This Lemon Chicken Has Something to Say

I have a chicken recipe.

This is a sentence I’d never thought I’d say, because for so long I felt like I couldn’t cook. But the last time I visited New York, I tried some leftover chicken that my friend Kristen had made using this recipe. It was no mere lemon chicken; it was Meyer lemon chicken, the difference between Meyer lemons and regular lemons being along the same lines as that between a Rolls Royce and a shopping cart that you sit in and push down the street with a pole. This recipe got me to not only cook my first-ever whole chicken but also to turn that bird into food that tasted good. In fact, I was so pleased with my most recent iteration of this dish that I photographed it, and I’m not usually one to photograph what I cook.

(It’s a little obscene, yes, but cram your bottom full of lemon wedges, half a garlic head and a thyme bouquet and then sit there with splayed legs and see how you look.)

And I’ve since recommended the dish to anyone needing a dish that seemed special, that suggested a higher degree of skill than he or she actually possessed.

Since my friend Dina is shambling toward matrimony, I passed it along to her, so her husband won’t abandon her once he realizes her wifely skills are lacking. That suggestion resulted in the following GChatted conversion today.

Dina: interesting fact
  i was trying to clean chicken juices off my keyboard yesterday
  after attempting to make your lemon chicken
  after i finished cleaning i looked at what i had accidentally typoed
  and several times i wrote "drewsdrewsdrews"
  because that is where the chicken was spattered
  and now i know i can write your name by rubbing my finger in a circle
  which sounds terrible
  and that is all

And I couldn’t be happier than the chicken recipe continues to entwine itself into my life. Soon we will be one.

Elvis Is Alive… in the Snarls of Horny Animals

How I arrived at this week’s word: +1 for it sounding funny, +1 for it having to do with animals, +10 for it having to do with sex, +.5 for it having come from Dina, +1 for it having an apparently confusing etymology, and you know, now that I think about it, another +5 for it sounding funny.

flehm (FLEM or FLAYM, I suppose) — verb: to exhibit the flehmen response, i.e., to draw back the lips, allowing scent to reach the Jacobson’s organ, an auxiliary olfactory organ found in many animals.

So not so much this:

But more at this:

Many animals can pull off such a stylish snarl, but when it’s a felid — housecats to lions — or an ungulate — deer, rhinos, sheep and giraffes, among others, though horses are by far the most entertaining — they’re not doing it to appear more badass. Instead, they do it to let some stank into their vomeronasal organ, a handy little button inside their mouth that allows them to analyze smells — especially urine smells — for information such as “Who made this?” and “Who long ago did they make it?” and also “Would they maybe want to procreate with me?”

As a verb, flehm comes from the term Flehmen response. In fact, you could also just use flehmen as a verb to mean the same thing, as in, “Is the tapir displeased with me? Or is it just flehmening?” Beyond that, however, I don’t know where this term came from, aside from German. Merriam-Webster says only that it comes from the German flehmen, which means that exactly what the English flehmen does. It had to come from somewhere, but maybe you’d need the German version of Etymonline to find out.

There’s also the weirdness of the pronunciation. Technically, flehmen is pronounced exactly like you’d pronounce flamin’, and that makes me feel a whole new kind of gross about Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. But if the word you’re using is just flehm, I feel like any speaker of American English would naturally pronounce it like you would phlegm. Because this is the sort of word that is only ever going to be used by animal science grad students, there are no dictionary entries for flehm that include pronunciation notes. And in my head, that gives me the authority to just say that it should be “flem,” if for no other reason that to avoid making people think you’re speaking rather nonchalantly about a flaming horse.

In closing, I’d like to share something else that reminds me of Dina: Vlem, a one-off Rachel Dratch character from the season of 30 Rock she was allowed to be on:

Thanks, Dina (who also suggested dewlap and flews), but also thank you, Vlem. Appy Valentime Day to us all.

Previous words of the week after the jump.

