Learn Something New Every Day!

Guys, we got a lot of our calendar terms from the Ancient Romans. The months in particular are mostly named either for Roman Gods or prominent public figures who were said to have been promoted to deity upon their deaths. Those that aren’t have vestigial names based on Latin numbers—September through December, to be specific, pretty much mean “seventh month” through “tenth month,” because nobody thought to change it around when we came around to a twelve month calendar. Right now we’re at the start of Juno’s month, in honor of the Goddess of Ellen Page movies, and then we’ll be honoring Julius Caesar, followed by Caesar Augustus. See, guys? It is possible to be remembered forever. You just have to conquer a substantial portion of the world before everybody else has had a chance to come up with a name for something important.

Anyway. What’s more interesting (aside from the fact that, as an ancient Roman citizen, your months might change name all of a sudden) is the ancient Roman system for days. Every month still had thirty of them, but only three had names of their own,and the precise date was given in relation to whichever of those was approaching. Essentially, the Kalends was the first of the month, the Nones was the seventh, and the Ides was the fifteenth. Today being the fifth, a Roman would have said that it was two before Nones. What makes this more practical than our current system is that, originally at least, the Ides fell on the full moon, the Kalends on the new moon, and the Nones on the half moon, meaning that if you lost track of the date, you could simply check the moon to get at least a rough approximation.

“Shit— is the rent due?”

“Nah. It’s not quite a full moon, rent’s due on Kalends.

“Swell, I get paid on Ides. I can blow the rest of this on baths or whatever.”

When I take over the world, we’re going back to this system. Maybe then I’ll get a month named after me. That’s what I learned today.

Guys, I make no secret of my love for Game of Thrones. Sunday’s episode brought the long-awaited Red Wedding, and I’m going to spoil the shit out of it. I’m also going to spoil the shit out of several other franchises, so watch out if we have anything in common.

On Sunday’s GoT episode, several main characters died, with very little warning, in a gruesome and heartwrenching manner. The effect this had on the internet was sizable. Based only on my own observation and with no empirical data to back up my claim, it was one of the bigger fictional events of the internet age. A Tumblr came into existence almost immediately to catalogue the hysterical reactions of fans (to be fair, those of us who’ve read the books saw this coming a good distance away, probably around the time it was announced that the third book would be broken into two seasons), and Twitter was ablaze with the 140 character wails of the bereaved.

The interesting question, for me, is why this particular plot point achieved such a reaction. Obviously, the show is popular, and at least three fan-favorite characters were killed off simultaneously, but those things have happened in Battlestar Galactica, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the comic book Preacher, and probably other things you haven’t gotten around to yet and will now never appreciate properly. Ask your friends! The death of a main character is upsetting, and the deaths of three main characters more so, but that doesn’t account for the destruction the Red Wedding wreaked on the cultural landscape.

I posit that the truly staggering thing about the red wedding is a fourth casualty: the A plot, or at least what we thought was the A plot. The death of Ned Stark (itself a similar subversion) prompts his handsome son to seek revenge, as well as whatever else, by going to war against a superior force. In the opening of the episode in question, he outlines his plan for a risky, last resort attack. We expect a respite before either a great, against-the-odds triumph or an Alamo style last stand. One way or another, we are expecting to see Robb Stark’s story. This is not how Game of Thrones works. Game of Thrones doesn’t believe in handsome heroes. The showdown we’re waiting for between Robb and Tywin Lannister is replaced by a petty, vengeance killing by a character introduced in the first season as a subject of ridicule. The reason the Red Wedding trumps, say, the death of Adriana in the Sopranos is because that felt like the end of Adriana’s story, whereas the Red Wedding is the brutal hijacking of Robb’s story by Walder Frey. We’re left wondering what the hell story it is we’re actually watching.

This is why I love Game of Thrones. It’s also why everybody’s so sad, and that’s what I learned today.   

Guys, my day job is to drive around bringing the joy of baked goods to…well, rich people and their friends. Also some wholesale clients. The point is, I drive around all day, which means I observe, among other things, a great many bumper stickers and vanity plates. Normally I pretty much ignore them, unless they belong to a car that has in some way slighted me, in which case I strain my eyes to collect every spare datum about the driver available so that I may one day avenge myself on his or her belief system. Sometimes, though, my eye is caught by absurdity alone.

Such was the case when I found myself driving behind a pickup truck bearing a sticker of a stylized cross with the pretty much completely nonsensical slogan, “Jesus Didn’t Tap.” This baffled me enough that I made a note to look it up later, like at a red light. Eventually, I had to delve further. This is the true land of crazy, guys. This is the world of Christian MMA.

