star Wars.  I'm fairly certain that if he secures a role as lead villain in J.J. Abrams next Star Trek movie that he will officially own us all.

-In addition to being fluent in French and German, he also spent a little time in college studying Latin and Ancient Greek.  The way we all did.  If by 'Studying Latin and Ancient Greek' you meant 'Drinking a lot of cheap beer.'

-His urine can cure Cancer.  (I'm just guessing on this one, but based on the previous entries it seems like a safe bet)

-Oh, and he's also 6'5".  Just in case he wasn't sufficiently intimidating.

All of which is a lengthy way of saying that as amazingly cool as it would be to meet Sir Christopher, under no circumstances should you do so alone or at night.

When he says 'I'd tell you, but then I'd have to kill you', he is NOT joking.

 

 

For the record - 'Jason Statham-y' is a totally legitimate adjective

Earlier today I was trying to explain a certain look as being 'Jason Statham-y'* And was pleased to discover that the person I was talking to instantly understood what that meant.  So I'm going to take that as a sign that The Transporter movies were not a complete waste of time.  (Crank, however...)

*It means - Shaved head, unshaved face, dress shirt and tie, and a slightly menacing air that indicates one might whip off the shirt and tie and start kicking peoples asses at any moment.

The interesting thing about this is that back in the bygone days of yore, before he was legally required to appear in any movie that features three or more machine guns, Our Jason actually began as an Olympic Diver for Great Britain.

What I like about this little fun fact to know and share is this- 

Diving is hardly considered to be the manliest of your Olympic events.  Generally speaking it's held to be only slightly manlier than Ribbon Dancing and Soccer.  (In the US in any case)

But I think we're all unlikely to point that out to Mr. Statham.  For fear that the shirt and tie would be coming off and the ass kicking would commence.

btw - Mr. Statham, if you're reading this - this is merely an observation about the biases of the general public and you and me are still totally cool, right?  Also, I loved you in Snatch.

(It's a movie.  Get your mind out of the gutter, you.)

"You are one cotton twill suitcoat away from the ass kicking of a lifetime, my friend."

I... did not know that about dragonflies...

There's an ongoing discussion going on in my head (well, actually there are several, but this one is relevant at the moment...) about whether all information is intrinsically good and worth knowing.

I tend to come down on the side of 'Yes, all knowledge is worth knowing just for its own sake', but there's a solid argument to be made on the other side.

Case in point - This morning I had the following exchange in the St. Paul skyways.  A guy I didn't know who looked normal enough and was pushing a stroller that appeared to contain a few coats but no child as far as I could discern stopped me as I was walking past him going the other direction by asking "Do you have a license?"

Now, this seems like a fairly unusual thing to just throw out there to a complete stranger, but for all I knew he had an elderly mother bleeding to death in the next building and needed to get her to the ER or something*, so I just went with it.

*Broadly speaking, unusual or unexpected questions tend to lead to interesting and unexpected conversations.  Which most of the time is a positive thing.

"Yes."  I said "Wait, to drive, you mean - right?"

He looked at me calmly and said "To Destroy."

This was not where I was expecting the conversation to go and so I took a moment to process.  He waited politely for me to respond.

"Uh... No.  I don't have one of those."

"Then what happened to your queue?" (Note for Americans - Pronounced like the letter Q - means an orderly line.  Sort of.  I think the rest of the world knows this.)

"Um... what?

"Your queue."

"Did something happen to my queue?" was the safest answer I could think of.  (For the record, I don't actually possess a queue, nor was I currently participating in one or responsible for one's upkeep as far as I was aware, but this seemed like the best way to get followup information.)


It seemed to suffice because he went on to say "The same thing is going to happen to you.  And it's going to happen forever."

"I'll... make a note of that..."

This answer seemed to satisfy him, because he gave a little half nod and walked away.

The point of the story being - as curious as I am at this moment about what crazy skyway man thought we were talking about, I kind of think I might be happy not knowing the answer to that question.

Which leads me to Dragonflies.

Spent a little time on the lake this weekend (Note for everyone but Americans - This was Independence Day weekend in the US. -It's like Guy Fawkes day with more boating and less inclination to actually know what we're celebrating.) and noticed a truly enormous quantity of Dragonflies on the shore.  (they eat mosquitoes so they were probably just feasting) and being all about knowledge I took a moment to Google them to confirm a vague suspicion I had that they were one of those bug species where the males and females look completely different.  (Turns out they are not, in case you were wondering)

Wikipedia (which I still do not implicitly trust as a source of info, but what the hell...) informed me first that Dragonfly babies were called Nymphs and they lived for the first 5 years of their life underwater clinging to the bottom of things. (which is probably why they're called Nymphs, e.g. it's probably a reference to mythological water nymphs and not an indictment of their sex lives.  You know you were thinking it.)

Wikipedia then went on to inform me that they breath through gills in their rectum and move around by expelling jets of water out of their anus.

Yeah.

You can't unread that.

So.  Buttplay of the Dragonfly*  Good information, or bad information?

*Worst Mozart Opera EVER.