The Desert Mermaid

• The song played at Bilbo’s birthday in Fellowship of the Ring has a name: “Flaming Red Hair”
• The Sea Organ is a concrete construction on the beach in Zadar, Croatia, as a way to mitigate mess made on the coast during World War II. It’s got a resonance chamber under its marble steps and a Series Of Tubes. Thus, when the wind and the waves move through it, it makes music!
• While I kew about the tragic story of Judith Barsi, the voice of Duckie in The Land Before Time, I did not know she had a marker saying “Yep, Yep, Yep!” That makes me feel slightly better.
• There is a nifty food co-op in Salt Lake City!
• The best kind of pie is cheese-and-mushroom.
• Verjuice, an acidic juice made by pressing unripe green grapes, was a condiment widely used in the Middle Ages.
• You no longer need assistance for red paint at those pottery-painting studios.
• Anything is possible when you smell like a monster and know the word “on.”
• My synesthesia still applies to music notation. Not to musical notes themselves, but to reading music—the notes are the same colors as their corresponding letters.
• Wearing a wrist brace actually can make your whole arm feel better.
• The Na’vi language nerds are doing double-time to catch up to the Klingon language nerds. Paul Frommer has a blog and a posse!
• People have a tough time keeping promises when those promises go against obsessive thoughts.
• The Australian sleepy lizard is monogamous, and will return to its mate every year for 20+ years. It will also hold several-day vigils if their mate dies.
• When you drain blisters, you’re better off inserting the needle along the side.
• Satin is evil when you’re sewing. There’s a reason it’s only one letter away from “Satan.”
• Ringo Starr has a Christmas album!
• It takes a while for agents to respond when they’re reading a sample chapter of your novel.  And the suspense is No Fun At All.

• When gardening, buy the wrong kind of soil at your own peril.
• When you do get the right kind of dirt, though, it’s possible to create self-watering containers out of Common Household Items!
• Never volunteer to close the library on Story Time days.
• Peyote: not just for crazy uncles! Also a nifty beading stitch!
• Using old shirts to make doll clothes is great because you already have hems!
• Marigolds planted with vegetables do a good job of deterring pests, and plus they look great!
• Don’t plant onion-type plants in the same container as legume-type plants, however, because the onion-type roots apparently do the botanical equivalent of pushing the legume-type roots down and taking their lunch money.
• Circumzenithal and circumhorizontal arcs are atmospheric effects caused by ice crystals high in the air—they look like rainbows on top of clouds!
• If you don’t like the ending of your book, it’s okay to go back and write a new ending, even if it goes over your self-imposed deadline, because you will feel much better if you do it right.
• It’s not just the Horrible Undead Cat who liked to sit in dirt. Our current old cats do it, too.
• The TV versions of The Color of Magic/The Light Fantastic and Hogfather are pretty respectable,* but stay away from the animated Discworld movies.
• If you don’t change your razor often enough, your lymph nodes could swell up and you’ll start worrying you have cancer.
• Keeping a Swiss Ball in my closet significantly raises the chances that I’ll do strength exercises at some point in the day.
• Car accidents apparently also come in threes.
• Mormon divorces have two parts: the part where you get divorced legally, and the part where you get “unsealed” in the temple, which takes longer. As far as I can tell, you can totally get remarried to your second spouse while you’re still “sealed” to your first.
• Nitpicking is my mutant power.
• Zyrtec has withdrawal symptoms at least as unpleasant as the various brands of Fukitol I’ve tried—and yet, for some reason, I find Zyrtec a lot creepier.
• My eyes are not broken, and my glasses are not polarized: the Nyquil-Dayquil** filter every movie since the mid-90s has decided to go with is bugging other people, too!
• Gardening is actually a thing I can do, if I start small enough!