• aasvogel, acné excoriée des jeunes filles, adulterine, ageusia, ambeer, anosmia
• barn, barrack, beeturia, bissextile, bloofer, breastsummer, brinicle
• catholicon, cecaelia, cephalophore, cherpumple, chilver, chyron, cockernonnie, collywobbles, coprolalia, couvade, cranberry morpheme, crwth, culaccino, cummingtonite
• darkle, deasil, decussate, deuteragonist, dingbat, dingle
• eidolon, embiggen, epeolatry, epopt, espalier, etui, exoterica
• fabiform, Feghoot, fissilingual, Föhnkrankheit, folderol, formication, freekeh, froward
• gallinipper, gnaborretni, grandgore, grue, guilloche, gyaru
• hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, hobson-jobson, hogo, honorificabilitudinitatibus, hoyden, hyetal
• ignivomous, iracund, isabelline, itaiitai, izod, izzard
• jabroni, jamais vu, jehu, jumentous
• kaffir, kakopygian, kayfabe, knipperdollin
• lagniappe, leman, lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
• malacia, malison, maroon, merryandrew, milt, mongo, mooncalf, morepork, muzjiks
• narrenfreiheit, nef, nihilartikel, nobiliary particle, nosism, nudiustertian 
• obelus, ochanee, ogonek, ombré, ooglification, orchidectomy, ordured, orf, osculate
• pace, padiddle, paraprosdokian, pareidolia, pavonated, perendiate, perigee, perverb, petrichor, pettifogger, pettitoes, phlegmagogue, phpht, pilkunnussija, pismire, pixilated, pogonip, pong, pruniferous, puggle, pulveratricious, purse
• quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh, quidnunc, quiff
• ronion, roynish, rubirosa, rumpsprung, runcible
• salmagundi, scrutator, seneschal, sharrow, shebang, sherd, shrimpoluminescence, sinople, slampadato, slubberdegullion, stan, stevedore, suovetaurilia, suzerainty
• tappen, tatterdemalion, teratogenesis, tergiversate, tetromino, thagomizer, thon, tiffin, tittery-whoppet, tmesis, toby, tutoyer, tyro
• ucalegon, ultramontane, umiaq, umquhile
• veneficial, verdigris, vespertilionine, vinegeroon
• weeaboo, widdiful, williwaw, witzelsucht, wooper looper
• xenodocheionology, xyster
• yazoo, ypsiliform, yoink
• zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic, zinnober, zugzwang

Zirconia Ztolen!

Here, finally, are the results to the abstract music suggestion game that I encouraged everyone to play two weeks ago. I actually expected to have this up far earlier, but I was downright stumped by some of your suggestions. Today, I finally paired the last one with an actual song. Prepare yourself for the oddest, most mismatched album ever.

In no particular order:

Alice suggested “nostalgic sighs.” To this, I respond with Andrew Bird’s “Oh No.” Though lyrics about chest-embedded calcium mines may not draw up feelings of nostalgia, I feel the instrumentation on this song does, especially for a simpler era in which string sections and whistling were more common in pop music. “Oh No” tends to make me feel happy and sad at the same time, and I consider nostalgia to be the recollection of a memory that makes you feel these ways simultaneously.

I offer Electric Light Orchestra’s “Twilight” as a match for Tom’s suggestion of “A song to play in the future, as you stand on the corner of a large space cube, having defeated all the Nucleon Tessalators with only the power of your Thor-suit.” I’m probably influenced a bit influenced by the fact that I associate “Twilight” with its use in the promo cartoon for Daicon 4, a neat little audio-visual treat that I’ve blogged about before. In fact, that version of the song might be an even better match, since it has the galactatastic spoken intro. Of course, any version of “Twilight” is wonderfully spacey and triumphant.

Godaigamer suggested this: “I want a song that brings back the relief that my 8-year self felt while playing Chemical Plant Zone in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 when he found an oxygen-bestowing bubble with less than a second to spare. In other words, something with a ‘times were tough, but everything's going to be groovy’ feel.” Difficult, right? This one actually gave me quite a bit of trouble, and I felt I would be remiss if I ignored the music associations I have with Sonic the Hedgehog. After skipping over The Hollies’ “Air That I Breathe” — because a bad match and yet still OBVIOUS — I instead chose to match the idea of calm-extreme panic-calm again. The best I could come up with is Andy Votel’s “Return of the Spooky Driver.” Odd, I guess, but at least blippy enough to not be completely inappropriate for a Sonic-based suggestion.

The anonymous suggestion of “the plight of captivity,” was easy: The Mountain Goats’ “Thank You Mario But Our Princess Is in Another Castle,” a surprisingly good song and one of the few works to not only narrate a story from the point of view of Toad but also to aptly use him as a metaphor.

Dina saddled me with “Theme song for a sitcom about a small dog and its best friend, a can of baked beans,” along with the following visual aid:


I respond with the Sam Lanin version of “Yes! We Have No Bananas.” I know, I know — it’s about bananas and not baked beans, but the instrumental opening could certainly work for this awful sitcom. Of course, the show will be black and white. How could it not be?

From Rey Flowers: “A man rocking a fro, clad in only a headband and cargo shorts, sayin’ to his buddy, ‘The colors man... Do you see the colors?... Cuz I sure do.’” I went with my first association, Olivia Tremor Control’s “A Sunshine Fix” — a good, trippy song in the spirit of 60s psychedelic pop.

I think I may have interpreted Darren’s suggestion — “Finding a moment of purity and beauty amidst seedy decadence, but only a moment. Then it is gone” — a little loosely. I could be way off, but when I read the words “beauty amidst seedy decadence,” my thoughts went towards noir. From there, it was only a short movement to the main title theme of Blue Velvet, which plays over the film’s opening credits and which seems to deliberately recall the melodrama of old detective movies. Too often, characters in these films experience something deep and profound, despite their surroundings, but this connection only lasts briefly. That’s my thought process for this one, anyway.

