If You’re Happy and You’re Handless, Clap Your Nubs

Because Friday is the day I blog without trying very hard, here are two photos of handless boy mannequins that I spotted at an airshow. They — along with this posting — were easily the most interesting parts of the airshow.

Why were they handless, you ask? I can only imagine that it stemmed from the presence of antique airplanes and a desire to teach children about propeller safety.

(Via my Instagram account, which I'm apparently plug on my regular blog because 2012 of course.)

On Stopped Clocks

Clichés will strangle your writing, the writers are told. I agree. If you can say something in a new way, you’re worth reading. Of course, if you phrase it in a particularly catchy fashion, you may well create a new cliché, but that’s something the future can worry about. (Come on — you live in the present.) However, a cliché isn’t necessarily dead text, I have recently realized. My example?

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

I can remember learning this expression as a kid, and I’d never thought about it until just recently. I’d always just assumed it meant what I’d been taught it meant: That even someone with a habit of being wrong all the time will eventually end up being right, so you’d better listen to them anyway, just in case this time happens to be the one when they’re shockingly not wrong. I’m guessing this is the meaning most people are getting at when they tilt their head, wag their finger and admonish someone who’s completely discounted some dumbass who has consistently proven that they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Just recently, however, I was confronted with a second interpretation. It’s less positive. Just as a stopped clock is almost always giving you the wrong time, it will occasionally get it right, entirely on accident. But that doesn’t mean that you should consider it a timepiece worth keeping around the house. Similarly, someone who’s always offering bad advice — “It feels like there’s going to be an earthquake today” or “You might get salmonella” or “Dump him! He seems like a murderer” or “The world is ending on October 22!” — could offer it every day for their entire lives and then, by sheer luck, turn out to be correct. But that doesn’t mean they knew what they were talking about.

The moral, I guess: Either listen to everyone or don’t listen to them ever, because they will either end up being right or never be right, depending on variables you have no control over.

No, fuck that. The moral is that clichés truly are awful.

Berserk for Etymology

I’d like to think that I’ve made the point here that video games, if experienced by a mind destined for dorkery, can teach you a thing or two. Just today, I realized that I’d learned one thing without realizing it.

If there’s one thing you could say sets Final Fantasy V apart from the entries in the series that directly proceed and follow it, that thing would probably be the fact that it wasn’t translated for English-speaking audiences until years after it hit shelves in Japan. If there were a second thing, it would probably be the fact that it features this weird homoerotic subplot in which two male leads seem to have crushes on a third male character, a pirate. That tension only gets resolved when the pirate reveals himself to be female, at which point the lusty feelings are never mentioned again. And that is a little unusual, if you think about it, for a video game.

But if there were a third thing, and your conversation partner hasn’t left the table because they don’t give a shit about Final Fantasy, it would be that the player is given a great deal of control over his or her heroes. With the mere change of a costume, their role in the game shifts. Princess Lenna, the main heroine? She can be your bruiser if you elect to have her play the part of the night. Butz, the hero? (Yes, Butz.) He can be a sissy healer and wave a magic health wand over everyone else. In that sense, it’s quite egalitarian.

The classes your little people can claim are largely based on stock types that had existed in the Final Fantasy series for years, but one class was new in Final Fantasy V: the Berserker. This type of character provides an interesting challenge. Though they’re ferocious in a fight and can take and receive damage like a pro, the player has no control over them. See, they’re berserk. They call their own shots, so they’re basically like an enemy character who just happens to be on your side.

They also wear animal skins — adorably pixelated little animal skins. See?

This is all information I learned back in high school, when Final Fantasy V received its first official English translation. Years later, that job title Berserker was rattling around in my head when I decided to look it up and find out exactly what it means to go berserk.

The goods, via Etymonline: Though the term Berseker was introduced to English by Sir Walter Scott, it comes from an Old Norse word berserkr, meaning “raging warrior of superhuman strength.” And while the history of that word isn’t precisely known, it’s presumed that it comes from the root ber, “bear,” and serkr, “shirt.” Bearshirt — or someone wearing a bear’s skin as clothes.

Thus, ol’ Final Fantasy V and later sequels weren’t too off the mark when the clothed their big-headed berserkers in animal skins.

And that is neat.

I’m Not a Thief; I’m a Treasure Hunter

As if I didn’t have enough secret routes leading toward some sort of representation of my life online, I have finally decided to make something of my Instagram account. I’m using it. Do follow me if you feel like you don’t have enough of me being beamed to your various screens. It’s hardly news, I know, but I suppose I might as well make every effort to publicize the things I’m sinking my free time into. Follow me on Instagram and you could see works as interesting as this one:

Which is to say that it’s not anything I can take credit for so much as a collection of somethings that I just appropriate, then ruin chromatically and then maybe blur in some hamhanded way.

This is how we seem creative now.

Owning It, I Guess

Well, some news:

But I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about it. A lifetime of TV and movies have led me to believe that my thirtieth birthday should be some milestone, dreaded as it approaches and then, once passed, a means to mature into the kind of person who can make sound fiscal decisions and maybe varnish a deck. Only I don’t feel like that will happen and am therefore forced to acknowledge that TV and movies may have lied to me. The closest I’ve come to varnishing a deck was polishing my wooden floors with a substance that later turned out to be specifically not for floors because it makes them dangerously slippery.

Cartoon watching and video game-playing, meanwhile, continue into my third decade unabated.

Know Your Irregular Demonyms!

A demonym is the adjectival form of a place name used to describe the people from that place. For California, for example, the demonym is Californian. But be warned: Not all demonyms work the way you’d expect. To avoid insult to your foreign visitors, please consult this list of irregular and unusual demonyms.

The people of Monaco prefer to be called Monagasque.

The residents of the English town of Manchester are Mancunian.

Those from the island of Cyprus are called Cypriot.

Those from the island of Crete are, unfortunately, Cretans.

If you’re from the Seychelles, you are Seychellois.

If you’re from Madagascar, you’re Malagasy.

If you’re from Halifax, Nova Scotia, you’re Haligonian.

If you’re from Oxford, England, you’re Oxonian.

Technically speaking, people who live in the Vatican are Citizens of the Holy See.

Citizens of Barbados are Bajan.

Those living in Mexico City refer to themselves as Capitalinos.

If you’re from the Belgium region of Wallonia, you’re a Walloon.

While the world knows the people of Peru as the Peruvians, they actually prefer to be called the Pervs.

Similarly, the people of Bhutan are the Booties.

If you’re from St. Kitts, you’re a Kitty Cat.

The people who live in Budapest are Budapasta.

You’ve probably heard the joke about people from Albania being Albinos. In truth, however, they prefer to be called Abba-Zabbas.

The people of Saskatoon generally prefer to be called the Saskatoodles.

Residents of Chad like to be called by their full name, Chad Ethan Allen Hollingsworth III.

Natives of the German city of Munich prefer the term Munchers.

Those who live in Antarctica just like to be called.

And, finally, it’s very impolite to mention the fact that someone is from Fresno, so there is no word for that.

Everything You Need to Know About My Hometown

I don’t write all that much about the place I grew up, but this headline sums it up fairly neatly.

Yes, it’s an actual headline, just reproduced on a foam stand for an airshow, and yes, I was at an airshow. But that’s not important now. What you should be focusing on is how it’s all here: the ambition, the inability to see that ambition through to the desired end and downfall as a result of farm animal intervention.

Home.