Banditos! Banditos! Banditos!

In the Village of the Blue

"Hey there, neighbor!  Looks like you're washing your smurf."

"My house?  Do you mean I'm washing my house?  That's what I'm doing, yes."

"It's a nice smurfy day for it."

"Sunny day?  Yes, it is sunny.  But I'm washing it because some kids tagged it.  Next time you see Papa Smurf, tell him I'm getting sick of having 'Smurfy Smurf' written on my house."

"Oh my Smurf!  That's what they wrote?"

"What?  What's "Smurfy Smurf" mean?  I have no context."

"Oh is that all?  For a second there I thought you said 'Smurfy Smurf.'  Whew!  Listen, don't worry about that.  'Smurfy Smurf' is just an homage to Smurfy Smurf.  You know, Smurfy Smurf, the smurf smurf."

"Again, no context.  Remember when we talked about helping words?  Use your helping words."

"But say, neighbor, why are you using a smurf to clean your smurf?  We live in smurfrooms."

"Hose, using a hose, the second one is house again, and, wait, did you just say smurfroom?  Smurf is the word for mush?  Really?"

"Smurfrooms, right.  You can't clean a smurfroom with water.  You need a smurfroom brush."

"I do not need a mushroom brush, thank you very much.  In many cases,  you can run a mushroom briefly under water and it won't get waterlogged at all.  It is a trade off between a little bit of extra water and completely stripping the mushroom with harsh, abrasive bristles.  You can also use a wet paper towel, and then a dry one."

"So you're saying that a mushroom brush is worthless?"

"No, they have their uses, but it's all about context.  Let the mushroom help you decide, based on how dirty it is, and how hardy or absorbent -- wait, what did you just say?  What?"

"Is a mushroom brush worth--"

"YOU JUST SAID IT!  I HEARD YOU!  You know how to say mushroom!  Say it again!"

"Sm . . . smur . . . smushroom?"

"Close enough!  Say house!"

"House?  Is that your word for smurf?  The smurf you live in?"

"Yes, that's right!  Oh, you don't know how happy you've made me!  All this time, in this tiny village, with everyone saying smurf this and smurf that, and now you're finally coming around!  Please, you have to tell the others.  They can stop saying smurf if they only try."

"Well, all right, I'll smurf, that is, I'll tell them, but you need to meet us smurfway.  When you mean smurf, just say smurf."

"I will, I'll meet you smurfway.  Just go and smurf the others."

"Hee hee hee!  But I know what you meant.  Yes, I'll go and smurf the others.  Wow, you've got a lot to learn."

Technorati Tags: Smurfs, mushrooms, mushroom brushes, context

Use Your Words

There are literally dozens of words in the English language, and if you want to make it all the way to the secret bonus words (like sesquipedalian, recursion, and portmanteau), you need to expand your vocabulary a little each day.  FreeRice offers a quick, challenging vocabulary quiz with a humanitarian twist; for each correct answer, their sponsors donate 10 grains of rice to hungry people throughout the world via the U.N. World Food Program.  Ten grains may not seem like much, but I played for just a couple of minutes, and earned 400 grains.  Then I measured some rice out on the kitchen table and found out it's a little over two teaspoons.  That would cook up to two tablespoons, if it made sense to cook up that little rice, which of course it doesn't.  Lesson learned: if I play for at least ten easy minutes a day, within a week I'll have an edible amount of rice.  Bonus lesson: rice goes everywhere.  Maybe by the end of the week, I'll have found all the stray grains.  If I threw some boiling water on the floor, they'd swell up and be easier to find.  Be right back.

As a game, FreeRice is very simple but has some nice design features.  A picture of a rapidly-filling bowl provides a little visual reward for every right answer.  Every incorrect answer is a little learning experience, as they immediately display the right choice, along with another question, a tempting chance for redemption.  The ads are simple and unobtrusive, and the game starts on the main page and rolls right along.  Click, click, learn, click, earn more grains, get a little hungry thinking about it, check to see if the floor rice is ready.  (Nope, it still hasn't absorbed all the water.  I threw in a little butter for flavor.)  The difficulty adjusts automatically, using a GRE-like initial assessment and tier system.  I got up to 49 out of 50.  In your face, English!