I’m not sure what Ben’s suggestion of “dinosaur tummy time” was supposed to mean, but he gets this:

It’s from a video game. I’m not ashamed to admit that. And it happens to be the first and only thing I could associate with the suggestion. DINOSAURS ARE EATING YOU!

From BigStompyRobots: “A song to play ironically over the top of an action sequence where someone plows a muscle car into a horde of hipster zombies.” To that, I offer something knowingly retro-sounding, inappropriately upbeat for carnage and finally something those very hipster zombies would likely delight in hearing. It’s “Moto Shagg” by April March, who’s perhaps best known as the woman who sings the closing credits song in Death Proof, which perhaps influenced my choice.

Don’t ask why, Bri’s suggestion of “Those aren’t pandas” in relation to Pedobear made me think of in-your-face, inappropriate sexuality and I wound up with “Purple Wail,” better known to the world as that horn-heavy stock song that plays whenever something comically sexual happens ever.

B’s suggestion — “Sukiyaki. The dish. If the song doesn't have anything to do with the dish, what song should?” in reference to my post on the actual song “Sukiyaki” — confounded me until I stumbled onto an old Elvis Presley song that I hadn’t heard since I was a kid: “Ito Eats,” which he recorded for Blue Hawaii. It skews more toward tiki culture than anything authentically Japanese, but I think the song works, at least according to that mid-twentieth-century worldview that collapses everything between the Caucasus Mountains and the California shore into the category “over there.” While listening, please note how the instrumentation, the beat and Elvis’s voice makes the song sound oddly similar to a song from Vampire Weekend’s first album — from before they became boring.

Because why not? After B posted a comment directly after Bri, I realized that they were not, in fact, the same person. They were different people, posting from opposite sides of the country. Don’t know why I assumed they were the same person, but I commented about it. In honor of this realization, I give a schmaltzy, mediocre song that happens to have a very appropriate title: “I’m Not Lisa (My Name Is Julie),” by Jessi Colter.

Lameness of the song notwithstanding, that’s a pretty awesome title for anything — and a very neat way to shorthand someone as being easy to forget.

Finally, there’s Julia’s suggestion of “I was walking in mud and lost my boot. Now my sock is all dirty.” For this, I give The Woods’ “Rain On.” From the opening strums sounding like heavy footsteps to the general sense of melancholy the song gives me, I think “Rain On” actually matches the suggestion pretty well. Either that or the combination of the song title and the band name made me think of mud. Take your pick!

To close out this playlist, I want to offer one bonus song, which I came across recently and which I realized would be the best song ever to load onto someone’s phone and a prank default ringtone: “Monster (in My Pants),” a solo effort by the B-52s’ Fred Schneider. (“For business meetings, weekly worship services and first dates, let “Monster” be your choice to mortify friends and enemies alike!”) The song is worth a listen for the opening lines alone, though if you could somehow make the phone play the entire track — like, lock all buttons until the song ends — that would be especially good. Can anyone get on this?

You get the whole video element for this one, just because it’s kind of amazing.

And to all you commenters, thanks for playing.

Turn the World on With His Hop-Hop-Hop

Dina gave me something that I’m now happily regifting to you all: footage of the jerboa doing its thing.

The thing it does, of course, is bringing joy to the world through bird-like hopping. Not to be confused with such similar species as the Kangaroo rat, Australian hopping mice, and some crime-against-nature offspring born from the drunken mating of a titmouse and a dormouse, the jerboa is native to regions of between northern Africa and central Asia. The above one, who hops to a soundtrack that seems to have been taken from a video game, hails from Africa, while the below one is a pygmy jerboa and therefore comes from temperate Asian deserts.

Both specimens glimpsed in these videos, however, seem to live in sterile, lab-like environments. Maybe they’re adapting.

Bonus points for the second one: It falls off its pedestal about 32 seconds into the clip.

Previous things from Dina:

• The word milt
• Strange, Scandinavian words for cooties
• The Eater of Meaning
• The trailer for the 1967 film Teenage Mother
• The St. Andrews Face Transformer
  

The Lactating Fish

For those of you who read this blog and know Dina, that she supplied this week’s word should come as no surprise.

milt (milt) — noun: 1. fish semen. 2. the spleen of a domesticated animal.

Uncmmon. I feel like only those in specific professions or subcultures would have reason to refer to fish semen by its proper name. The Wiktionary definition for milt offers the word roe as a synonym. This would be true only certain circumstances: when milt isn’t referring to animal spleens and when roe isn’t referring to fish eggs or crustacean ovaries. More interesting to me, however, is the likelihood that someone — likely an older man, possibly your grandfather — is or was named Milt Roe or at least Milt Rowe, because this is now funny to me. Such men do exist, and I’ll bet they’re not aware that names refer to fish sex in two separate-but-equally hilarious ways.

