One of the first "documentaries" I can remember seeing was one where <Efim Geller> was caught cheating on stage with the spoon bending trick.

A cabal of magicians, scientists, and other annoying do-gooders caught him with his pants down and his career immediately went down the toilet.

They also showed how he did the trick- it was a simple substitution trick with a pre-bent spoon.

Although now it's considered Ok to be "pre-bent" in the West- not here in Korea though.

Has Ireland embraced its "pre-bent" populace yet, or is "The Church" still frowning on it?

I don't see any problem with such folk myself.

I'm not sure how <Geller> found all that time to do the stage shows in the first place given his grueling tournament schedule in the 1960s.

I love <Tim Robinson> as well.

I read that one where Jesus rides in the balloon.

Actually, isn't that "Skinny Legs and All"?

Or am I misremembering?

I read "Even Squabs get the Grill" as well.

And the one about "Woodpeckers."

But they are all jumbled up in my mind now.

Uh, I don't actually *make* any posts. Whaddaya expect? I'm from the hot air pigeon post generation, after all.

I *can* spell, but I understand that no longer matters.

B.R.O'N.T. O'Saurus, esq. (Eat your heart out, C.H.O'D. Alexander and Count Alberic O'Kelly de Galway!)

Brion Ripley O'Neil Tiberius ....

(Quick trick trivia question: assuming that B.R.O'N.T's parents were sci-fi fans, where did they get his names? More than one solution may be valid ...)

Ok what was James T. Kirk's father's first name?

Hint- there's an actual answer to this one. I know because I just saw the new <Star Trek> movie and I'm not ashamed to say I enjoyed it heartily.

I loved it actually.

<spelling matters/doesn't matter>

As per the "style of the times," as you suggest.

I'm not sure how much of a value can be placed on these styles.

Spelling, syntax, grammar, idiom- which of these is considered important varies over time.

All depends on usage of course- so they are never really stable anyways.

So long as whatever unholy arrangement gets the job of communication done, I'm not sure that any of the "rules" associated with these linguistic conventions are that important.

One rule is as good as another if the other guy understands what you mean.

I like the variant spelling in <Shagspr's> lingo- I find it colorful.

I don't care for CAPITALIZED ACRONYMS, or "CA"s as they are known.

Well known by me as I just made it up now.

Capt Hook is also the villain in Peter Pan - played by Dustin Hoffman in Spielberg's version, opposite Julia Roberts and Robin Williams. A serious contender for the worst movie ever. *Ever* ever.

The cast, to their credit, saw this. At a press day in London, they took the piss out of their own characters -- Williams riffed thru his vast collection of slightly 'off' accents, Hoffman wore an 18th century wig, and leered. And Jools, as Tinkerbelle the fairy, was quite invisible. Uncanny. Meanwhile, I watched the herd of red snappers - the paaaaaparizzi - in full gonzoid flow ("Oy, Rob! Robin! ROBBSY I LOVES YER!! You, Dustin, my man! Over here, Joolyer! Invisible, ace, I'll get a front cover! HEY ROB!!" etc etc).

Next day's papers: <Hollywood Starlet Joolz Roberts, 61, shows the latest movie-biz fashion by turning up *completely invisible* to meet OUR MAN SEB at the Dorchester Hotel ... "You always see through me, Sebastian" she simpered. Her director, a Mr Spielberg, said 'virtual reality' and 'dot com stocks' were the next big things.>

It all belongs in a neo-Flaubertian meta-wiki compilation of *bad stuff*: maybe an update of the <Myles na Gopaleen Catalog of Cliché>.

Flaubert's Bouvard & Pecuchet were the originals of the species. It's said that they were at the Paris opera with Morphy, suggesting moves to Isouard and the Duke of Brunschweig. Who, it must be said, hung on longer without their advice.

Another example of idiocy occurs in a 'historic' novel by Tom Petsinis, *The French Mathematician* -- about the short and intensely Romantic life of Evariste Galois, founder of group theory.

I like a spot of anachronism myself. Aristotle with a typewriter or Christopher Marlowe with a Derringer. Dillinger with a synth. Mais Petsinis, il prend le biscuit. There are idiocies that don't warrant the term anachronism ...

For example, young Galois's teacher, circa 1830, has access to astonishing troves of data. He mentions the Ahmes manuscript, an important source of info about ancient Greek mathematics. Somehow, M'sieur le teacher had the gist of it 30 years before one Henry Rhind found it at a flea market.

Teach's 2nd example is closer to home. He tells Galois and fellow pupils about the way in which international chess tournaments are organized -- 20 years before Staunton ran the 1st one.

I could be falling into the <trap of translucent trifia> here, but I'm not. May Bouvard haunt me with Pecuchet adding agricultural details if I tell a lie - or the truth, for that matter.

There is something deeply scary about Sincerity and all who sail in her.