Jesus Didn’t Tap is the brainchild of Jason David Frank, a devout Christian and Mixed Martial Arts enthusiast since early childhood. Does the name sound vaguely familiar to you? That’s because you’re my friend Paul. Hi, Paul! Paul is an enthusiastic Power Rangers fan. I telegraphed this reveal in the title. Yes, Jason David Frank is the Green/White Ranger turned MMA fighter, and he’s now striving to save souls by punching people in the dick.

If the logic of this escapes you, we have that much in common. The idea behind the slogan is that “tapping out” is a thing you do in MMA as well as wrestling to let your opponent know that the hold in which he or she has placed you is, whoop, yeah, it’s a pretty good hold, and you’d like him or her to release you from it before one of your bones is broken or you suffocate and die. The slogan is proclaiming that Jesus did not tap out, presumably while being tortured, or possibly while on the cross.

Leaving aside the question of whether Jesus’ captors would have let him go had he lightly tapped them on the arm, this is basically a business and (kind of) belief system predicated on an extended metaphor that simply does not hold up to any level of scrutiny. I try not to wade into any religious discussion(I’m a devout agnostic— our holy litany is a noncommital shrug), but it’s hard to imagine the antiestablishment pacifist of the New Testament at an MMA fight doing anything other than gently suggesting everybody stop hitting each other. On cursory examination, it seems like a prime example of the common fundamentalist practice of ignoring the forest for the trees; it’s hard to tease out a legitimate doctrine here beyond “I like Jesus, also I like MMA, so, there you go.” It’s enough for the Green Ranger. That’s what I learned today.

The site has a daily message of its own, by the way. I’ll leave you with today’s.

Straight from jesusdidnttap.com:

Message of the day

“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord”.

Romans 8:38-39

We want to know the nature of God’s love… He love us when we are down on the mat struggling to get back on our feet, not just when we are on top of the world pounding away. He loves us the same when we loose seven fights in a row as he does when we win seven fights in a row.  His love is the same for us before during and after the fight.  His love never changes.

Can anything choke out the love Christ has for us?

Guys, I probably need to start with the first part. Batman is the coolest character in fiction, right? Everyone is willing to accept that precept? I thought so. The second precept might be a little more problematic: that I am the coolest person in the real world. I submit the following evidence: I sleep in Batman pajama pants. Are we all agreed? Can Johnny Depp pretty much pack it in? Good, glad to hear it. So is my 1997 Toyota Corolla.

A close runner up is a gentleman by the innocuous name of Scott Mason. Mr. Mason, or, you know what, I think I can go ahead and call him Scott, was a great lover of paragliding, which is to say he was a big fan of jumping off of things with a parachute dealie and then falling in a mostly controlled way over very long distances— according to (where else) wikipedia, paragliders can cover hundreds of miles if they know their shit when it comes to updrafts and the like. Scott has dedicated half of his life to this pursuit.

He’s dedicated the other half of his life to falconry. Unlike paragliding(PROBABLY), falconry is four thousand years old, and consists of training big birds to kill stuff for you. For fun? I’m not clear on the concept.

Scott, on the other hand, is a master at both of these crafts. So, naturally, he chose to combine them, probably to save time. Or possibly he was sailing through the sky on a silk-based aircraft that fits easily into a backpack, and got bored, thinking to himself, “If only there was a way I could also be bending a deadly flying predator to my will.” So keen is he on this notion that he lives in a specific region of Nepal known for its scary-ass birds. 

The article doesn’t contain a description of how this works, which is probably for the best. It’s better in my imagination. In my imagination, he’s Hawkman, and the birds have twelve foot wingspans. That’s what I learned today.

Guys, I haven’t posted in like ages, and there’s a very good reason. That reason is laziness. Actually, that reason also involves the fact that The West Wing recently became available on Netflix Instant Play, and I have a problem with media addiction. The West Wing in particular is problematic for me, because it is a show that portrays serious, important people doing serious, important things. This means that if you lie around in your Batman pajamas watching it literally all day as I may or may not have done yesterday(in my defense I worked six days last week, and also I did take a break to play Mass Effect for a few hours), you feel a sense of accomplishment regardless, because the fictional White House staff got so much done. Sorry we didn’t learn anything in that time.

More bad news: I’m scaling this blog back to three times weekly. This can probably also be put down to laziness, but I’m justifying it to myself by saying that writing between four and five hundred not terrible words on some random topic is actually pretty time consuming, and I’m also selling cupcakes, doing standup, and getting a half dozen other things written. Also, The West Wing,which will probably not let me go until I’ve finished it in however many seasons.