Wiktionary links milt to the Old English milte, also meaning “spleen,” as well as the German and Swedish words for “spleen,” Milz and mjälte. The American Heritage Dictionary most agrees, but also suggests that milt comes from both Old English milte and a Middle Dutch word spelled exactly the same way. There’s no entry for it at the typically handy Online Etymology Dictionary. Perhaps I’m disclosing my ignorance of anatomy in revealing this, but I don’t quite understand the connection between semen and the spleen. Can anybody explain it to me?

Google Books offers another take on the etymology of milt: Reverend Abram Smythe Palmer’s 664-page Folk Etymology: A Dictionary, published in 1882. From what I’ve read, Palmer seems to debunk folk etymologies with a sense of glee. I’d like to picture him, white-haired and hunched over stacks of books, muttering and sputtering about bastardizations to his beloved English and scribbling out the etymologists’ version of a holy crusade. His book’s subtitle, “Verbal Corruptions of Words Perverted in Form of Meaning, by False Derivation of Mistaken Analogy,” gets quite close to what I imagine Palmer’s mindset was as he wrote this book.

Clear though Palmer’s ambitions may have been, however, I’m not entirely clear what he means in his entry on milt. He writes:

Milt, the soft roe of fishes, so spelt as if identical with milt, the spleen of animals, A. Sax. milte, Dan. milt, Ger. mil. It is really a corruption of milk, so called from its resemblance to curd or thick milk, as we see by comparing Dan. fisfa-melk, “fish-milk,” milt; Swed. mjolke, from mjolk, milk; Ger. milch, milk, milt.

And from this, I’m not sure whether his claiming the notion of milt and milk being related is true or rather a folk etymology. He mentions milt again in his entry on milk, however, so perhaps the former is the case. Regardless of what Palmer says, I’m not what to think, aside from that even a possible etymological connection between milk and a word for semen makes me uncomfortable in a way I’ll try to put out of my mind when I next eat cereal for breakfast.


If that’s not enough to make you feel uneasy, consider this: As we’re on “M” this week, we’re halfway through the alphabetical order I began in the first week of January. Since two runs-through of the alphabet will fit perfect in the span of one year, we are therefore one-quarter done with 2009.

Previous words of the week:

• adulterine, ambeer
• barrack, bissextile, breastsummer
  
• catholicon, cecaelia, cranberry morpheme, cummingtonite
• deasil, decussate
  
• epeolatry, espalier
  
• fabiform, fissilingual
• gallinipper, grandgore
• honorificabilitudinitatibus
• itaiitai, ignivomous
  
• jehu, jumentous
  
• kaffir, kakopygian
• leman, lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
• malacia, mongo
• nobiliary particle
• ooglification, ordured, orf
• pareidolia, pismire, pong
• quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh
• roynish
• scrutator, shebang
• tiffin, tittery-whoppet, toby
• ucalegon
• veneficial
• witzelsucht
• xenodocheionology
• ypsiliform
• zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic

Paperweights

“Anything can be a paperweight.” This was the conclusion I made at the end of a long-ago conversation with friends about the strangeness of paperweights being souvenirs that people would actually pay for. Compared to paperweights, other souvenirs are inherently better. Snow globes, for example. Or postcards. Both serve a function that a “just anything” can’t. I can’t remember if the friends and I reached a unanimous agreement on this or not, but I at least arrived at the belief that paperweights were inherently inferior to other souvenirs because literally anything can be used in place of them. A stapler. A mug. A tape dispenser. A rock. A well-behaved baby. Even a moderately heavy writing implement could successfully prevent a small stack of papers from blowing away. If one was for some reason hung up on the notion of pinning these papers down with a memento from some vacation, there’s enough to pick from on the vacation itself. A seashell. A different kind of mug. A vacation place rock. A well-behaved baby that happened to have been conceived while away. Really, anything can be a paperweight. Why do people have such problems keeping their papers from blowing away? Can’t they just close their windows or, if the problem really is so bad, move to a less drafty house?

Girl Lice, Boy Lice

Dina knows me well enough to point me in the direction of the Wikipedia page for cooties.

What you may not know: By most accounts, the word seems to come from kuto, which in various Austronesian languages refers to head lice, the non-head-residing kind of lice, and fleas. (What a great catch-all word to know if you’d rather not emerge from your travels infested.) From that word, soldiers passing through Malaysia or the Philippenes or wherever formed an Anglicized plural that we use today to refer to the germs we supposedly get from the opposite sex. (Oddly, we don’t use quite as often as adults, even though the opposite sex is just as likely to give us germs. A very specific kind of germs, depending on what you’re into.) The Wikipedia article notes that the term for this imaginary ailment has some fairly entertaining names in Scandinavia.