Virgin Islands? Virgin on the absurd.

<Here lies the body of Sophie Charlotte Born a virgin, died a harlot;
She was still a virgin at seventeen
An unusual thing in Skibbereen.>

And you're definitely not a Ferengi. Females who wear clothing are regarded as radical.

If you're talking about coffee here, you have my complete and unreserved agreement; however I have a sneaking suspicion (something to do with lemmings) that you actually had tea in mind? Oh well. :)

<Dom: <<Bill> You are the only bill whose arrival promises pleasure rather than threats, poverty, and the usual bill-related stuff.>>

It has indeed been argued that, it being a serious and formal document, its title should really have been "William of Rights".

<Dom: <But Robert Sheckley deserves a mention, not least for the odd parallels between his (little-known) 'Dimension of Miracles' and the bestselling Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, by Douglas Adams.>>

Thanks for that - Sheckley is brilliant, and that title and plot sounded familiar, very familiar... and so I visited my rightmost bookcase, wherein resides my Sheckley collection, and spent the last couple of hours re-reading 'Dimension of Miracles'. It's a good way to spend some time... even if there are several chess games waiting for me to make a move in. ;) I shall quibble though, that DoM is not a short story.

PS - While I'm rather lenient about grammar, I still believe in correct spelling - and not the automatic spellchecker type, the use of which is usually very easy to recognize. When you see people "defiantly" agreeing with you, or references to the Bearing Straight... nuff said. :s

Legendary waves off the cliffs of County Clare have somehow got mixed up with traditional Irish music to create a strange mutant surf culture.

They have it in Cornwall and Norway as well ("Feeling bjord? Go surf a fjord!") so it's not a one-off. Maybe it's the Gulf Stream's last gasp: water temperature measurements near Iceland suggest the gulf stream may be collapsing, leaving Europe with the temperature we 'deserve' - more like Newfoundland. Colder. No more <gentile Europe, meek and mild, anyhow> ....

Ah, diversions, diversions ...

<Annie> ...

I'm positively envious that you have an actual library where you can proceed directly to the Sheckley shelf. I have ambitions in that direction: several thousand books, currently piled higgledy-piggledy all over the place, several sets of bookshelves which I haven't got round to unwrapping yet, and a room set aside to contain them. When I get round to it. I can even visualize a chess table in the middle, and books organized according to some eccentric classification system...

But for now it's the same old chaos. I find it inspirational. (Excuse #34 for inertia, known to strict moralists as 'laziness'). But if we're talking about the relationship between entities of dubious veracity, I should add that 'laziness' is good for the 'soul' ... and strict moralists should have some metaphoric bone-setting done on their tendency to reify category mistakes.

John Lennon put it nicely: "God is a concept by which we measure our pain". Some folk have a 'god of the gaps' - this is more like a god of the voltmeters.

Speaking of Semitic languages (as we were) it seems that 'algebra' (like many al- words in English, eg alcohol, alfalfa, algorithm, alchemy ... but not alias or alexipharmic) is derived from an Arabic root, incorporating the Arabic article *al-*. Algebra, in particular, literally meant *al-jebr*, the resetting of something broken such as a bone or an equation.

I've read somewhere that Spanish bone-setters still describe themselves as 'algebristas'.

<The inevitable semantic loop> I previously mentioned trolley dollies on trains -- *of course* I meant coffee, as a confirmed caffeinoholic. You thought I drank *tea*? Naaaah, rarely. My point was, if I must drink the stuff, I add lemon to it. But coffee is my first and second love, and that which gets me functioning in the morning. With sugar. These multiple addictions are good for the 'soul'.

Anyway (still looping) I noticed that the PA announcement in Irish (*as Gaeilge*) told us that a trolley would be "ag dul thart". This is also the phrase used for 'en passant' in chess. Not unreasonable, I suppose, in passing.

A rough phonetic rendering in English is <egg dull heart> which raises the prospect of a strange sandwich.

The Sandwich Islands, where Captain Cook was caught on a sticky wicket and went for a Burton, is a whole nother loop ...

Time to break out of these ellipses ... tomorrow I'll, heh, start on that library, with sections for chess, evolutionary psychology, cyberpunk, languages, and 'zine production ... Good ♘.

(1) <DoM is not a short story> ... too true, alas. Far too verbose. But it's about 20 years since I last read Dimension of Miracles. I hope it stood up as well as I remember it.

I'm enough of a fan of the original cast to feel very grateful for the many, many humorous scenes calculated to tug at our nostalgia.

Which is a lot better than the neuralgia I got after watching the truly execrable <District 9>-

Which, my dear <DoM: A Short Story that never ends- hence rather a Long Story and We are Happy for That>, rivals <Peter Pan>- truly- for the "much coveted" WORST worst movie ever made.

Really it does.