[SPOILER ALERT]

My favorite word so far was burgoo, which I happened to know as a thick gruel served to 18th century seamen, and nowadays as a soup they make down South.  I just enjoy it when a food-related word comes up.  It's like attacking an enemy in Bookworm Adventures with the word fisticuffs.  Southern burgoo goes well with rice, in fact.  Speaking of rice, I'm pleased to say that my kitchen floor rice was a tour de force of culinary invention.  The butter and saffron (I added saffron) complete the rice's subtle flavor profile, and the slightly caramelized dust bunnies really make the linoleum flavor "pop."  But there's no time to rest on my laurels.  I've got vocabulary to learn, rice to donate, and if I start to feel peckish, storm gutter pilaf.

 

Technorati Tags: FreeRice, Poverty Center, world hunger, rice, burgoo, Bookworm Adventures, fusion cuisine, Michelin stars

Search Engine Awesomization

Oh, it's such a hackneyed Internet trope, but after six months of hits from increasingly curious search queries, it's time for the banditos to spit into the wind.  This site will not be defined by some random strangers' search terms, damn it!  Virtually everyone who happens across this site has been searching for porn.  Really specific porn, too.  Points for inventiveness, you guys, but if you think about it, that scenario is crazy unrealistic.  It sounds fun but the remainder of your life after that point would just be a letdown.  Best case scenario, you spend most of your waking hours reminiscing and applying salve.

Anyway, let's respond to some other odd search queries.  These terms have no real connection with Banditos! Banditos! Banditos!, and no one here is qualified to address them in any way.  The truly brilliant thing is that by writing about them, the site becomes even more closely linked to these dumb, irrelevant subjects in Google's perversely robotic mind.

"killing bugs is murder"  Oh, come now, killing bugs is murder like chewing gum is dinner.   

"paella rice vesus risotto rice"  You either misspelled "versus" or "Jesus," but here's your answer.  Paella rice is medium grain rice, and the stuff you get in the store usually has saffron mixed in already.  Paella cooks slowly in plenty of liquid, so you can't use risotto rice, which is short grain arborio.  You're even supposed to burn paella a little at the bottom.  Don't burn risotto.  No one likes that.  Burning risotto is murder.

"where is God when it hurts"  Wow.  Really?  OK, look, God should be the last thing on your mind when you're hurting.  Medical studies have shown that getting all religious and pray-ey totally screws your chances of recovery.  If you invite God into your heart when you're sick, God is like, "Oh, you want to hang out with me?" and then bam, you die.  They revoked God's medical license in like, the year 3.  Go see a real doctor.

Besides, what are you, God's mom?  He's off in some unknown corner of the universe doing secret deity stuff.  Maybe He's getting everyone in the office to sign a big card for you.  Way to ruin the surprise.

"i feel sorry for the men i won't be doing this forever"  These are song lyrics, but isn't it nice to think about someone just typing that into Google?  Just kind of a random thought.  "I'm afraid to watch Desparate Housewives because I think I might catch an STI."

"how to make a hat stay on a dog"  How, indeed.  Helps if you feed the dog treats, so she knows it's playtime.  Helps if it's your dog, or you have permission.  If not, you're a rude friend or inefficient burglar.  Helps if you talk it up beforehand, about how hats are the new collars, and how you saw the Pokey Little Puppy wearing this hat just before he landed that book contract.

"why Marie Curie didn't believe in God"  Didn't she, now?  Maybe God's not as impressive once you've played around with radioactive stuff.  Even mercury makes God look a little dull.

"homemade banditos"  Ah, crunchy, cheesy, delicious homemade banditos.  You can make them in the microwave or the toaster oven.  With a little masa and time, you can make hot, fresh tortillas, crisp them up, and smother them in chili con queso.  Mmm!

Wait, you did say nachos, right?  No?  Homemade banditos?  What does that even mean?  No one makes banditos at home.  You make banditos in a hideout.  It takes like four hours, two pistoleros, some loot from a train heist, migas . . . that may be where you got confused.  The banditos themselves are not edible.  Outlaws are not snacks.  Similarly, you'll never have to head some nachos off at the pass.