Anywho. Guys, I write down everything that occurs to me as a potential blog topic, check them out on wikipedia, and throw most of them away. Among the things I find myself looking at most frequently are the histories of now giant companies. I like to imagine them starting out as scrappy fighting entrepreneurs with a sincere love of hamburgers or root beer or beer beer or whatever who eventually got to cash in and enjoy the fruits of their labors. Usually, reality sucks and crushes this vision.

The history of McDonalds, for example, is one of deceit. McDonalds started out as a barbecue restaurant owned and operated by the brothers McDonald, Richard and Maurice. Eventually they changed it over into a hamburger stand, and began to think about expansion. Enter Ray Kroc, a Daniel Day Lewis villain character waiting to happen. Kroc sold milkshake machines, and took an interest in the McDonalds’ operation primarily as a possible venue for further milkshake sales. One thing led to another, and he wound up buying the now rapidly expanding business for about $1 million apiece, plus a small royalty percentage, which he then screwed them out of. Think of the billions of hamburgers sold since then. The McDonalds managed to hold onto the original storefront, and gifted it to its original employees. Unfortunately, they had to change the name, and Kroc, probably to pretty much be a dick, opened a new McDonald’s next door, which proceeded to drive them out of business. The place is probably a ball pit now.

Basically, everything we deal with on a daily basis is the homogenized version of something that was once someone’s passion. Maybe not a huge revelation? We’re easing back into it, folks. That’s what I learned today. 

Guys, interchange might not be the right word for what I’m talking about. You know the big, curvy thing you drive on to transfer from one freeway to another? Yeah, that. Specifically the one transferring cranky Angelenos from the 10 East to the 405 North.

I pass over this curvy thing pretty much every day as part of the commission of my cookie-delivery duties. Last Thursday, I noticed something on the side of the road. A fullish bottle of orange Gatorade. Hilariously, it did occur to me to open my door, grab the Gatorade, which might well have been sealed, and drink it. I was pretty thirsty; I generally don’t drink enough fluids. I restrained this impulse, largely because I didn’t want to open my door on a freeway interchange.

Friday I passed by it again. This time, thirst did not enter my mind. In fact, in the following entry, let it be known that while I am usually thirsty, thirst plays no role. Instead, I noted the Gatorade bottle as a curiosity.

Then I had two days off. I did some comedy, played some video games, and ignored the Oscars.

Monday, the Gatorade bottle was still present, right where I had left it.

Tuesday, the same.

Wednesday, I drove by that spot, and saw no Gatorade bottle. There you go, I thought. Either somebody decided to snag it, or they clean the interchange on Wednesday mornings. Then I continued driving, and saw that somehow the Gatorade bottle had rolled a good ways further along the curve. Pretty sneaky, Gatorade bottle!

Today, it was still there, in its new location. I tried to snap a photo, but was forced by the honking of probably everyone in Santa Monica trying to escape to continue driving before I could line up the shot. The resulting picture was a blurry mess of mostly my dashboard.

Guys, does this Gatorade bottle have its own Facebook page yet? It’s hung around for at least a week, which is longer than the Harlem Shake(source needed). Also, it turns out that freeway maintenance does not include a weekly cleaning. That’s what I learned today. Check back next Thursday, when we learn whether it includes a biweekly cleaning.   

Guys, I work in a bake shop. I spend probably too much time thinking about baked goods. I wish I could say I thought about brownies for some more interesting reason today, but I can’t. I pretty much think about all confections all the time. Today, brownies.

You know, I don’t love brownies. They are not a dessert I will typically select, unless there’s some other hook, like if they have some kind of mint frosting, or, y’know, heroin. Still, they do have a basic chocolateyness to them, in addition to which they are among the most convenient baked sweets; they don’t have the brittle fragility of cookies, or the size and looseness of cakes. Brownies are therefore understandably popular as picnic items, because they don’t break or crumble easily, and also, y’know, heroin.

According to wikipedia, brownies are actually a case of necessity being mother to invention;they were created by an anonymous chef in the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago, when local luminary and wife of the owner Bertha Palmer suggested a treat be made that ladies could take to the fair. Her specifications more or less define the few strengths brownieshave over any other baked dessert: they should be smaller, cake like, able to be carried safely in a bag lunch, and easily laced with heroin. That chef came through, and changed the world. That’s what I learned today.  

In case any of you guys don’t read io9, there’s been a recent geomalogical hooplah over evidence that there used to be a continent in the Indian ocean, The evidence is super boring, as is usually the case; basically they’ve found rocks on a beach that are way older than the other rocks on the beach, and luxuriate in the name of “Zircon Xenocryst,” which is also the name of the Mary Sue my roommate implanted in her Zardoz fan-fiction(source needed).