• Hans Christian Andersen wrote “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
• Dexter the show is awesome. Dexter the book series is only allowed to exist because if it did not, the show wouldn’t either.
• People CHECK OUT BOARD BOOKS. FROM THE LIBRARY. Sometimes, they check them out after PUTTING THEM ON HOLD.
• Twitter can make for some interesting new ways to do fiction—character studies, point-of-view stories, etc.
• Unless the characters involved are Pintsize or the Yelling Bird. Seriously, don’t go there.
• There are very few resources to help out the college grad who has moved back in with parents, but plenty of tips for parents on how to put up with the kids.
• A totally awesome historical figure I had never heard of before is Nzingha Mbande, a 17th-century queen of a couple of Mbundu kingdoms in Africa. She fought Portuguese slave traders all her life, sometimes with armies and sometimes just with pure badassery.
• Virgin coconut oil is apparently a good substitute for other vegetable oils—especially if you have PCOS—due to its medium-chain fatty acids and ability to stimulate the thyroid. But this is hotly contested.
• Stephen Hawking has co-written a kids’ book with his daughter! It is about science.
• As I had long suspected but never bothered to confirm, it is indeed possible that I have PCOS—a conclusion arrived at because I fit all the symptoms and don't have any of the other hormone imbalances that those symptoms go with.
• toast_zombie is a pastrybender! Man, those Danishes were good.
• Not everyone realizes that geeks are a specific subculture.
• The Colorado School of Mines does a full convocation for graduates mid-school year, because so many students go for 4½ years.
• The phase of the moon directly correlates with where it is in the sky and when—something I’d never really thought about before.
• You can get athlete’s BOOB WHAT THE FUCK.
• If you add a spoonful of peanut butter to a raspberry smoothie, it tastes like a cold liquefied peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Calvin was right!
• Driving a grandma car means you get treated differently on the road. And by that, I mean you get bullied.
• Self-Revelation #1: I Kirk when I talk. I just realized this. I add punctuation where there is none. Also, sometimes even trail off completely because I assume the rest of my sentence is implicit. Perhaps I need a reminder I keep having to give The Hive—“Dude, not everyone is you.”
• Self-Revelation #2: I literally don’t know what to do with group projects. I mean, I knew I hated them, but it just occurred to me recently that I usually start with gusto, then find myself wondering if I’m getting in the way or working at cross-purposes, ask too many questions to try to straighten it out, conclude that the other group members are bugged, and gradually fade away because I honestly don’t know how to work together.*
• Self-Revelation #3: I … actually like The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask better than Ocarina of Time. Finally, the years of lying to myself are over.

• My sister thinks my lack of desire for a mate is weird.
• “Anhedonia” is the medical term for an inability to feel joy.
• Wasps are the god damn SUPERVILLAINS of nature. Now, I knew that some wasps were disgusting monstrous horror-movie-inspirations from the very depths of your worst nightmares, but I didn’t realize the sheer variety of horrifying parasitic atrocities they’d commit against trees, grass, spiders, butterflies, and beetles.*
• Wyoming and Colorado state laws require you to move to the left lane when you see someone on the shoulder.
• While Star Trek TOS is almost entirely made up of homoerotic moments, the winner of all the episodes I’ve seen was “Mirror, Mirror.”
• Octavia Butler is even more rocking than I was led to believe. Took me way too long to find one of her books.
• Mark Hamill can do three different crazy laughs.
• Bill O’Reilly writes kids’ books. I didn’t need to know that.
• When stroked, alligators can be sedated. They also make a hilarious warnk sound before they do.
• Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome perfectly describes my bedtime habits, and is in fact very, very difficult to treat. Take that, people who think I’m just not trying!
• It’s almost nice to find out you have a “disorder,” because at least you know you’re not a one-of-a-kind freak.
• In the world of my aunt, dark wizards and lawyers are apparently always hovering around little old ladies just waiting for them to have heart attacks. That’s why it’s imperative that it be kept secret from everyone, including, preferably, most of the little old lady’s children.
• Your hips have to be forward for front stance in tae kwon do. I’ve been doing it wrong for years.
• Even one stellar job interview doesn’t guarantee you the job.
• There’s a really nice section of Salt Lake City off on the other side of Downtown that I never knew existed—and which I should keep in mind for whenever I want to actually move out.
• I am not the only person in the world who thinks Strunk & White were full of shit! Yay!
• Bad movies based on good books touch a serious nerve in people.
• Uhura’s first name is Nyota.
• Arc flash is an ionization of the air around an electrical system with sufficient voltage and no grounding. It’s an impressive and unfortunate cause of death among electricians.
• Wire-wrap jewelry is pretty straightforward in its basics, but mastering it is less easy.
• There is such a thing as an antidepressant that works without making me fall down
• The life of a Mormon missionary is even more regimented and awful that I could have imagined. You’re never even supposed to be out of sight of your partner. I realize this is probably in order to keep missionaries out of mischief, but that doesn’t make me feel any better.

• 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.)