And one last term.  This is absolutely real:

"simple paragrap about if you are going to died as a teenager what are three important things you will like to take in your tomb"

Hm.  A whole paragrap?  Well, it's too late to answer this one anyway.  It's from a few months ago and by now that poor kid will have succumbed to his advanced case of Internet Grammar Tuberculosis.  Goodbye, little searcher.  He's in Heaven now, Googling for angel porn.

Technorati Tags: Google searches, banditos, welcome to the Internet, population fun

Fighting Like Hats and Dogs

Get ready for the dumbest thing you'll read all week.  Guaranteed.

As you may know, I've always wanted to make the world a better place.  To this day, I haven't gotten around to it, because I had a thing, and then I thought I'd wait a bit and see if someone else did it instead.  The other day I was thinking about the phrase "you can't have your cake and eat it, too". It doesn't make sense to say it that way.  The original version is "eat your cake and have it, too" -- once you eat it, you don't have it anymore.  This is all common knowledge.  I was wondering whether reversing the verbs made people just a little bit more optimistic, because on some level they realize that it is possible, even as they use that phrase to deny it.  Also, mmm, cake.

You can see where this is going.  The next logical step is to start using the phrase "fighting like hats and dogs".  When cats and dogs fight, it's violent and they both get hurt.  But hats and dogs, as you can see from the visual aids here, are adorable.  You can't stay mad for long when you're fighting like hats and dogs.  Obviously this little change wouldn't wipe out war and aggression overnight.  That's unrealistic.  We'll need to come up with something for the non-English-speaking countries.

Possible objection:  Dogs and hats don't fight.  Answer:  Yes, they do?  Dogs don't like wearing hats, so they pull them off.  They fight the hat, and the hat fights back, just not very well.  It tries to stay on a dog's head to the best of its ability.  It's like fighting boredom.  Boredom is lazy but it's still in the ring.

Problem:  People will make fun of me.  I'll get tired of explaining it to everyone.  Answer:  That's not my problem.

Question:  Have you adequately proven a connection between the meaning of a phrase and its effects on the speaker?  People say nonsensical stuff all the time.  No one thinks about everything they say.  Answer:  Remember at the beginning, when I said you were about to read something really dumb?  You read it anyway, right?  And dumb as it is, you've absorbed the idea.

Follow-up question:  What if I just read all this because it was woven around a bunch of cute dog pictures?  How could anyone ignore an image of dog wearing a hat?  Triumphant answer:  YOU HAVE PROVEN MY POINT.

Technorati Tags: hats, dogs, fighting, and, like

Times Square

I only just discovered, from this New Yorker article, that Times Square was named after the New York Times.  It was called Longacre Square until the Times built their offices there in 1904.  I've been to Times Square countless times and never wondered about the name.  Now that I think about it, it sounds odd to name a square after something plural.  Reds Square?  Washingtons Square?  If it were Time Square, I would probably have just assumed it was a reference to the ball drop.  The next time I design a city I'll name part of it Annual Slowly Descending Ball Square.

 My memory for these "aha!" moments is directly proportional to how obvious the connection should have been.  When I was a kid I loved Chip's Ahoy! cookies, and I loved the ocean, but never realized the name was a play on "Ships ahoy!"  If I'd seen a barbershop called "Hair She Blows!" I think I would have caught that one, but who knows?  Wow, that's atrocious.  Looks like I can come up with terrible names for barbershops on the fly.

I've been reading Patrick O'Brian's 21-novel Aubrey/Maturin series for a couple of years now and I'm on the last book.  (I read other books as well these past couple years, so my reading rate isn't as slow as you might think.  Also, I savor every page and stop to look up every early 19th century nautical or medical term.  But I admit that as I get older, I read less often than I should.)  In every Aubrey/Maturin novel there's at least one common phrase that suddenly takes on new meaning when you discover its nautical origins.  Sailors had a lot of free time to come up with odd phrases and adapt ordinary words to a multitude of shipboard objects.  Then the phrases and meanings filtered back into ordinary speech, stripped of context.  I won't give any away, because it's a rare pleasure to suddenly re-think a word you never noticed before.  But for example, I find it cute that on a ship, the word "ship," as a verb, means at least three different things, in addition to the noun that the sailor stands on the whole damn time.  The Times Square ball has nautical origins, too, which may be why I ended up on this tangent, and seems a good place to stop.