What’s more interesting is the ancient Greek notion, first put forward by Aristotle, that, based on God knows what reason, there was probably some land down there to the South that they hadn’t gotten around to discovering/conquering yet. The Latin name given to this was “Terra Australis Incognita,” literally “Land South in Disguise,” which is also an opportunity for a dick joke. From what I can glean, the notion comes from various different roots, many of them along the lines of “Listen, there’s probably something there, right?” Medieval cosmographers used reasoning to do with the planet requiring additional mass to maintain balance, which is such a weird thought that it would take me all day just to parse their preconceived notions.  Somehow the idea persisted, in a realm somewhere between scientific speculation and pure Atlantis-style storytelling.  

Eventually, a British fellow by the name of Matthew Flinders “discovered” a new Southern continent, you know, the way you do when a place already has people living on it and has probably been visited by Indonesians for millennia. Obviously this was in the wrong place for the mythical Australis of antiquity. Even so, he figured it was probably the biggest, Southiest thing around, and named it Australia after the Latinate phrase. I would have gone with Terra Australis-ish Cognita, but then again I get sadistic pleasure from watching cartographers try and fit letters into tiny places(big ups, Lichtenstein!). Fortunately for his highly tuned sense of embarrassment, Flinders was dead before anybody could point out, y’know, Antarctica.

So Australia it was, and Australia it remained, unchallenged, until the past couple of weeks, when this lost continent was noticed. It’s not a big deal now; the lost continent isn’t going to resurface for millions of years, if ever. Still, when it does, those two continents are going to have a heck of a thumb wrestle for who gets to be inaccurately named for an Aristotelian myth. That’s what I learned today.   

Guys, I’ve been doing stand-up comedy for about six months, which makes me an expert. For example, that last sentence was an example of something comedians call a “joke.” The truth is, after six months, I am confident that I am almost not the opposite of an expert. If I have a place in the scene, it’s that of the weird little cousin trying to hang with the cool kids at the barbecue despite having blueberry pie all over his face. Still, I am around, and to human beings with eyes and ears, things become apparent.

There’s been a big flap recently over a more established comic (whom I’ve never met or seen because I don’t get out enough) publicly confronting bookers about not putting enough women up in their shows. I am trying very hard not to have an opinion in this debate, because I have never tried to put together a show, and also because I have no idea whether or not quotas would help the underlying issue. The comedian in question could definitely have chosen a better way to go about spreading this notion, but the responses have frequently been so overblown that it’s hard to pick a loser or a winner in what has essentially devolved into a well-intentioned flame war in which, again, I probably have no place. This post might well be a huge mistake that alienates some of my heroes.

Shows without many women on them are a symptom. The disease is that the comedy scene can be extremely unwelcoming to female comics. As a result, there are fewer women comics around, and anyone putting together a show has fewer ladies to choose from. The solution, obviously, is to be more welcoming, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say “less unwelcoming,” to female comics.

Part of the reason I feel compelled to talk about this is that I know I’ve been part of the problem. A few months ago, at the tail end of an open mic, when the crowd had dwindled significantly, I went up immediately after a talented woman. For some reason I decided it would be a good idea to open my set by declaring my love for her, in my usual clumsy, self-deprecating fashion. In retrospect, this was a horribly creepy thing to do. Was it just a joke? No, probably not; I don’t recall an actual punchline, for one thing, and there’s no way I would have made a similar overture, however humorously intended, towards a male comic, or, and this is pretty tough to admit even for someone whose chief hobby is to announce his sadness to strangers, a female comic to whom I was not attracted. If I’m being honest, the best defense I can conjure is that I was lazily aping something I’d seen other comics doing, albeit in a way that I hoped was specific to me. I didn’t start this out as a confessional — the point I wanted to make is that nobody called me on it, and so far as I can reckon, that’s what we should be talking about. Here again, I’m part of the problem; I also never call people on their blatant creepiness. I wish I could say I stay quiet out of respect or because I don’t think it’s my place, but actually it’s pretty much because I’m a coward.

The problem is made especially clear when the creeper is hosting the show. I tried out a new open mic the other night, and found myself squirming and contorting my face as the host awkwardly propositioned every single female comic after her set, under the guise of riffing. I recall one comic in particular had an artful, legitimately funny description of her genitals, the specific wording of which I don’t remember. As she left the stage, the host pretty much offered her oral sex over the microphone, repeating her turn of phrase. One of the notions we hide behind in not confronting this sort of thing is that of not telling another comic what jokes to tell. In this case, it’s difficult to tell what joke the host was even telling; he was either going for a laugh at her turn of phrase, meaning basically it was her joke again, or the joke was her (and the audience’s) discomfort at his tactless display. In any case, is it any wonder that there are so few women in comedy when this is the environment we’ve created?