• in Denmark: pigelus and drengelus, literally “girl lice” and “boy lice”
• in Norway: jentelus and guttelus, also literally “girl lice” and “boy lice”
• in Finland: tyttöbakteeri, literally “girl bacteria”
• and the most entertaining of all, the Swedish tjejbaciller, literally “girl bacillus”

Good job, Dina girl, you tjejbaciller-carrier you.

The Rooster Stampede of 1978

Courtesy of Dina, two things:

The below image, in which the cut-out design in a rail along a sidewalk in some unfortunate town cast a shadow that looks like so many penises.

courtesy eyje.com

And the ensuing discussion on Reddit, which, as Dina pointed out, discusses the value — or lack thereof — in the interrobang, only a day after I recalled my original post about this elusive and so-very-special punctuation mark.

Dinnertime Vainly

Speaking of Dina, she recently sent me something that made for an amusing few clicks: The Eater of Meaning, a little application that takes text and effectively renders it into nonsense. See for yourself: Back of the Cereal Box, with meaning completely masticated beyond recognition.

There’s also a few other flavors of nonsense you can pick from.

• Whole words eaten, rather that just word endings
• Just the chewy center eaten
• Eaten and then regurgitated
• Completely eaten
• Chewed rhythmically, though I’m not sure what this one does, exactly
• Eaten with a side of spam
• Eaten with a side of harrrrdtack
• Dabbed with political ketchup

While we're on the subject, Dina also deserves credit for sending me an entirely different sort of what-the-fuck last week: thew news about the father of SNL alum Cheri Oteri having been stabbed to death by his country music songwriter roommate. Very odd.

The Calendar on Your Wall Is Ticking

Dina, to answer your question.

This is Kami and I on Halloween in 2005, I think. I'm a Crazy 88 from Kill Bill, Kami is a flamingo. I'm stabbing her because that's what Crazy 88s do to waterfowl. I scanned this photo, which previously did not exist in digital form, because Kami recently emailed me with the below image.

This is Kami and I. I'm not sure when, but possibly in 2004 or 2005. She had been invited to a school-themed party in which attendees were expected to dress up like they went to a private school and then follow a class schedule that had people shifting from room to room. Flaming Dr. Peppers in the science lab, body shots in Sex Ed, drinks vaguely associated with historical figures in history. You get the idea. In all, the party worked pretty well. But Kami had the idea to dress up as exchange students and act like we didn't understand anything. Hence the awkward, vaguely foreign clothes.

Now you know Dina. World, you too.

My Sweet Sun Bear

It makes me happy.


I first saw this image on a comment from Lela on Sanam's MySpace profile, then saw it again moments afterward when Dina sent me a link to a page on the World's Weirdest Animals that also included this very image of a sun bear. I suppose it makes sense, seeing as how sun bears aren't the most-photographed animal in the world. Plus there's the fact that if you wanted to use an image of a sun bear, the above one if, like, the best one ever.

Regarding the list of strange animals Dina forwarded to me, she did so with the note that a few of them haven't even showed up on my blog yet. That's true. Specifically, the following purportedly weird animals have already been fawned over here: the red panda, the sloth, the axolotl, the alpaca, the narwhal, the blobfish, the platypus, and, now, the sun bear. That means the World's Weirdest Animals page offers a few new ones worth mentioning.

Read all about...

The flapjack octopus, a.k.a. the far-less cute-sounding Opisthoteuthis.


The Leafy Seadragon, a.k.a. the Australian seahorse.


The Yeti crab, a.k.a. kiwa hirsuta.


And the Aye-Aye, a.k.a. Omigod-Keep-That-Thing-Away-From-Me.


The most noteworthy of this new batch of freaks, at least according to my opinion? It's the guy who graces this t-shirt from McSweeney's.

Abject Horror

More cell phone photography:


In an effort to avoid drawing the wrong kind of attention to this blog, I won't recount the story that put this expression on Dina's face. However, I will drop a few keywords: "first time," "seafood," "filled," "it went everywhere," "guy videotaping in the closet" and "she ran out with the bedsheet just stuck to her body."

Fun Teenager Ketchup Party

Stole it from Meg H., who stole it from Bri. It really did sound like fun:

Rules:

1. You guys tell me what kind of music you want.

2. In a few days, I'll post one mp3 for each of you.

You can't request music by band name or genre. You have to describe, in terms of color, mood, texture, taste, or any other creative way you can think of, what you're looking for in a song, and I'll do the best I can with what I have. Yes, that means that I may end up posting a song that you wouldn't normally listen to. That's part of the fun.

I can't use more than one song by any given band. The point of this meme is to give you a taste of new stuff, not to pirate whole CDs. If you like what you hear, you'll still need to buy it yourself. If two of you come up with identical descriptions, I have to find two bands that both fit, or use one song for both of you.