Why are these pop fake documentary <Cloverfield-style> films so irritating?

Well because they spend zero money, apparently, on a screenplay.

Every note in this woefully wrongheaded "aliens are better than humans" piece of stink is a false one.

That's not so easy to achieve as you might think either.

I'm speechless because it was so bad.

And I'm not usually.

Ok I'd like to kill every single person involved in the production and every single person who enjoyed it.

Is that extreme enough?

On the other hand- the new <Star Trek> movie- it's not great cinema that's for sure but my lord those two boys they got to play <Jim n' Spock>-

I'm not usually distracted by how incredibly good looking actors are- the last time that happened was <Brad Pitt> as the immortally incomprehensible "Pikey" in <Snatch>- well Ok and also <Christian Bale> in his impossibly skinny turn as "Raskalnikov" in <The Machinist>- which is a very loose, and very clever, adaptation of "Crime and Punishment" couched as a horror vehicle that I also recommend highly.

<The Machinist> reminded me of what's best about <Cronenberg> horror screenplays- deft characterization, an atomsphere of creeping dread, things are not what they seem, and the blackest humor imaginable.

It wasn't directed by <Dear David> though.

Pretty sure.

I'm not a fan of human sacrifice, but I'm not necessarily against it either.

<Dom> is a Spanish virgin?

I wouldn't have thought so- but this *does* put his cryptic comments about <The Virgin Islands> in context...

Er, quite. I try to remind myself that every single word we use now was once an error, a youthful abomination, a grammatical heresy, a borrowing from some vile alien tongue, or a meaningless babble. *Everything* was a novelty at some point, or else we'd be speaking Anglo-Saxon or Norman French or Old Celtic. Or perhaps Basque.

Therefore I try not to get worked up about linguistic change. Changing is what languages *do*, and their evolution may often seem unpleasant to those who grew up with an older variety. And some of whom persuade themselves that 'their' version is correct and set in stone, and novelties and neologisms are just pure ignorance.

The ironic thing is that ignorance often *is* the cause -- but it doesn't matter in the slightest. Ignorance or erudition, the machine grinds on.

What is interesting at the moment is the tension between the fissile and static forces in the case of English, which is 'trying' to become a world language without splitting into thousands of mini-dialects.

In the past, geographical separation for a few generations was enough to separate two varieties to the point of mutual incomprehension. Print slowed the process without preventing it -- Hungarian is apparently a key example here, because of changes that can be tracked over the last 1000 years: but I don't know any details.

The point is that the electronic media *do* seem to arrest change. American, Australian, Irish and English versions of English should have diverged by now -- instead they've reached a sort of unstable balance, where they retain certain marks of their individuality and culture-specific tropes, yet on a broader scale they somehow evolve in parallel. Something to do with constant feedback, I expect -- the kind of thing we're doing now, actually.

There, see? We're not just exchanging amicable messages in a shared language. (I almost wrote 'shared tongue' there ... linguists have to take care with their stylistic tics.)

And not just linguists. I've got a live Leonard Cohen DVD running in the background, and I just heard him say something about "a solo on the instrument of wind" -- which sounds, well, *wrong*, somehow.

Which is where we came in: the perception that something sounds 'wrong'. (I could go into a riff here on things sounding 'right', eg Cohen's astonishing way with simple words -- "I'm good at love, I'm good at hate, it's in between I freeze ... been working out, but it's too late, it's been too late for years" ... even in his asides to the audience, "I was sixty years old, just a kid with a crazy dream" ... etc.)

But no, better skip that riff. Back to the *bad* words. Specifically, your example: <When you see people "defiantly" agreeing with you, or references to the Bearing Straight... nuff said>

Is nuff ever truly said, as we verbose types like to ejaculate? Can we ever even *have* nuff? I doubt it ... but in this case I'd assume that anyone who wrote 'Bearing Straight' was creating a clever pun (the fact that both 'bearing' and 'straight' are correctly spelled, even if Bering and Strait aren't, is a dead give-away). Your true cretin writes something like *Berring Strate*, I think.

A very good pun, in fact. Paronomasia to a punctilious degree -- and Mr Cohen once wrote that "we should study etiquette before we study magic" while Pynchon said there is "high magic in low puns". I'm with Cohen here.

And, um, I can't find anything wrong with 'defiantly'. From 'defy' and 'defiant'. Seems fine.

Inappropriate use to describe agreement? Hmm. They 'really' mean 'defenestrate' or 'defec...' ... doh! Of course. It's *definitely*, innit? Never even crossed my mind until now.

There *was* a case on CG, I recall, where somebody was told that the 'Grim Ripper' would punish his heresy.

But we need more books *about* idiots and idiocy. Apart from obscure psychological tomes and the novels of Dan Brown, it's hard to think of examples. So who will write 'On Cretinism' or 'De la Stupidité'?