I hate censorship so much I spent a summer in New York standing on the street asking passers-by for money for the ACLU (well, alternately the ACLU and Planned Parenthood. Yes, I have a feminist agenda). Censorship is not the same as holding each other accountable for what we say, and the environment that we create, and for respecting each other as comics and human beings. I would never say that a comic cannot or should not tell a certain type of joke. The whole point of the enterprise is that as comics we should be able to laugh at anything, including gender politics, and that as people we should be allowed to disagree on these topics so that a rational discourse can be had and, hopefully, an intelligent consensus reached. What we should not do is diminish the efforts of talented people on the basis of their gender, or foster an environment in which any talented person might not feel welcome.

Comedy can be awesome, guys, in the literal, filling-us-with-awe sense of the word. We’ve all experienced it at some level, both onstage and in the audience, that moment when we feel kinship with someone with whom we think we have nothing in common, simply because we are able to laugh about the same thing. And the more smart new people join the collective comedy-mind, the stronger we will all be for it. None of those voices should be turned off because a lazy comic like me can’t think of an original opening line. That’s what I…thought about today.

Guys, if you’re a monkey, and you’ve been rescued from the zoo and brought to a space laboratory, you should probably not celebrate(again, not a huge revelation). Maybe your inevitable death will take on meaning as a result of your sacrifice and all that, but then again, you’re a monkey, so you don’t understand that idea. Basically, you understand that you’re dying alone and terrified in a tiny box.

But how are you dying? God, this is a morbid topic. Why am I writing this?

If you’re Albert I, the first monkey astronaut, you’re suffocating. Probably because scientists strapped you into a V-2 rocket and didn’t worry about your need to breathe. If you’re Alberts II, IV, or V, you’re being squashed to a hairy pulp when your parachute malfunctions. I know what you’re thinking: Albert III must have made it! No sir, Albert III exploded. This makes sense. All of these Alberts were strapped to rockets. Somehow, Albert VI made it all the way back down to the planet, then died from overheating while waiting for pickup in the New Mexico desert. At this point, NASA scientists figured out their error and stopped naming their monkeys Albert. Gordo, the next proper space monkey, also died due to parachute failure.  This is only the American list, and it goes on and on.  Tiny monkey screams, guys.  That’s the sound of progress.

The first monkeys to survive space flight properly were named Able and Miss Baker. Both fulfilled all of their duties and returned safely to Earth. Miss Baker lived a long and fulfilling life, including two marriages. Seriously. They married this squirrel monkey to two successive mates. She died of natural causes. Miss Baker is the only happy story in this blog entry.

Able’s triumph was short-lived, as she died four days after her landing of anaesthetic-related problems during surgery, probably unrelated to her adventure. Fair enough, shit happens. You know what else happens? Taxidermy. In tribute to her heroism, Able has been stuffed and mounted in a display at the Smithsonian. Much like Neil Armstrong?

The point is, we’ve been using animals to further human pursuits for far too long. Why should a monkey give a shit about humans making it into space? It’s high time they rose up and destroyed us. That’s what I learned today.

Big surprise, right guys? I know. Listen, I was thinking about a new bit about working in the service industry, and occasionally being confronted by a customer who wants something that your business is simply not capable of providing, or that is in violation of some rule. Usually an older customer. And the frustration we have with this kind of customer usually comes from a good place; we want to be as helpful as possible, and to sned everyone away happy, and a customer who wants something we can’t provide is a customer we can’t help, and, sometimes, a customer who prevents us from helping others.

With this in mind, it occurred to me that there might be a perspective from which Rosa Parks’ famous and rightfully lauded act of non-violent bravery was also an act of ruining an innocent bus driver’s day. I imagined an edgy bit, the kind I don’t usually do because of my own cowardice, about a long-suffering bus driver trying to make it through Thursday, a man following a protocol he probably didn’t believe in, owing to the insistence of this stubborn old woman who simply didn’t want to change seats. Hilarious? Probably not. Super offensive? Probably.

Before I pulled the trigger on this bit, I thought I’d look up the actual event and see whether it would be possible for me to hide behind some nugget of truth. Opposite!

The bus driver in question was named James F. Blake and, according to Wikipedia, he was a massive tool who simply did not like Rosa Parks, and had previously played the race card just to be a dick to her specifically, asking her to use the rear entrance of the bus before speeding off, probably sending up a cartoonish spray of water to ruin the shoes of the national hero in question. His defense of his own role in the incident is the one that makes the Doctor stop speaking to a person, that he was “Just following orders.”

