The Life Experience ~ Winter '13

[bloodyrosemccoy]

What I Learned Since The Winter Solstice

• Dyslexia can cause difficulty in word retrieval in speech as well as in writing.


• The original edition of The Hobbit mentioned policemen. For some reason, I find this far weirder than the business I already knew about the Riddles in the Dark scene being so much less awesome at first.


• Lisa Frank is still around, but she's gotten rather weird.


• Retired AG items are on eBay for reasonable prices, and apparently inside I am still ten years old and WANTING them.


• Yuri Gagarin's flight into space was even more awesome than I thought, because it turns out his reentry strategy was basically to jump back to Earth.


• Fi, from Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, apparently does have real arms under her wings/cape.


• Netting requires its own special knots.


• The history of matches is long and crazy, and features poison, disintegrating jaws, and explosions. Which is kind of awesome.


• I don't have astigmatism; I just have myopia. This means I do not have football-shaped eyeballs; they are simply oblate spheroids.


• It is possible to get completely absorbed just classifying the hell out of images of distant galaxies. For SCIENCE!


• Snow can smash up your roof pretty impressively.


• You can totally make yourself a fluffernutter on the International Space Station.


• Prescription sunglasses are the bomb.


• MRI chambers act as Faraday cages to keep out external radio forces.


• Speaking of MRIs, apparently dybbuks show up on them.


• Oswald the Lucky Rabbit is the most adorable plushie ever made.


• The term for delicious potato chips and cream puffs and other such things is "supernormal releaser," which is a fancy way of saying "too much of a good thing," since back in Ye Olden Times it was really difficult to come across fat and salt and sugar, so your body is still convinced it should stuff them into your face whenever you come across them. That I knew, but I didn't know the term for them.


• Writing on a deadline, even a self-imposed one, is rough.


• Horror movies in theaters are a very different experience from horror movies alone in your room in the dark.


• Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D major is an impressive bit of music to watch being performed.*


• Cats and toy trains are natural enemies.


• My confusion regarding a certain specific idiom in Irish accents is a direct result of David Eddings' confusion regarding the same.  When I learned that the phrase "I'm after [verb]ing" meant "I've just been [verb]ing," I thought for some reason it was counter-intuitive--it seemed like it should mean "I'm gonna [verb]"--but I didn't know why.  It's only after rereading The Belgariad and Malloreon that I realized that it's because Eddings uses the expression in his "Wacite brogue" accent, where it does mean "I'm gonna [verb]."  I picked up that meaning in junior high and it stuck with me after I'd forgotten the source.**


• In Tolkien's mythos, Fëanor was the one who came up with the Tengwar. Yet another addition to the list of atrocities he perpetrated on the Firstborn of Ilúvatar.


• Popes can retire.


• Mister Rogers answered every single letter he got. Which is a gargantuan task, because by god he was MISTER ROGERS.

*I've always rather wanted to see that one. It gets mentioned on an episode of M*A*S*H and I was always intrigued by the idea of writing a concerto for someone who had lost their right hand. So when my friend invited me to the symphony, I was not disappointed when they changed the program due to the pianist's having an injury on his right hand because hey, that meant I finally got to hear the left-handed piece.

**Even back then I knew that Eddings had some fanciful ideas about linguistics, but I did not notice that one specifically.

Comments

[withoutawhy.livejournal.com]

Newfie English is much the same as Irish English. "I'm after" exists here and is used in everyday speech, as well as "What's after happening here now?" ("What just happened?"), "Stay where you're too til I comes where you're at" ("Stay where you are until I come and get you".), and using "he" and "she" in place of "him" and "her" ("It was he found she".).
There is also a type of weather here called "Trying." That's apparently when the sun is almost breaking through the clouds or the snow or the rain. ("What's she like out?" "B'y, she's tryin'".)

~*~The more you know!~*~

[westrider.livejournal.com]

Fëanor was seriously a total dick. That he ever got held up as any kind of hero by anyone just goes to show that Elvish Wisdom ain't all it's cracked up to be.

I think there's another dialect (I believe an English one), where "I'm after [FOO]." means "I'm looking for [FOO]." Possibly the source of that confusion on Eddings's part.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Well, Elves have a rather strange idea of nobility, anyway. It seems to lean heavily toward stabbing.

In the Language Construction Kit, Mark Rosenfelder notes that the Elves must have been "tormented by dyslexia." His point was that the Tengwar letters are all way too similar to each other. Although it also got me thinking of dyslexic fairies and elves, which may explain a few scenes in Scatterstone.

You could be right about the dialect, but I am really not sure ...

[dark-phoenix54.livejournal.com]

Dybbuks in MRIs? Please elucidate. That HAS to be a good story!

[kelkyag]

Seconded!

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

It's a movie my sister and I thought was hilarious--The Possession. There's a terrific scene where they give the possessed girl an MRI and see a little demon in there making faces at them.

Although one thing we did learn is that apparently radiologists don't see gorillas when they are superimposed on MRIs. It was some experiment done to see if they'd notice that while looking for cancer or something. Most of the radiologists in the study reported all sorts of findings but failed to see the gorilla. Because really, who is looking for a gorilla on an MRI?

[dark-phoenix54.livejournal.com]

So, the radiologists are capable of intense focus, but heaven help the person who goes in with some novel health crisis going on! Like, say, having a precancerous gorilla in the colon.

It is good to know, though, that demons can be detected on MRIs. Another tool in the exorcist's box of tricks. Pretty expensive, though.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

Well, to be fair to the radiologists, most people won't notice a gorilla walking through a basketball game, either.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Psychology joke FTW

[westrider.livejournal.com]

I figured that would be appreciated around here ;)

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

In LotR the Shire has "Shiriffs", and apparently they existed before Saruman's campaign of destruction. They're basically policemen with no kind of weapon.

A lot of people confuse that Irish phraseology. I think there's a part of America where it's used the way Eddings does.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, weren't they called the Bounders or something at the beginning of LotR, too?
But for some reason "policemen" sounds so ... not in keeping with the rest of the concept. I guess Tolkien agreed with me there.

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

I dunno, the Shire is basically a shrunken, idealised rural England transposed into a fantasy setting (inasmuch as a fantasy setting existed in Tolkien's time). If anything, the policemen stand out just because they aren't needed in a Hobbit society. (Frodo says during the Scouring that no Hobbit has ever murdered another in the Shire)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

True, but the shiriffs only showed up after The Hobbit got absorbed into the Middle-earth mythos. So the term "policeman" itself does sound out-of-place, even if the concept of a shiriff exists. I think that "police" to mean "law enforcement" is a more modern term and thus gives a more modern connotation. (Also, "shiriff" makes more sense for the Shire from a purely etymological standpoint, since "sheriff" is itself a worn-down version of "shire-reeve," and it comes from English rather than Greek.)

[westrider.livejournal.com]

"Police" is also derived from a word for "city", which kind of clashes with the Hobbit lifestyle in a different way, too.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Exactly!

According to Wiktionary, its use to mean "civil force" or law enforcement only showed up around the 18th Century--and The Hobbit seems like its fictional setting is based on an England WELL earlier than that.

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

Also, I just replayed the end of Skyward Sword and I'm not convinced Fi has arms.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

According to the concept-art in the book, she does. I remain skeptical, though. It sure doesn't look like it when she dances.

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

Dyslexia can cause difficulty in word retrieval in speech as well as in writing.
I knew that! But only because my mother's a speech pathologist, which mitigates the credit I can take for it somewhat.

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit is the most adorable plushie ever made.
Ain't that the truth?

Popes can retire.
I didn't know that either. It almost makes me surprised that it hasn't happened way more times.