Technorati Tags: Times Square, New York Times, New Yorker, Chips Ahoy, Patrick O'Brian, Aubrey/Maturin, nautical terms, words

Word Fixer: The Perfect Storm

At Roughly Drafted, you can attempt to read "Secret iPhone Details Lost in a Sea of Hype and Hate," an article about why some sources are not very enthusiastic about the iPhone, and why they are wrong.  I don't have a dog in this fight, because I prefer actual fights, and I don't let my dog do the fighting for me.  As far as I can tell, the article is a list of bad things some other websites said about an imaginary product called the iPhone (I've never seen one in real life, have you?) followed by some pointed rhetorical questions implying that these websites are secretly biased, lying Microsoft-lovers, followed by links to other Roughly Drafted articles about how Microsoft sucks.  Swell.  I guess that's how they roll here on the Internet.  I accept that.  But I want all writers everywhere, even the Internet-level writers, to stop using "a perfect storm" as a metaphor for "shit went down," because it is perfectly stupid.

Sebastian Junger over there made up the phrase "perfect storm" to describe a pretty bad storm, although it originally described his three square meters of face stubble.  Shit went down, and soon the phrase was a book, and then a movie, and then an irritating thing people say when shit goes down.  I guess the idea was that some weather patterns coincided to make a situation that some sailors found inconvenient.  Boo fucking hoo.  There already was a cliché for that: "Events conspired."  Why make a new one?

First of all, it's a confusing way to use "perfect."  You can use "perfect" to mean "complete" or "unqualified," but be careful using it to describe something that's actually bad, and can never really be complete.  If I call someone a perfect idiot, I'm really just emphasizing how much of an idiot they are, not saying that they finished Idiot School and now have their M.F.I. or whatever.  Affixing "perfect" to sucky things works better in speech, where you can play around with tone of voice.  I don't like the way it looks on the page.  I awoke screaming from a perfect nightmare.  Even though I start with "awoke screaming," not a good sign, "perfect" still weakens the impact of "nightmare."  What I mean is, "perfectly awful nightmare," which also suggests that my nightmare was that the Queen said something truly devastating about my silver service, embarrassing me in front of my devoted gentleman's gentleman.

Metaphorically, a storm tends to be a bad thing.  It's sudden and violent.  But "perfect storm" gets applied to things that are merely inconvenient, or silly trends, or opinions.  Those aren't storms, not even metaphorically.  That's just a writer trying to make his boring article sound dramatic.  Do you know how writers come up with trends?  One of their friends comes up with an anecdote, and the writer Googles two other incidents that are similar, then grinds out an article about the hot new trend that's sweeping the nation.  If you put together three things that are kind of pointing in the same direction, they don't magically become some world-changing storm of activity.  Similarly, it's not that amazing if different pressure systems encounter each other and have some kind of cumulative effect.  That's called weather.  Waves do that all the damn time.  Two waves moving in the same direction can amplify or cancel each other out.  It's the hot new trend in wave interaction, a "perfect storm" of amplification, and you read it here first!

For me, the only meaning "perfect storm" has is, "I'm a lazy writer," or, "I'm trying to sound smarter than I am."  It's a sign that I can stop reading or listening.  It's like saying you don't believe in evolution.  I once got in a long discussion with a guy who didn't believe in global warming until he mentioned as an aside that he didn't believe in evolution, either.  I realized I had been wasting my time assuming we would actually come to some common ground about global warming.  After that, I liked him more, because he moved on to a lot of elaborate talk about Creationism and I could just pretend to pay attention.  I bet he liked me more after that point, too.  The next time you hear about a perfect storm, relax.  You're in no danger of encountering a storm.  Or perfection, for that matter.  Someone's just trying to piss on your leg and tell you it's raining.  Metaphorically, that is.  If someone actually urinates on your leg, don't just take it -- that's somewhat rude.

Technorati Tags: word fixer, perfect storm, cliches, writing, wave addition, sebastian junger, piss, Patton, iPhone