I can't make the song permanently available. Unless the song in question is already available on the band's website (in which case, I'll provide a link to their site instead of posting an mp3), I'll be taking the songs down in a few days, or posting them on a temporary host so that they'll expire after a few days.

And be forewarned: I tend to have fairly odd taste in music. Make of that what you will.

To Buffalo

This morning, the righteous Dina sent me a link to the Wikipedia page for a certain linguistic parlor trick. “I'm sure you've seen this and probably blogged about it, but it makes
me happy, and I would like to share,” she said. In fact I had not heard of this, but Dina nailed it on the head when she decided it was something worth sharing.

Generally credited to William J. Rapaport, an associate professor at the University of Buffalo, the following sentence is grammatically correct, at least in a technical sense.

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”

Technically correct, of course, is the best kind of correct. It describes the social hierarchy of buffalos at the Buffalo Zoo in Buffalo, New York. It employs three definitions for the word “buffalo”: the animal, the place and the verb meaning “to intimidate.” (Also, I should note that this is one verb I neglected to list in the post regarding animal name verbs, “Don’t Make Me Platypus All Over You.”) Translated into easier words, the sentence is trying to relate the fact that some buffaloes from the Buffalo Zoo that other buffaloes intimidate themselves also like to intimidate a third group of buffaloes in the zoo. Initially the sentence was problematic to me, even with the explanation. I kept feeling that any way I read it, the sentence omitted a crucial “that” whose presence grammar demanded.

In my mind, the sentence should have either read

Buffalo buffalo that buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

or

Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo that buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Then i realized I was leaving out one "buffalo." Furthermore, neither of these interpretations really express what the sentence should, however, and I had to read the Wikipedia’s explanation of it several times in order to get it. Even still, the correct interpretation fades out of my head the instant I avert my attention to anything else, kind of like how you can work to see the alternate interpretation in an optical illusion, but then revert back to the initial image if you stop concentrating and then have to work back to the secondary one. A major clue is which words are capitalized, as you can tell those words have to be the city, excluding the first one, of course.

To explain, I’m going to employ so font modifications. In the below sentence the bold buffalo represents the city name, the italicized buffalo represents the animal and the plain one represents the verb.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

This, to me, is the easiest way to parse the sentence. Think of every "Buffalo buffalo," with the capitalized one followed by the lower-case one, as "a group of buffalos from the city Buffalo." With that, you have

Various buffalo at the Buffalo zoo that other buffalo at the same zoo tend to intimidate in turn go and treat this third group of buffalo at the zoo in a similar way.

or

[One group of] Buffalo buffalo [that other] Buffalo buffalo [tend to] buffalo [themselves] buffalo [other] Buffalo buffalo.

or

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

It's like making algebra out of grammar, which you'd think I hate but apparently don't. Still, I can't believe I've typed the word "buffalo" this many times. Likely, more than a lot of people have in their lives, rather than Buffalo Bill. I can no longer even look at the word "buffalo" without thinking that it now looks wrong, just by virtue of me having stared at it for so long and noticing how weird it is.

The Wikipedia article also suggest others, including "Badgers badgers badger badger badgers." but I don't even want to attempt delving into those today. All of them, however, are what is known as "garden path sentences" — that is, a sentence you can't correctly understand without doubling back and re-reading. "The horse raced past the barn fell," for another example, in case your head doesn't hurt like mine.

And it's with no small sense of humor that I note "buffalo" can also mean "to confuse." Seriously, who thought "buffalo" was suitable to being a real word, anyway?

[ link: Wikipedia on "garden path sentences" ]

The Lady in the Lampshade

And from way back on Fiesta weekend, here's a little sketch the talented Dina Dina Canklesaurus drew in the dust on my lampshade. Those familiar with Dina's artistic style should not be surprised.

More Wool Than a Norsewear Fashion Show

The highlights of our trip to the Agrodome in Rotorua, all of which are sheep-related.

Clearly, I saved the best for last.

No wait, this one is the best, because he can appreciate good photography.

This is a backdated post that I wrote in 2010. After putting up the photos from my 2010 trip to New Zealand, I realize that I’d neglected to put up any photos from my 2006 trip. So now I’m putting them up, for posterity’s sake, or something. Enjoy.

Apex

I'm standing at the front of a catamaran built when I could barely walk and my daily routine consisted of Legos, playing astronaut and a very special daily event called "juice time." Ahead of me, black meets black and the only way I can tell the sea from the sky is by looking for the whitecaps that rush forward from this void and crash onto the ship's deck. The horizon — or at least the subtle distinction between black and black that I'm guessing is the horizon — bobs five feet above my head and then quickly drops out of sight, and every time the boat sweeps downward, I feel like all of us — me, Kristen, Dina, the two Canadian girls, Giacomo from Lake Como and the two guys from London, who, incidentally, have dressed up like pirates — are going to be digested by some pulsating dark-fleshed organism not unlike the giant clams we saw earlier in the day, during our first scuba dive on the Great Barrier Reef.