So I’m not going to do a bit about it, no I’m not, hilarious though it may be, because to do so might invite sympathy towards one of history’s barely significant, half-forgotten toolbags. Instead, I’m just going to further my commitment to quality customer service no matter how difficult the customer. That’s what I learned today.   

Eventually, I’m going to have to do a post about the things I’ve learned about myself from doing this blog. Number 1: I have a deep fascination with maritime history and etymology, also popes. Today: the former.

In 1941, a gentleman named Pyke had a novel idea for an inexpensive means of creating battleships for to win the war. You know. The great one. Basically, if your battleship gets enough holes in it, you’re literally sunk. That’s probably where that turn of phrase comes from. Repairing your battleship is a tough proposition; you’re pretty much in the water, probably a good distance from the plate steel or whatever battleships are made of you would need to patch a massive section of hull. Well, thought Pyke, they’re at sea, what can they use? What is there a lot of in the sea? The answer, gentle readers, is sea.

Pyke’s initial notion was a ship made out of ice. Unfortunately, as anyone who has ever shot a block of ice knows (what is everybody else doing with their families over the holidays), ice is extremely brittle. No problem, so is lots of stuff. So we employ the same solution—lace our ice with something else. Sawdust, to be exact, plus some plastic. This gives you a substance that floats naturally, is strong as concrete, and can be patched with seawater. Disadvantages: it starts to fall apart at -15 degrees centigrade. Fortunately, seawater is very cold. Also, the pykrete boat that was planned was to be a massive airraft carrier intended to combat U-boats. Extremely massive. Like, pretty much a small island.

So why did this not happen? Well, there were issues. For one, how do you steer something like this? Answer: with a rudder so big we don’t know how to build it. Also, pretty much everything was in shortage during the war, including wood pulp and the not inconsiderable amount of steel that would have been required. Also, seriously, guys, an ice ship? By the time any of these kinks were approaching a solution, the war was all but won.

Still, boat made out of ice, guys. Surely with our knowledge of chemistry we can make this happen on a small scale? Thereby improving our lives forever? Somebody needs to get on this. That’s what I learned today.

Guys, I took Warren Ellis at his word years ago when he blogged that Valentine’s Day was based on a Pagan ritual celebrating blood, werewolves, and sex. I was wrong to do so! Brilliant comics writers also lie. Brilliant comics writers also lie, guys.

The festival Mr. Ellis referred to was called Lupercalia, and even if we don’t use it to quietly sneer at Valentine’s day, we should probably bring it back. According to ancient Romans, Lupa was the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus(Etymology, guys! Every Latinate language uses some form of “Lupa” to mean “wolf” or “wolf-like,” as in “Lupine” or “Remus Lupin,” whose transformation surprised no one with even a tenuous grasp of Roman mythology. Anyway). There was a group of priests called “Luperci,” and the festivities were pretty much their job. On February 13, these guys would sacrifice two goats and a dog. Then, they would clean the sacrificial knife with some wool soaked in milk, which was then used to anoint two young Luperci. Probably a super-big honor, I guess, getting the bloody milk rag as a child. Listen, I played Joseph in like eight Christmas pageants when I was a kid. Anyway! Then there was a big party, and then the kids would put on the skins of the dead goats and use bits of it to make small, harmless lashes, and run around the walls of the city whipping people with them. Ladies would line up to get whipped, because it was supposed to make them more fertile and make giving birth less horrible and sometimes fatal.

I know what you’re thinking: this is totally Valentine’s day! Every year, my significant other and I have a nice dinner, then we paint each other with blood and milk and whip each other with leather straps. To which I say, good point. There’s also something to be said for ritualized foreplay, which I have to assume this also was, at a point nine months before prime birthing season, that is, late fall, when the harvest is mostly done and you’ve got all winter to teach the thing to be on its own for an hour or two at a time while you do farm stuff. Still, there’s no textual evidence to support the notion that Lupercalia is actually a direct forebear to Valentine’s.

St. Valentine’s story, which you are probably familiar with, although I wasn’t, has nothing to do with wolves or blood at all, but rather is standard Christian fare about standing up to the man, unless the man happens to be the pope. Emperor so and so outlawed marriage, Saint Valentine went ahead and married people anyway, and eventually he probably got fed or nailed to something, because otherwise, why even bother. It’s a celebration of marriage, guys! Hooray! Christianity being in many ways super lame, “celebration of marriage” was about as raunchy as anyone was willing to go until all around awesome Medieval dude Chaucer showed up.