• Pennies no longer count as money in some vending machines.
• You’re supposed to cut divets out of the seam if you’ve sewn an outside curve so the fabric lies flat properly.
• Skin-picking is a horrible, horrible disorder affecting millions of Americans and its tragic consequences cannot be properly recorded. I learned all this from a website where you can pay $29.95 a month for a subscription that will apparently help you master the compulsion. In due time, of course. These things are not instantaneous. (And here I always thought it was just a bad habit.)
• Black holes have a region outside the event horizon called the ergosphere, where space gets sort of tangled up in the spin of the black hole and moves faster than the speed of light. Which matter can’t do, but which space apparently can. Dude.
• If you are going to make disgusting lewd comments to the doctor’s receptionist, do not be surprised when the doctor refuses to see you.  Especially when the receptionist happens to be the doctor’s wife.*
• I am not cut out for customer service. I don’t care enough about what I’m doing.
• Don’t use windshield wiper fluid on a cold day.
• Americans are willing to vote for the competent guy, and don’t let silly things like whether he’s black trump the fact that he’s competent.
• On the other hand, Hollywood still feels that an all-white cast playing nonwhite characters is an improvement on a story.
• Hooper’s sign is a test you do on the leg muscles of paraplegics in which you massage the muscles of one leg while holding the other leg as well.  You are feeling for countermovements of the muscles there. And if Hooper’s sign is positive, your next step is to call a psychiatrist, because the person is not actually paralyzed. (There is a whole battery of tests doctors do to see if you’re really paralyzed. My favorite is the test to see if a patient's arm is actually paralyzed: lay the patient down and hold their arm straight up with their hand over their face.  If they’re really paralyzed, their hand hits them in the face.)
• The newspaper is being held up right now by two groups: old people who can’t figure out this newfangled internet, and Coupon Ladies—frazzled-sounding housewives who obsessively chase after bargains, to the point where they demand four Sunday papers in order to get the coupons out of them. And who get very upset if their K-Mart or Harmon’s ad is not included.
• A lot of people don’t quite understand human rights versus stuff you can vote on.
• My brother loves The Sandlot the way I love It Takes Two—nostalgically and unconditionally.
• The infamous 9999 Damage Geno Whirl in Super Mario RPG is not a myth.  And it is awesome.
• When you say your company is going outta business and everything must go, you attract a whole lot of vultures and the customer service you pride yourself on gets flushed away in favor of just keeping track of everyone.
• Vulture-shopping is different from normal shopping: you treat stores that are going out of business like you are looting them. Shoppers become much less observant and impatient and instead of waiting for you to take their rejected clothes they just put them back themselves, which never goes well.**
• “High definition” really is.
• They really trowel on the makeup on non-HD shows.  While this makes sense because, as Roger Ebert pointed out in his smackdown on Expelled!, nobody looks quite right on TV without it, this has become a drawback now that I have an HD TV and can see that my wimmin doctors’ faces are pretty much masks made of pancake.
• You can actually browse the stalls at the Hyrule Castle Town market in Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
• Street performance has a lot more to it than just going out and juggling or whatever.  If you’re doing it properly, like street_show, it’s a pretty complex but very worthwhile profession.
• Originally when Jim Henson came up with The Dark Crystal, he wanted to make all the dialogue in Fantasy Language—actually, a whole host of Fantasy Languages for the different characters.  His buddies were like, “Jim Henson, no.” But I now know about this and love him even more.

*Since some of you are not aware, the doctor in question is my dad, the receptionist is my mom, and the creepy patient is gross and inappropriate enough that we're wondering if we should send him back to the scan people to take a look at his head for tumors.  Except we found out he was gross with every single person there, too, and they may refuse to scan him.

**Dear shoppers: I appreciate the thought, but for the love of god don’t put clothes back when you’re done trying them on. Customers never seem to notice that all our pants are hanging up a certain way, they never button the shirts, they frequently put the stuff back in the wrong part of the store, and in the rare instances they find the correct spot they mix all the sizes up and hang the wrong sales tags on them.  Not to mention we have to at least try to account for the clothes.