The crew of our ship, the Pacific Star, seems rather blase about this whole scenario. They tell us that we're welcome to remain at the front of the boat provided that we cling to the rail with two hands. (At this point, I note that the London guys' hands are occupied by (a) a rubber cutlass, (b) a can of Victoria Bitter beer, (c) a toy telescope, and (d) another can of VB, and I imagine how ashamed their families will feel when they hear that their sons were found drowned in the waters off the coast of Australia, dressed in pirate drag.) Regardless of the crew's attitude, however, we rail-clutchers have realized that a front-row seat for barrage after barrage of underwear-soaking waves is the absolute best place to be on the boat at the given time.

It's simple, really.

This being our last night on the Pacific Star, we've all been drinking, a fact generated by a choice rendered poor when the boat crossed into a stormy patch marking the place where tall, incoming waves meet an ebbing tide and the run-off of several rivers that empty into this region of the Pacific. The waves peak here, when they might not have anywhere else in the ocean, explains our skipper. As such, standing anywhere inside the boat will make even the sober passengers walk like drunkards. Queasiness ensues. And the best cure for seasickness — which, by the way, I'm just starting to get — is to look to the horizon, however obscured the current meteorological conditions may make it. Who cares if the rain is cold and stinging and may have just evolved into hail? Each large wave that hits us is as warm as bathwater, making our precarious position as figureheads on this vessel the warmest and therefore best place on the boat. We tip forward again, the water splashes and I once again hear that automatic, uniform amusement park squeal. Only when it's done do I realize that I helped make it.

- - - - -

We boarded the Pacific Star on Wednesday night, shortly after we arrived in Airlie Beach. We had initially planned for the day to have been spent at Magnetic Island — the local beach attraction near my aunt's house in Townsville, which we may well leave Australia without having seen — but whether conditions have left "Maggie" stormy enough to warrant looking elsewhere for entertainment. Not wanting to waste a day of our last week down under, we Greayhounded it down to Airlie Beach, the best place to catch a pleasure cruise around the Whitsunday Islands, a scattering of green spots that contrast nicely against the teal of Australia's portion of the Great Barrier Reef. The names of the islands are too whimsical and beautiful to seem real: among them, Daydream, Dumbell, Plum Pudding, Perseverance, and Double Cone — the last of which being "Dina's spiritual homeland," one writer points out to me.

Previous tour groups and abroad study programs have taught me that approximately ten percent of any travel party I move with will be piles of shit encases in human skin. This, however, proves not to be the case with the Pacific Star. As I systematically approach the boat's twenty-some twenty-something passengers, I find each to be remarkable tolerable — personable, even. And entirely attractive, if in a whitewashed Bunim-Murray kind of way. We're like a floating United Nations, if the United Nations actually got along together and consisted solely of Australia, South Africa, Canada, France, Italy, England, and the United States. (Like I said, whitewashed.) My favorites were easily the French couple — friendly, but withdrawn, and looking like Adrian Grenier and Mayim Bialik, respectively. (Also, you have no idea what a big part of our trip Mayim Bialiak has been. Love you, May-May. It wouldn't have been the same without you.)

So in the midst of a good travel group, Dina, Kristen and I konked out in our room — the only above-bottom level cabin and, thus, the one place on the boat where you didn't have to sleep in the smell of sewage. That next morning, we woke up to Whitehaven Beach, the nicest spot on Tongue Island and, if we're to believe what our divemaster told us, "the second-most photographed place in Australia." (He did not specify what was the first.) The sand here is ninety-eight percent pure silica, so dropping a camera on this beach effectively ruins it. That didn't stop us from taking pictures, however, and as soon as I get back to California I'll be uploading the photos from this last leg of the trip. The water was great, though full of sting rays, and those sting rays being the kind that can actually stong you — definitely not the touch tank variety. We stayed long enough to sunburn the tops of my feet — the right somehow worse than the left — before continuing to our first dive practice.

The beach they dropped us at was about as far from Whitehaven as we could get while remaining in the Whitsundays. Think Monterrey peninsula: not much sand to speak of, rocky, cold and fraught with crashing waves. Top make matters worse, the water was also littered with a fine, brown substance that our skipper identified as coral spawn — essentially the little coral gametes washing around in search of a receptive lady coral to make new life. It's here that nature first bared her nasty teeth to me and a particularly strong wave washed me over some coral and, stupidly, instinctively, I put out my hands in order to stop myself. I grazed the tips of the coral with my right hand. Bad move. Not only is sea water rich with foreign-to-landwalkers bacteria, but the coral itself, as I learned, secretes a mucous that can irritate skin. Soon enough, I was back aboard the boat. And slightly less soon, so was everyone else; the conditions proved to bad for diving, what with the coral cum clouding the water and reducing visibility to only a few feet.