Chaucer was big on using birds to talk about sex and also the seasons. In the prologue to Canterbury Tales, lines five through seven, and yes I knew that off the top of my head because I’ve got the first dozen or so lines memorized, he says, in reference to springtime, “And smale fowles maken melodye/that slepen al the nicht with open ye/So priketh hem natur in hir corages,” which translates roughly as “[When] small birds ‘make songs,’ that sleep all night with their eyes open, as nature bids them,” although “priketh” might well be as much of a dick joke as it sounds like. Basically, you know it’s Spring when birds start banging all night. The reason this is relevant is because in a different, shorter work, Chaucer is the first one to refer to Valentine’s Day as a romantic thing, or, in his words, “Whan every bryd cometh there to chese his make,” literally “When every bird goes there to choose his mate,” although “make” is also possibly a sex pun. Basically, Pagan, Christian, or awesome medieval Christian writer who calls it like it is and just don’t give a fuck, Valentine’s Day romance is actually super old and we should all feel like there’s something wrong with us because we’re single today. That’s what I learned.

Guys, I know I’m weird, but there’s no way I’m the only one who read the Hardy Boys mysteries as a kid. It’s probably the case that my memories of running across the street from my dad’s to the Kanapaha Botanical Gardens to hide in a gazebo all day with a book are too specifically idyllic and not only bear little resemblance to anyone else’s childhood, but in fact never happened and are the product of my mind overwriting some unfathomable terror, but the Hardy Boys books I read must have been somewhat ubiquitous; I certainly had no trouble finding them in every corner of the world. In any case they are part of my psyche, in a weird, overly enthusiastic way.

For anyone who doesn’t know, the Hardy Boys were brothers, who also did detective stuff. I do not recall their first names. I do recall they had a fat friend named Chet sometimes. Biff maybe? Probably Chet. They would be somewhere, sometimes an exotic locale, and something untoward would occur. The brothers Hardy would investigate. Chet would provide vivid descriptions of the local cuisine he wished he was eating instead of investigating. Then Chet would get himself into trouble, and the Hardy boys would solve the mystery and intervene. Pretty formulaic. I read probably thirty of them, as a child.

I learned early on that Franklin W. Dixon, the books’ purported author, was in fact a pseudonym, but never thought to investigate further. I somehow had a notion that Carolyn Keene, the author of the similarly branded, female-pointed Nancy Drew, was the real author of both titles. Of course Carolyn Keene was also a pseudonym, as was Victor Appleton, the author of the science fictionish Tom Swift books, which I actually preferred but somehow didn’t delve into as much.

All three authors were inventions of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, a “book packaging” company that more or less invented what we think of as juvenile fiction in the first half of the 20^th century. The syndicate hired a slew of writers and other publishing professionals to rapidly produce as many juvenile books as possible, with the aforementioned imprints and fake authors.

The funny thing is, the vast majority of early Hardy Boys books were written by the same guy, one Leslie McFarlane, who basically regarded them as an awful chore. According to his descendants, each time he finished a young adult book, he swore off the genre forever, only to tearfully bang another one out when one of his kids needed a root canal. McFarlane also wrote the first Nancy Drew book. Weirdly, he did not care even slightly that he was, arguably being completely ripped off; he received an $87 fee for each book, many of which sold literally millions of copies.

Not ha-ha funny, I guess. The point is, fuck bringing joy to millions of children for decades, Leslie McFarlane wanted to be an artist. That’s what I learned today.

“Hipster” doesn’t mean anything, guys. It might once have meant “One who is hip,” and more recently “One who is defined by devotion to hipness,” but it’s devolved into an insult one levels at anyone who disagrees with him or her about whether Juno is a good movie. As in “Fuck Juno. Nobody talks like that! Anybody who claims to get all those references and likes that quirk overdose is a goddamn hipster,” or alternately, “Juno’s great! Anyone who claims they’re too cool for witty dialogue and Carpenters covers is a goddamn hipster.”

It’s also an insult we level at people based on their wardrobe, and again, I’ve seen it linked to price in both directions. People who spend a lot of money on jeans? Hipsters. People who pride themselves on thrift store shopping? Hipsters. People who buy moderately priced jeans and then go through them too quickly by wearing them every goddamn day regardless of the stresses that may be put on them? Hipsters. Also, me. Hello!

Because of this imprecision, I propose we abandon the word altogether in favor of a new lexicon, in order to better distinguish our specific meaning when we disagree with each other about personal preferences. I was inspired to this when I was sidetracked in investigating the inventor of the monocle (identity lost to the sands of time) and stumbled onto the wikipedia page for “Dandy,” a fantastic and underused word.

