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It was an old phone booth, decrepit. Grass grown up all around, and weeds. There may have been a door at one point, but that was no longer true. Spidery cracks filled the existing windows. I lived there. You might think this is unusual, and you’d be right – but for all the wrong reasons.

The phone booth was enormous.

(Untrue.)

The rain was sidelong and clever, flying at us upside-down and zig-zag, wetting places you didn’t think about, making you wish for the dryness of a bath. I hadn’t believed it was true, at first. It certainly wasn’t possible. Writing articles about nachos shaped like the Virgin Mary, everyone joked: that’s what you’ll be doing next. It seemed like a gag.

The driest place on earth, that’s tedious, but measurable. A place that’s inside isn’t even in the running. Most places it doesn’t rain inside, not proper-like. Conversation of raining inside, and you expect you’re talking to someone without a proper understanding of sprinkler systems, or of “inside”. That’s what I thought.

A color piece. A crazy eccentric. That’s what I expected. UFOs and folk art, a leaky pipe and a cracked ceiling. I pictured: everything painted blue.

The rain in Trevor Wheelock’s apartment was like nothing you’ve ever seen. Everything covered in tarps and sealed in zip-log bags and garbage bags or dissolving into the floor. Plastic furniture. It was raining when they built the house, Trevor said, and it hadn’t stopped since.

A while ago it had stopped raining on the second floor, Trevor said, which was just uncanny. I thought I saw a fish, out of the corner of my eye. It might have been Doris.

The cover story¹ of the July/August edition of The Atlantic hits an interesting note, if one that’s hit with a fair amount of frequency (if not depth). One of the points is that the way our tools² process information affects the way we process information. Which should be obvious enough, but isn’t always.

The article’s focal point is Google, and the internet, and how the fragmenting, attention-scattering nature of the internet rewires our brains, making it more difficult for us to process long, deep passages of text. Nicholas Carr (the author of said article) worries, and sprinkles anecdotes of people who find their reading habits severely impinged upon by their internet browsing habits — people who can no longer delve into long works of fiction, who (as the author) can no longer read tomes they’d regularly re-read in the past; but, also, he is circumspect, and skeptical, and does not burn bridges: maybe it’s bad, and maybe it isn’t.

Reading the article, I couldn’t help but feel that, while my real-world (read: books, magazines, newspapers) reading habits haven’t been impacted by the internet, my internet reading habits have definitely evolved. Finding tasty morsels of facts on the internet has devolved from a thing of learning to a thing for its own sake. Trivia and ephemera are great, but when the fact only exists in memory long enough to lead to another fact, never to be recalled again — well, that’s just silly.

My folder of “read it later” bookmarks is poorly named, because I don’t know that I will. Or wouldn’t have. But conscious effort is intriguing. And maybe it will change.

This could be the beginning of more depth on here, or of nothing at all.

P.S. That’s not to say there will be fewer posts on here about secret iguana-smuggling compartments and such.

Notes:
¹ “Is Google making us stupid?” by Nicholas Carr
² Also: written language; the printing press; clocks.

You were always crazy, Red Dog tells you.
But didn’t it have to originate some time?
Red Dog says maybe not.
Was it maybe like we didn’t always think alike?
Red Dog doesn’t know what that means.
Like, maybe before we thought we were crazy but had a different word for it?
Red Dog thinks possibly.

I AM
81%
JAZZTake the Transformers Quiz

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I am: Kurt Vonnegut For years, this unique creator of absurd and haunting tales denied that he had anything to do with science fiction. Which science fiction writer are you?

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What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North   You may think you speak “Standard English straight out of the dictionary” but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like “Are you from Wisconsin?” or “Are you from Chicago?” Chances are you call carbonated drinks “pop.”
Philadelphia
The Northeast
The Midland
The South
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Also, I do not refer to carbonated beverages as “pop”; naturally, all of the other information is 100% accurate.

65.

There were three bears roaming the streets, but they weren�t the ones to watch out for.� It was the turkeys who were instrumental in looting the bank.� They seemed harmless, and besides, everyone was worrying about the bears.� No one thought to stop the turkeys, or ask what their business was.� They just gobble gobble gobbled into the bank, waltzing out with a sweet haul.
43.

He shakes his head a little, squinting.� Someone asks how is he.� Right as rain, he replies.� There�s, like, a genial pause as whoever asked this�s parsing the statement, or thinking something else.� The sun�s blood red.� Someone says, �this rain ain�t right.�

59.

The cardboard boxes, sagging at the edges and poorly labeled, littered the warehouse floor, like islands. The Old Man had said, �it�s in one of the boxes�: spoken from his death bed, mid-death. Those present pretty well knew it to be a reference to his uncounted millions. Going through the boxes seemed simple enough, until the first one exploded.

46.

