The Life Experience ~ Winter '09

[bloodyrosemccoy]

What I Learned Since The Winter Solstice:

• The presidential power transfer takes place automatically at noon, unless you’re on the Fox Network.
• There is a fourth-cone mutation in humans that makes some people (the articles claim only women for reasons of chromosome, but I have a dude friend who says he came up positive on the test) see more colors than ordinary people. They’re called tetrachromats. Dude, that’s awesome.
• On a related note, that’s why some male birds do not appear to be the fancy men you would expect male birds to be: they are, but in the ultraviolet range, since birds are default tetrachromats.
• No matter how low you go on clearance pricing, people will always ask if it’ll go lower.
• Some people are honestly convinced that it is difficult to break even $500,000 per year. This is because they count nannies, private schools, chauffeur/bodyguards, and thousand-dollar dresses as necessary expenditures.
• Baby skunks are born naked, but with black and white markings on their skin
• There is a difference between a bulldozer, a digger, and a front-loader.
• Lining a bodice is much easier than hemming the neckline.
• The Motion Picture Association of America is weird—it’s run like it’s some kind of Sooper Sekrit Undercover Organization, when it’s really just a bunch of pissy, uneducated people with no real guidelines of psychology or sociology sitting around censoring movies.
• Snow days aren’t always good. Man, I hate being a grownup.
• James Earl Jones was briefly given the role of Gordon from Sesame Street. This gives one the opportunity for so many entertaining speculations …
• Skilled noodle chefs can very quickly flip hundreds of noodles out of a blob of wheat dough.
• The problem of girls bullying each other and the way they do it stems, once again, from society’s refusal to see girls as people with conflicts and feelings, so their anger is forced to be passive-aggressive. This also explains a lot of Mormon culture, incidentally. (ETA: 10cents pointed out I was oversimplifying here. We're just starting to study this sociological phenomenon, so I expect other factors will be found as well.  This is a big one.)
• Semi-finalists in the Captain Crazypants L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest cannot re-tweak their stories and send them back in. Not surprising, really.
• Colossal squids are distinct from giant squids in many ways, but one of the badass ones is that they have rotating claws instead of suckers.
• A mele ma’i a song devoted to a particular person’s genitals in Hawaiian. If the person’s really influential, their genitals might even get their own name. Nether bits: powerful and entertaining.
• Squeaking brakes are not always a sign of worn out brake pads, but they are always annoying.
• Terry Pratchett’s young adult fiction kicks ass.
• That feeling of numbness that people report on some antidepressants is highly unpleasant.
• One of the reasons my mom gets bugged with my sleeping schedule is that she actually tries to be quiet while I’m sleeping. I told her emphatically not to bother.
• Chaos theory is a description about how small margins of error in predicting equations build up as steps are repeated, which can even be affected in simple systems.
• You can get sent to therapy just for being a cloud cuckoolander—but that’s if you’re so much of one that your entire interaction with others consists of it.
• Curling a doll’s hair with curlers and a dunk in some hot water works spectacularly well.
• The wrybill, a New Zealand Plover, is the only bird known that has a beak that bends to one side. (Always, it turns out, to the right.)

Comments

[beccastareyes]

I think the reason is related to why color-blindness is more common in men -- the coding bits for the colors your eyes see are on the X chromosome. So, if you get A, B1, and C on one, and A, B2, and C on the other, you are a tetrachromat. (Also, the test they link to just tells you if you have normal 'trichromatic' vision, re-green colorblindness ('dichromatic vision') or total coloblindness ('monochromatic vision').)

Also, I contributed to knowledge!

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's what the articles said. Perhaps my friend's claim suggests we must study this further!

And thank you, yes! It was a good contribution.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_wastrel/]

Some people are honestly convinced that it is difficult to break even $500,000 per year. This is because they count nannies, private schools, chauffeur/bodyguards, and thousand-dollar dresses as necessary expenditures.
Wow, these people kinda need to get shot or something. I mean, not shot dead or anything, just, y'know, shot.

cloud cuckoolander
This is going to have to be one of those cases when my non-native English speaker shows through. I can deduce some of it from the context, and I'm pretty sure I know which entry it alludes to, but frankly it just sounds like an expression you'd have an entertaining description for.