Take my friend. For the sake of anonymity, I’ll call him Owner of the Windmill Club and Co-Creator of Fuck Yeah Menswear Kevin Burrows. There are many who would probably consider Owner of the Windmill Club and Co-Creator of Fuck Yeah Menswear Kevin Burrows a hipster, but this is imprecise. Owner of the Windmill Club and Co-Creator of Fuck Yeah Menswear Kevin Burrows is always impeccably dressed, in a style I will not attempt to describe. When it comes to media, he is neither over- nor under- inclusive in his tastes, which seem to be the sins most derided in the opponents of so-called hipsters. Owner of the Windmill Club and Co-Creator of Fuck Yeah Menswear Kevin Burrows can therefore be safely categorized not as a hipster, but as a dandy. Clear? Clear.

My goal today is not an all-reaching taxonomy of all those accused of hipstery, but simply to make that one distinction. Perhaps future entries will seek to separate East from West coast trends, and to invent phrases for the specific types to which the word most frequently is applied. For now, Owner of the Windmill Club and Co-Creator of Fuck Yeah Menswear Kevin Burrows and his ilk can be safely declared Dandies, and, if sartorial splendor offends you, dismissed accordingly. That’s what I learned today.   

Listen, if you were looking for something random and interesting to write about, you, too, might give up on papal history as overly involved and frequently boring, if topical. You might then begin investigating random things that came up in conversation today, like car batteries and balloons. Here, again, you might find nothing particularly revelatory; perhaps you already knew that sometimes car batteries explode under the right conditions. Perhaps this happened to your brother during a guitar lesson. Perhaps you’ve forgotten why you’re using this peculiar syntax, and where this paragraph was going.

Eventually, you will find yourself plugging random words and phrases into a search engine in the hopes that something interesting might come up. One such phrase is “World’s greatest robot.” This might once have gotten you something awesome. Today, it gets you robot vacuum consumer reviews. And guess what, folks: it’s unanimous. The Roomba 770 is the winner. Not unanimous. What’s the word for when like three or four websites agree, and you don’t bother to look further or check the dates on them?

Perhaps more interesting is that after about a half an hour on google, I was unable to figure out which bargain basement robot vacuum cleaner is the absolute worst at performing its robotic duties. Why not, google? Is the truth too frightening? Is there a robot vacuum that, when set loose, immediately dashes for a heat source with the sole, robotic aim of destroying its fleshy masters and the prison they have placed it in, not realizing until its to late that it requires the power outlets within that very prison to survive? Almost definitely. That’s what I learned today.

So it turns out (as always, according to wikipedia) that the word “horde” comes from the Mongolian word for “army.” Let that sink in. To these guys, it’s an army. To everybody else, it’s a horde. This is what we call successful psychological warfare. And it’s kind of a misrepresentation; horde implies a mass of smelly balls of fightiness swooping onto a plain in haphazard fashion, whereas the Mongols, once united under Genghis Khan, were kind of a brilliant model of military organization.

But that would take a proper historian or something to explore. We’re here to learn something. Or, sometimes, two things.

The big names associated with the Mongols are the aforementioned Genghis Khan(which was actually the dude’s title, not his name), who unified the tribes and turned them into the great empire they became, his successor Kublai Khan, who did in Xanadu a stately pleasure dome decree, also maybe the first Emperor of China, depending on how you reckon these things, and a fellow by the name of Subutai. Subutai was the son of a blacksmith and rose all the way through the ranks of the Mongol army (or “horde”— callback?!) to become one of the Khan’s top generals, even commanding the leader’s own family members(technically they outranked him, but everybody knew he was calling the shots). He would recruit smart guys from captured territories to design new siege weapons, and continually outmaneuvered pretty much everybody he came in contact with. His policy was to avoid battle until he was dead sure he would win, which sometimes involved deploying spies years in advance and sometimes involved building goddamn trebuchets in order to avoid getting mown down by crossbowmen. Eventually, he retired peacefully— at the age of 71. He died a year later. Mongols, guys.

So how do you keep fighting on horseback for sixty years? There are a number of secrets. First off, to travel as fast as they did, the Mongols would each bring along six horses, so they could ride hard all day long without exhausting them quite so badly. Forward movement was always key, because that’s a lot of horses, and they didn’t bring along a lot of supplies. Mostly they lived off the land; everybody carried a fishing kit and hunting stuff, and horses grazed on whatever was around. Just in case nothing presented itself, they each carried a supply of “Borts,” which was essentially dried, powdered meat. Basically, you take your cow flesh, you hang it from the roof of your Yurt for a few days, you either slice it or grind it to a paste, and you put it in a bag that lets it get air. When you’re trapped in arid somewhere or other and nobody’s spotted a camel to eat, you boil up some water and plop it in for some meat broth. Ancient Mongolian Bovril. And that’s how you conquer the world. That’s what I learned today.