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.

Sitting in the second row at the symphony listening to a stellar orchestra produce a velvety billow of music,* with magnificent cadences and brilliant cohesion—and having nothing in my head but cuddly G-rated slash scenes involving the very flail-oriented conductor and the cute young soloist.

I couldn’t help it! The conductor had the fluffiest fauxhawk I’ve ever seen! And he winked at the soloist between movements! Winked! No jury would convict me, dammit!

*I’d never heard Sibelius before.  The program noted that “Dark, somber colors predominate” in this Concerto For Violin In D Minor, Op. 47, to which I indignantly replied, “Are you kidding?  That’s the yellowest concerto I’ve ever heard!” Usually string music takes on the burgundy of the lower strings for me, but this one was inescapably the color of white wine.

• Spanish: murcielago, ‘bat.’  It’s just got such a great rhythm to it, although I’m guessing that they don’t translate ‘Batman’ because Hombremurcielago—or worse, el Hombre de los Murcielagos—would be hard to say.
• Swahili: Hands down, kiboko, ‘hippopotamus.’ Fun to say, but even better, the ki- at the beginning puts it in the noun class of tiny things.
• Japanese: atatakakatta, ‘warm (in the past).’ This is the hardest word to say in the world. The root, atatakai, ‘warm,’ is bad enough, but when you add that bit that makes it past tense, it’s damn near impossible.
• Hawaiian: Any word. The more syllables, the better.  For an example, I give you ho’okalakupua, ‘to do magic,’ but pretty much any word in it is awesome and fun to say.
• ASL: The word for Coca-Cola, which in Utah is still done by faking shooting yourself up with cocaine.  Also the generic word for soda, which is just fun to do.

• People with perfect pitch have an advantage when learning Mandarin.
• Rowlf the dog might have become my favorite Muppet, up there and maybe even surpassing Kermit the Frog, my first crush.*
• You can see some interesting bits of human nature by just working at a cash register:
  1. If there is a bagger standing behind one side of the counter, people will invariably approach the opposite side.
  2. When a customer takes a pen out of the cup provided and it does not work, the standard practice is to say “This pen is out of ink” and then put it back in the cup with the other pens for the next guy to find.
• Hawaiian uses three different demonstrative pronouns/adjectives: kēia, kēnā, and kēlā, which respectively refer to something near the speaker, something near the listener, and something far away from both of them. This isn’t the first time I’ve run across something like this, and ever since Spanish’s esto, eso, and aquel I’ve been thinking of them as “hither, thither, and yon.”
• Despite having spent some years as Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Wesley Crusher, Wil Wheaton’s actually a pretty cool guy.
• Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman is a popular book for anthropology courses. And well it should be.
• Synesthesia is the standard Fun Fact About Me that I pull out when asked for something memorable.
• In the Agta tribe there is very little division of labor: women are just as likely to hunt as men.
• Sometimes even a step you know you’re going to take can be painful when addressed the wrong way.
• The Movius Line is a theoretical line dividing two technologically distinct groups of human ancestors.
• Luna Bars is some nasty shit.
• If you have forgotten to take your Fukitol, do not spend even a small amount of time the next evening playing Tetris on your phone, because when you stand up the next thing that will happen is that you will fall down.
• Apparently people do use roses in tea—thank the gods!
• Pediophobia is the official name for the fear of dolls. I was totally unsurprised to learn that this was an official phobia, because I know many people who have it to some extent,** and it seems like a logical phobia. (Logical because of their resemblance to humans while being stylized and distorted in some ways—same reason coulurophobia is so prevalent.)
• It is possible to burn Pasta Roni.
• Going by one theory in evolutionary biology, a possible reason for kinship closeness is a built-in tendency in our species to recognize genetic closeness. By this logic, full siblings are emotionally closer than half siblings, and identical twins are closest of all. There’s no word on why fraternal twins are often close. Probably environmental cues.
• The reason you barf after being on a crazy tilt-a-whirl ride is that your perception of vertigo it instills (by sloshing up the fluid in your vestibular system) mirrors the effects of some toxins (which slosh up your neural systems). And when you’ve ingested a toxin, what’s the fast and easy way to get rid of it?
• Some mugs have built-in tea strainers. These do not work.
• Asian sauces are awesome for cooking.
• Vintage anime is crazy.
• E-mail friendships are a lot of fun, but sometimes you want to hang out with them in person, which is what the Craft Center’s classes are for.
• Somebody who wrote for Star Trek: Voyager was a huge Alien fan.  You can tell by the number of times that the crew finds themselves in a creepy abandoned setting with possible Creatures just around the corner.  Also by the number of times Janeway whips off her jacket, slings a really big gun to her hip, and goes off to kick some alien ass.  Also, I swear at one point Harry Kim tries to recreate the "Six meters!  That’s in the room!" scene.
• Don’t go into a used bookstore during finals week, especially not if you want to keep your money.