• You can get injured while juggling.
• Cytotec was a drug used in the 1990s to induce labor in women who had had a previous C-section, which turned out not to be a good idea because it was causing women’s uteri to EXPLODE.  HOW BONKERS IS THAT?!
• There are five tablespoons of orange grit in a packet of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.
• Latah is a condition recognized in Java in which the affected person startles easily and, when startled, will swear involuntarily and sometimes act out. Arguments still abound as to whether this is cultural or biological. I say both (come on, dudes, are we really still arguing?), especially since my mom exhibits some of the behavior.
• You really can’t please everyone with your writing. (It’s good to internalize this.)
• Far from being some crazy granola dirty hippie movement, midwifery kicks ass, and now I want to look into it on the side of actually being the midwife.
• Spine tattoos do hurt like a mutha.
• It turns out there’s an answer to something I’ve wondered for years: what do creationists think about the possibility of aliens? Seems that all answers can be found in Genesis.
• Apparently I’m not the only person who is always either wearing or carrying comfortable shoes, in case of space pirate abduction, getting on the wrong side of the shadow government, transports to other dimensions, velociraptor attacks, or hikes through the ocean.
• If you go ask the lady at the information desk downstairs in the UO Bookstore if you can buy a roll of electrical tape because your headphones are a mess, she will kindly offer to just tape them up for you.
• Apparently, my spine does list to the left. Who knew?
• While a lot of people could stand to apply it a little more, cultural relativism can go way the hell too far, to the point where the scientific, empirical method of figuring out biomedicine is seen as totally equal to, say, an exorcism in terms of healing. This is getting subjective and objective reality mixed up, and is wrong.
• I fall for hardcore Catholic names, like Mary Margaret or Vincent Francis. And the name Joseph Mary or Mary Joseph? HAWT let me tell you internet.
• You know when you’re lying in bed, blissfully drifting off into dreamland, and suddenly WHOA your whole body spasms forward like a claptrap? There’s a name for that: myoclonus.
• If there were an award for the most adorable cult ever, that award would definitely go to the Unarius Academy of Science.  The Unarians are a flying saucer group that believes that there’s a united civilization of 33 planets of various aliens out there, known as the Space Brothers, and that they’re going to show up and usher in a new age of enlightenment through Science. This group has an elaborate styrofoam and plywood 3-D representation of the planets that lights up, and ther leader was an octogenarian lady who wore giant clown-color cloaks and crazy outfits and called herself the Archangel Uriel.  They sang enthusiastic hymns with lyrics like “From OUT of the spiralling GAL-ax-ies …” The date for the amazing arrival was 2001; I’m not sure what they did when it didn’t happen,* but it probably involved a mild sigh, an affirmation that it would definitely happen next time, and an adjournment for a nice glass of lemonade on the front porch.
• “Shave and a haircut” is a tap dancing move. Specifically, the steps go“step shuf-fle ball-step step beat ball step stomp.”
• Bleach doesn’t just kill mold.  It blasts it into another dimension.
• The relationship between pirates and ninjas actually seems perfectly logical when people start to articulate it.
• In some classes your grades actually do go down when you start disagreeing with the teacher.
• You can elicit an amazingly fast mobilization if you announce that they’re giving away free kittens a few blocks away.**
• Titus Andronicus is the most hardcore Shakespeare play ever written—a play involving rape, mutilation, and cannibalism. It’s so overdone that a lot of people argue that it’s some kind of metaphor, but as far as I can tell it’s completely done for the sensationalism. This is not just Shakespeare crossing the line; this is Shakespeare jumping the line and twelve schoolbuses on a flaming motorcycle, nude, while flipping off the audience and biting the head off a kitten.***
• Tattooing was actually quite a common fad among upper-class women in the Victorian and Edwardian times. The tattoos were “small and decorative,” although I can’t find out what, exactly, they are. I do know that Lady Randolph Churchill had one.