Right as the creature let out a horrid scream didn�t Mae go and complicate matters by pretending like she empathized with the thing.� It was grotesque, to see this display.� More grotesque, knowing Mae.� No one ever found out if it was a zombie or what.

Outside there�s a whorl of green, leaves being ripped from trees and carried in the wind. It�s relatively mild, all things considered; if this is what someone had told me the End of the World would be like, I wouldn�t have believed it. Where�s the chaos? Where are the looters? I still don�t believe it, and neither should you.

Isn�t there supposed to be fire or something?

Brimstone, AKA sulfur, boils at 835.88 �F.

Create all sorts of fun maps thanks to the folks at the MLA: map language-speakers by county, by zip code, and all sorts of other good stuff.� Pull-down menus and such let you re-draw the map according to your curiosity.� (The above map, FYI, is of Hungarian speakers by county.� I think.� Of course, handily, I didn’t include the color-coded key, so if you’re really curious, you’ll have to dial up the map yourself.)

A handy list of how to pronounce difficult-to-pronounce author’s names.

(via The Millions: “Hard to Pronounce Literary Names Redux.” 26 Aug 2006.)

They came and asked questions, asked before the paint was even dry. Which, it was oil-based and as such taking like decades to dry itself out, but nonetheless: it wasn’t like they had to ask the questions.

The painting was large and gruesome, veiled after-the-fact in some thick nondescript curtain of rough material. It sat in the center of an empty room, what could have been a living room, or sitting room, or whatever you’d prefer to call it. The room surrounded the painting, saluted it. Hundreds of square feet of empty space stared blankly at the painting and, when it was covered, at the sheet.

The claim was that people don’t simply disappear, which was quite obviously a lie, flat and outright.

I told them, magicians do it all the time.

Or maybe it’s just a table of animal noises in different languages…

But just think, what if it weren’t…?

(link [though not the graphic] via, probably, some other blog I’ve forgotten all about; just imagine the actual citation is right here)

The train ride was short and insignificant. I met no mysterious strangers. No crimes were committed. The weary rested their heads with no ill effects.

Haha!� Of course it’s not.� But it is, well, interesting: now there’s a blog dedicated to rooting out (or at least pointing out) abuses of the word “literally.”� It’s about time.

Not particularly current or important, but curious and fun nonetheless:

In 1986, Silo (a chain of home electronics stores) ran a television commercial in 23 markets nationwide, offering stereos for “299 bananas.” They never thought anyone would take them at their word; after all, “banana” is a widely accepted, if playful, term for greenbacks. Who could possibly mistake one for the other? Thirty-two customers held the retailer to its unwitting word � they showed up bearing loads of the yellow fruit and demanding the store keep its end of the bargain.

…

Each stereo was exchanged for $40 to $60 worth of bananas, and Silo took in a total of 11,000 bananas. Many of the bananas were donated to Woodland Park Zoo, but there were too many even for the hungry animals.

(Though how widely accepted, exactly, is the use of the word ‘bananas’ as a stand-in for ‘dollars’?)

(Snopes.com: “Banana Skinned.” [October 20, 2005])

…will be a crazily discordant year. Ancient prophecies will allegedly be fulfilled, and new ones will be made, daily, in the papers and magazines and things the kids are reading these days. Fish will fall from the sky, but only where they feel like it. Meaningless statistics will litter television commercials, and commercialism will creep even further into stray spots of emptiness in the world. Emptiness will hide in noise.

Blood will be shed unnecessarily. “Shed,” or “spilled,” because that makes it seem passive and non-violent. Tears will flow, but out of necessity. A thing called money will dig deeper into the souls of the converted. War will be abstracted by men talking about principle, and by some women. Hail will crush grains, and glaciers will melt. Asphalt will crack. Buildings will continue to rise up. Las Vegas will find itself caught up in a sudden water conservation movement, or maybe not.

Technology will make tinier and tinier that which occupies us more and more. We’ll be constantly surprised, by everything. We’ll be deluded, by everyone and ourselves.

My one New Year’s Resolution will be to become a pathological liar, and I will fail.

But you will have no way of knowing.

Fish falling from the sky you read about in those Unexplained books, that series from Time Magazine or whatever; you read about fish falling from the sky in anecdotal morsels, not really translating the thought into meaningful expectation. Like: sure, fish fell from the sky in 1863 in Nowheresville, ND, but the idiots probably knocked over a ladder that had a pail of fish on it and didn’t know any better. Like, “Oh, fish rain!” But then it happens to you.