We spend the night on the boat back in a cove, where out skipper turned the deck lights on. The light reflecting off the water beneath us drew moths, which in turn drew schools of small white fish. The fish proved prey for a squadron of squid, which glowed orange. The whole nature-versus-nature show climaxed with the arrival of three of four dolphins, which frolicked, lept and then ate as many squid as they could. Me: delighted. Me: awed by nature. Me: more aware than ever that even the pleasant looking nature can be vicious.

The next day, Kristen, Dina and I had our first real dive. Following a simple skills test, we floated down to the bottom of a relatively safe area of the reef. I've never before had the sensation of standing ten meters below the ocean's surface and still walking on sand. What we can't see when we above water truly is beautiful. Alien, colorful, delicate and all those other Steve Zissou adjectives. I must admit, however, that being around coral that's seen millennium after millennium roll by is slightly off-putting. As a newbie diver, I was faced with moving in a full 360 degrees of motion, as well as having plastic flippers extending the clumsiness of my body enough that I was in constant fear of kicking something that would, in turn, bite me back. Despite the divemaster's warnings, I also sliced my hand on a barnacle while gripping the rope we used to pull ourselves out from the ocean. Drew: zero. Nature: two.

After that morning, the Pacific Star sailed far out onto the reef. Far enough, in fact, that we couldn't see a spot of land anywhere on the horizon. I had never before experienced the bare curvature of the earth like this before. Our skipper told us that the area we were over was a place most diving outfits don't take tourists to. He called it "The Cathedral," though I have no idea why. See, while the certified divers took a big kids trip out, we snorkled about. I was enjoying marine-gawking at a forty-five degree angle when I felt a strange burning sensation on the small of my back. "Can't be a jellyfish," I told myself. "I'm wearing my stinger suit." So such luck, however: I quickly felt another sting on my shoulder. Fearing immediate death by the irukandji, I hopped out of the water. I had apparently fallen victim to the little fire jelly, a cute little fucker who, when agitated, sends off stinging cells that can pass through even high-quality stinger suits. I was not amused. Neither was the girl from Buffalo who took one on the neck.

I had nearly given up on becoming a man of the sea when I had a chat below deck with Heena, a Briton who had opted against venturing into the water again after the bad experience at the pseudo-Monterrey Peninsula. She reminded me that I wouldn't have the chance to dive on the Great Barrier Reef again. Somehow, she made more sense than Kristen or Dina. So I went, fearing the worst. Forty minutes underwater, breathing through that awkward mouthpiece and treading around a host of fluorescent creatures who could on a whim string, strangle, immobilize or otherwise maim me. It didn't look good, especially considering my track record, but I dove anyway.

I had a great time.

And that's as far as I'm going to attempt to write about it, really. I didn't get hurt, so I can't write about that. And as far as words in my personal vocabulary go, nothing can really come close to describing the beautiful freaks I saw on the reef. I had a great time. I don't regret it. I had a great time. I saw stuff. I had a great time. Fuck you, ocean. Take that. And I had a great fucking time.

That night, we endured the tossing about at sea I described earlier. It's all basically how I said it, even if I neglected to mention that Heena's fiance, Shaun, spent the night hurling off the back of the ship. But you don't need to know that. We survived — poor placement on the deck aside — and now the worst of it all has become a good story to tell.

The night after we returned to Airlie Beach, a handful of us met up at a bar to celebrate Dina's birthday. We commiserated with all the "I still feel like I'm on a boat!" and "Look how sunburned I am!" and reveled in the fact that a bunch of kids from different spots on the globe all know the lyrics to "Wonderwall" backwards and forwards. We drank (heavily). We danced (humorously). I went to bed (early).

For me, this was effectively the end of the trip. After returning, we had less than a week left, just enough to drive up to Cairns to catch our flight back to Auckland. But as a climax, I think it works rather well. Or is it bad luck to deem what you're doing falling action before you're done with it?

[ you snooze you lose. well i have snost and lost ]

Dum Daro Dum

I am not dead, contrary to what the level of recent blog activity might indicate. I'm writing this from a tiny, cold place called Franz Joseph Village. Glaciers and all that. We left Queenstown, the self-proclaimed adventure sport capital of the world, yesterday morning, when we were all just a bit sore from bungy jumping and a jet boat outing on a river named "Shotover." Grammatical note: people in New Zealand spell "bungy" however they feel like: "bungee," "bunjee," "bunjy," bunjie," "bungie." Who's even in a position to say they're right?

In three days, I'll be in Syndey.

The only one of us to successfully get photos online is Dina. I suggest that you all visit Dina's Flickr account here. It's not much yet, but it documents (a) me with short hair and (b) what the whole Shotover experience looked like. More to come, I promise.

Dina Says I Don't Take Good Notes in Class

So do you agree with Dina?









In my defense, my grades are as good if not better than hers.