• The sun sails from dawn to dusk and back very regularly along the equator, without a whole lot of pausing for twilight.
• If I were a magical thinker, I would totally believe Ganesh and I were buds.  The number of times he has popped up—sometimes to save my ass—is uncanny.
• Things rural Kenyans know about our culture: Doctor Who, The Flash, X-Men, George Bush, Coca-Cola, English, WWE, Barack Obama, and of course Chuck Norris.
• Things rural Kenyans don’t know about: secularism, pet cats, Spanish, states other than California and Texas, and of course bears.
• Things I knew about rural Kenya: tin roofs, farm animals, squat toilets, chicken slaughters, malaria, mosquitos
• Things I didn’t know about rural Kenya: cell phones, hot water for baths, ant holocausts, malaria being treated like chicken pox, tae kwon do, flying somersaults, ugali
• The recipe for ugali is as follows: boil some flour.
• The phrase for “turkey” in Swahili, bata mzinga, literally means “cannon duck.”  I don’t know why.
• It’s a good idea to wear shorts under your skirt, because 1) it keeps your thighs from chafing, and 2) you never know when you might have to hitch up your skirt to hike across the god damn ocean.
• Mosquitos will bite you more if you eat bananas.
• One of the traditional ways for a Swahili to make herself alluring is to stand over a censer while wearing a big skirt so that the smoke theoretically goes straight up into all the nooks and crannies to make them smell more pleasant.  I do not know why a man would have his nose there in the first place, but who am I to argue with Tradition?
• Sending postcards is expensive.
• Mosquitos that have already consumed blood explode when you swat them.
• I have good luck with people whose names start with some variation of "Kris."
• EVERYBODY uses Facebook.
• EVERYBODY.
• Kenyan outlets are something like 250 hertz, which will give your iPod superpowers but which Nintendo DS’s refuse to even acknowledge.
• Bagels are like the holy grail of food.
• The book Clan of the Cave Bear is a well-researched story with some very interesting, if not always well-written, details on the possible lives of the Neanderthals. The sequel, The Valley of Horses, is basically caveman porn.
• Goat meat is pretty good.  Not so much goat intestine or liver.
• Donkeys make the second most annoying sound in the world, right after mosques.
• The Swahili I learned from my book is the kind spoken in Tanzania, which is more formal than the kind in Mombasa.
• The Deaf accent trumps all others.
• Fridges and ceiling fans are the GREATEST INVENTIONS EVER.
• Al Gore is a helluva sport.
• There actually exists a canonical Sherlock Holmes story where Holmes and Watson get baked and have a gay moment.*

• The average life span of a house rabbit is 10-12 years. (I knew this, but now I have learned it.)
• In comic art a good way to keep effect lines focused is to stick a tack at the focal point and rotate the straight edge around it.
• Superman originally couldn’t fly; he would jump around like a flea. I had wondered about that because of the “able to leap tall buildings” bit, which seemed a little redundant if you could go sailing off through the ionosphere whenever you wanted to.
• Subway sandwiches actually aren’t bad.
• Budgies glow in the dark.
• In linguistic subgrouping, shared innovation shows a closer relationship between languages than shared retention.
• Wraparound pants are the coolest pants in the world. And they can help you with your worldbuilding projects!
• There are two styles for wedging clay: the Western, also called “ramshead,” and the Eastern, or “chrysanthemum.” The second terms refer to the shapes the clay takes on.
• I use “Fucking” as both an honorific and as a sign of derision. For examples, I give you: Sigourney Fucking Weaver versus Paris Fucking Hilton.
• Patrick Fucking Stewart does the voice of Adventure in The Pagemaster, one of my favorite animated movies. This reinforces my theory that classically trained actors are filthy filthy whores. They’ll take any paycheck you offer them. And that’s awesome.
• People interpret the word “diet” to mean “please offer me a disapproving opinion without noticing any of the other words in the sentence.”
• Cobalt can undergo reversible oxygenation, meaning that it can work as a metalloprotein. Dweijidŕ, Ghiltrol, say hello to your blue blood.
• There is one thing I can do better left-handed: I can pull clay into long, thin strips. I always wind up with little knobs and thin bits when I do it right-handed. Presumably this means I can also milk a cow better, since the motion’s almost identical, but we will have to study that further before we know for sure.
• Originally, the word for apron was napron, but people saying a napron eventually started hearing it as an apron.
• Linguists have actually discussed whether languages have “masculine” or “feminine” characteristics (I’m looking at you, Otto Jesperson).
• The answer to the question “If I decide to make a career out of standing on rubber balls balancing tea trays and vases on my nose while swinging a hula hoop on my hips, what is my first step?” is: Wuqiao Acrobatics School.
• You know you’re not cut out to watch porn when your first thought after the movie ends is, “Hey, that subplot with the dirty maid and the guy in the cravat and enormous platforms didn’t go anywhere.”
• You should definitely make sure to hug your rabbit before you leave after spring break, because you’ll feel slightly better about it when she dies before you get back for summer vacation.
• Either I really do have Jubilee’s mutant power of blowing up electronics, or every iPod in the Universe is a piece of shit.
• It is actually possible to upstage Johnny Depp as a pirate.
• It takes a month to get some psychiatrists to do paperwork.
• Fraggle Rock stands the test of time. Rugrats doesn’t.