1 Mother
2 Passion
3 Smile
4 Love
5 Eternity
6 Fantastic
7 Destiny
8 Freedom
9 Liberty
10 Tranquillity
11 Peace
12 Blossom
13 Sunshine
14 Sweetheart
15 Gorgeous
16 Cherish
17 Enthusiasm
18 Hope
19 Grace
20 Rainbow
21 Blue
22 Sunflower
23 Twinkle
24 Serendipity
25 Bliss
26 Lullaby
27 Sophisticated
28 Renaissance
29 Cute
30 Cosy
31 Butterfly
32 Galaxy
33 Hilarious
34 Moment
35 Extravaganza
36 Aqua
37 Sentiment
38 Cosmopolitan
39 Bubble
40 Pumpkin
41 Banana
42 Lollipop
43 If
44 Bumblebee
45 Giggle
46 Paradox
47 Delicacy
48 Peekaboo
49 Umbrella
50 Kangaroo
51 Flabbergasted
52 Hippopotamus
53 Gothic
54 Coconut
55 Smashing
56 Whoops
57 Tickle
58 Loquacious
59 Flip-flop
60 Smithereens
61 Oi
62 Gazebo
63 Hiccup
64 Hodgepodge
65 Shipshape
66 Explosion
67 Fuselage
68 Zing
69 Gum
70 Hen night

(Like any other survey-based list of favo(u)rites, it’s arbitrary, of course. And, yes, meaningless, aside from the meaning these words have to the however many thousands of people submitted their favorites. Together, some of the words are delicious surprises. I am a flabbergasted hippopotamus.)

(Guardian: “Mother’s the word,” by David Ward [November 25, 2004])

• Prisons are America’s “primary supplier of mental-health services.”¹
• Make a face. Change it. Craft your new identity. Morphases.²
• Dolphins and humans are fairly similar, brain-wise.³
• Struwwelpeter/Shockheaded Peter, online.⁴
• Tired of original speech? Cliche Finder to the rescue.⁵
• “I think that it could be done.”⁶
• Send me your brains. Sterling Courier Systems, please.⁷
• They have a list. They’re checking it twice.⁸
• Woobie: feel the warmth.⁹
• This is now. 10×10.¹⁰

Sources & additional commentary-type crap:

1. NYT: “A Death in the Box,” by Mary Beth Pfeiffer [October 31, 2004] - Above and beyond this startling factoid, the article is worth a read. While it approaches the subject through the story of one woman, it is by no means a straightforward case-study/human interest type article.
2. Morphases - Go see it—you get to play with faces; it’s fun. (Though shouldn’t that be Morfaces?)
3. Science Blog: “Humans and dolphins: If brain size is a measure, we’re not that different” - Human brains are 7 times larger than you’d expect, based on comparisons to similar-sized animals. For dolphins, it’s 5 times.
4. with pictures, and English translations alongside the original German. Good fun. (link via MeFi)
5. type in a word, find cliched substitutions.
6. CalTech News: “The End of the Age of Oil,” by David Goodstein - adapted from talk
7. Actually, don’t send me your brain. But feel free to check out the New York Brain Bank’s recommended procedure for packing and sending a fresh brain. And yes, the instructions do say “fresh” brain. That’s what the Ziploc bags are for, I guess—keeping the brain(s) fresh. Mmm. Fresh brain. (link via BoingBoing)
8. NYT: “What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers’ Habits,” by Constance Hays [November 14, 2004] - As a matter-of-fact, it’s a database. And Wal-Mart’s checking it waaay more than twice.
9. Double-Tongued Word Wrester defines “woobie” as
   

   a security blanket; a blankie; a favorite toy or object. Also wooby.

10. The pictures that define the times.

In the American Prospect, Harold Koh writes:

In no small part because of its promiscuous failure to ratify a convention with which it actually complies in most respects, the United States rarely gets enough credit for the large-scale moral and financial support that it actually gives to children’s rights around the world. [emphasis added]

I only point this out to be petty and small, as I have no real stake in how words are misused. But promiscuous? There’s really no sense of the word that makes sense in this particular context.

Barring a “creative” use of the word–which is not totally out of the question—I think the author means something along the lines of prominent, or conspicuous (which, when combined, yield something surprisingly close to promiscuous, [promi...]+[...spicuous]= promispicuous).

My point, aside from being small, is also to bring to light the fact that such misuse undermines the presumed validity of the article. I.e., as long as there are no incredibly conspicuous errors, you’re more likely to defer to the author’s opinions, or at least adapt you own viewpoints slightly. Phrases like “national prerogative” and “international adjudications” tend to make you think the author knows what he’s talking about.

And, let’s be honest. I doubt that a simple mistake means the author doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But one simple mistake is all it takes to force the reader to re-evaluate everything the author’s written, at least in that particular article/essay/etc.

When you’re trying to be persuasive, you can’t afford a simple misuse.

(apologies to American Prospect: “On America’s Double Standard,” by Harold Koh [October 1, 2004])

Double-Tongued Word Wrester records words as they enter and leave the English language. It focuses upon slang, jargon, and other niche categories which include new, foreign, hybrid, archaic, obsolete, and rare words. Special attention is paid to the lending and borrowing of words between the various Englishes and other languages, even where a word is not a fully naturalized citizen in its new language.