Learn Something New Every Day!

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.

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.