[tay421.livejournal.com]

I agree entirely, those people just... ugh. They make me sick.

I'm a native English speaker and I'm not even entirely sure what "cloud cuckoolander" is supposed to mean, haha.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

"Cloud cuckooland" was a setting in a play; the term has changed to refer to where your mind goes when it wanders a bit far from home. (It's also a level in the game Banjo-Tooie, and they weren't kidding.) A cloud cuckoolander is on a different wavelength from everyone else: they're often oblivious to everyday things, may not follow conversations or other people's implied trains of thought, and will frequently blurt out non-sequiturs or ideas that seem out-of-place. Think Pinky from Pinky & The Brain, who was never pondering what Brain was pondering, Walter Mitty with his secret life, Fry from Futurama ("Have you seen Bender? I think he's gone crazy! Also, smell this milk."), River Tam ("I'm fixing your Bible!"), or pretty much anything having to do with Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes.

This is not a bad thing in and of itself--most of the interesting people I know are frequent flyers to Cloud Cuckooland--but a few kids at the preschool take it far enough that it's difficult to get anything through to them and they can't really communicate what they want to us, so we have to figure out how to help them balance their inside world with the outside world.

[10cents.livejournal.com]

The problem of girls bullying each other and the way they do it stems, once again, from society's refusal to see girls as people with conflicts and feelings, so their anger is forced to be passive-aggressive.

I'm curious what your reasoning/source/basis is for this statement.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm oversimplifying a lot for the sake of bullet points, but it's from a book I found* called Odd Girl Out. It's a field study into girl bullying, which isn't so much about physical violence as about relationship destruction. A lot of the girls lamented that they couldn't just tell their friends when they were mad; they were forced to seem okay and make nice because they felt expressing anger was not something girls could do freely.

I am willing to believe it, like I said, because it does seem to be a feature of Mormon culture as well. Even here where Mormons run things, there seems to be a certain desperate need to prove that Everything Is Perfectly Fine. The church insists that life is better when you're Mormon, and the culture struggles to live up to that nicey-nice image, which leads to a lot of under-the-table stealth attacks when someone's angry. It especially applies to women, not surprisingly.

The book was interesting, but it reminded me more of my sister than myself. I was sorta oblivious to the usual dramas of school.


*Yes, found. It was left at our store by someone, so I took it when we closed For Good.

[10cents.livejournal.com]

Hmm, interesting. I question whether or not this is an entirely accurate explanation for this behavior--for many reasons, but in this case simply because I experienced the same kind of vicious girl-bullying (both as the victim and the bully), and I was NEVER exposed to that kind of mentality as a child. We were horribly cruel to each other, in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways, but, um, we were OBVIOUS that we were mad. We didn't even TRY to hide it.* So saying that it's a result of pretending like everything is a-okay, well, clearly it exists WITHOUT that, as well. I would hope and expect that the book presents it as a more complex issue that this quick explanation/tangent, though.

*That is, when we WERE actually mad, and not just when we felt like being mean for no particular reason, which I remember as being much more common.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I would hope and expect that the book presents it as a more complex issue that this quick explanation/tangent, though.

It does.

I'm not sure what your bullying entailed, but the book is specifically about the kinds of bullying that cause friends to suddenly stop talking to you altogether, to whisper rumors about the subject of their anger to a third party, to sharply declare "No!" and storm away when asked if they're mad, to say things like "I feel sorry for you since everyone hates you," to circulate anonymous petitions declaring someone outcast, etc.. The book talks about styles of aggression and why there is no positive way to mediate--it's that while victims know their bullies are bullying, it's unrecognizable to outsiders.

Avoidance of direct confrontation--either constructive or destructive--does seem to be more of a girls' problem than a boys' problem, although it's not all girls who do it, and not only girls. The book makes a pretty good case and notes that a lot more study has to be done.

Yeah, it's an interesting subject--everything I found out is! All of my bullets could be expanded, but these lists are meant to be interesting teasers and summations. I don't want to make them too long, although it is tempting sometimes. But you're right, I did over-generalize; I'll edit.

[sofish-sasha.livejournal.com]

...


I didn't even know there were Colossal Squids.

My world is now a bit more awesome. :D

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

See? This is why I can't risk missing even a single one of your entries. You are just way too full of cool facts.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Why, thank you!