The Inferno

Not only is the build-up immense, the punchline is as anticlimactic as the Obama presidency.

Having grown too old to ring the bell in the cathedral tower, Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame, ran an ad in the local newspaper for a replacement.

An armless man appeared at Quasimodo’s door, and the old ring-master asked him, “Are you here for the job of bell ringer?”

“Yes, I am”

“But how can you ring the bell when you have no arms?”

“That’s easy. I may lack arms, but I possess an extremely tough skull. I simply run at the bell and strike it with my forehead. The tone produced is absolutely exquisite.”

“All right,” conceded Quasimodo and hired the fellow.

The man ascended the spiral staircase, climbed into the bell tower, ran to the bell, and struck it with his forehead, indeed making a lovely clang. Alas, though, the bell swung back pendularly, smashed into the poor chap, and knocked him out of the tower. He splatted on the cobblestoned far below.

When the police arrived at the scene, an officer asked, “Mr. Quasimodo, do you know this man?”

“Yes, I do,” answered Quasi. “He was an employee of mine.”

“For our records, please give us his name.”

Quasimodo furrowed his brow. “I don’t know his name, but his face rings a bell.”

Shortly thereafter, Quasimodo placed a second ad in the paper asking for new bell-ringing applicants. A second gentleman appeared who looked exactly like the first, including the state of armlessness.

Quasimodo asked the new man, “Are you here for the position of bell ringer?”

“Yes, I am,” replied the second man.

“Then I have two questions for you. First, am I wrong or do you look exactly like another fellow who was recently in my employ and who came to a tragic end?”

“That man was my older brother,” replied the applicant. “Indeed, many people have remarked that I look just like him.”

“You look so much like him,” Quasimodo went on, “that you too lack arms. How do you propose to ring the bell?”

“Easy. Like my brother, I too have an exceeedingly tough forehead, which I use to ring the bell, but I am more agile than my brother, and I have learned to get out of the way of the bell’s backswing.”

“Fine,”sighed Quasimodo with relief. “You may start immediately.”

The second gentleman mounted the spiral staircase, climbed up to the tower, and ran headlong into the bell, producing as exquisite a tone as had his brother. As the bell swayed back toward him, he deftly stepped aside and avoided getting clobbered bythe return swing.

Alas, though, three nights later, the new bell ringer got stinking drunk. He staggered up the spiral staircase, lurched toward the bell, and struck it with his forehead. As he stood there swaying, the bell swung back and knocked him out of the tower and onto the cobblestones below.

Again the police arrived. “Do you know this man, Mr. Quasimodo?”

“Yes, he too was an employee of mine, ” answered the hunchback.

“May we have his name, please?”

“I don’t know his name either, but he’s a dead ringer for his brother”

This pun is good, but it demands too much perseverance. A pun’s fleeting beauty lies in its ephemeral understanding, the tacit knowledge that it is a wordplay that needs no deeper insight or thorough investigation. A two-part pun like this deserves little mercy, if any. Only the most avid logolepts would find this pun enjoyable. This joke is from The Miracle of Language, by Richard Lederer. Read it, stranger.

Just when you thought you knew some people who’re overly pedantic with their devotion to logorrheic minutiae, this guy comes along and sets the bar at a whole new level. Or should I say, “came along”, since he’s been dead for at least four centuries now. Check out this excerpt from “The Story of French” by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow:

The earliest champion of language purism was a poet whose work very few francophones actually read: Francois de Malherbe (1555-1628). While there are many cases of literary geniuses whose writing shaped entire cultures – Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Goethe, Cervantes, Dante, to name a few – there are very few instances of a single person influencing the way an entire people think about their language the way Malherbe did.

…

Although he became the official poet of King Henry IV in 1605, at age fifty, and retained that status under Louis XIII, it was Malherbe’s literary criticism, not his poetry, that gained him repute among his contemporaries and turned him into the French language’s first real guru. In his criticism Malherbe preached the values of clarity, precision and rigour. He argued that good writing had to be stripped of ornamentation, repetition, archaisms, regionalisms and hyperbole. Malherbe rejected the idea of synonyms; in his view each word should have a definition, and a definition should apply to only one word.

…

Malherbe was quite possibly the biggest and most brazen language snob the world has ever seen. Biographers describe him as a fretful fault-finder who spent his life attacking, both verbally and in writing, every mistake – or what he regarded as mistakes – he could find and anyone who made one. He wanted to banish the word vent (wind) because it was a synonym for fart, and pouls (pulse) because it sounded like pou (louse). He feared no one, and even reproached King Henri’s son, the future Louis XIII, for signing his name as “Loys” rather than “Louys”, an inconsistency that many courtiers would not have dared point out had they noticed it. … Malherbe once refused to be treated by a certain Doctor Guebeneau because “his name sounded like a dog’s name”. On his deathbed he was still correcting the language of the woman  who was looking after him.

The emphasis is mine. I mean, this guy was correcting the language of the woman who was nursing him on his deathbed. Case closed.

Before anyone points out, I should state that I know that he wasn’t a “grammar” nazi, since he was more of an orthographic authoritarian, a morpheme Machiavelli, a lexeme licensee, a phoneme preservationist. The term “grammar nazi” is used as a catch-all for all the above, a fact that will no doubt infuriate those who truly are grammar nazis.

A few years ago, I lived in a loft close to the Metrotown area. This house was an older house and I lived in the attic. My friends co-rented the house with me and shared the other bedrooms below and in the attic. Often, as I lay in the dark, drifting off to sleep, I heard vague scrabblings on the floor and in the walls but paid them no attention, being unconcerned about nocturnal noises.

One day, I found our cat chasing a huge spider down the stairs, but before I could stop him, he’d killed the spider and eaten him. Thinking it was just an irregular incident, I ignored it as well.

One summer afternoon, as I sat at my computer desk in my room, something scuttled past my bare foot and stopped in the middle of my room. I stared at it and saw an enormous spider. I seized an empty bowl off my desk and dropped it over the spider, who was now trapped. Realizing that I had to find out if it was venomous or not, I decided to kill it by not destroying it completely. I fetched a can of RAID and shoved the nozzle into the upturned bowl, simply gassing it to death. I put the body in ice in a tupperware container and stuck it in the freezer. Before doing that, I took some pictures, so that people would believe how big this spider was. You can see how large it is, its leg-span equals that of a regular DVD case.

There are sites on the internet where trained entomologists identify bugs for you, based on pictures, but these helpful scientists are inundated with requests from all over the world. I looked for spiders with similar characteristics:  the spindly legs, huge diameter, the boxing-glove fangs and my research led me to believe that the specimen I’d frozen was a hobo spider. Not good! They’re one of the few venomous spiders in the Pacific Northwest and their bite causes deadly necrosis. I won’t post pictures, but you can quickly google it and be revulsed.

I looked around on the BC Forestry site (what are my taxes for, after all?) and emailed the resident entomologist, who happened to be on Vancouver Island. At his behest, I couriered him the frozen spider and he got back to me in a couple of weeks. Good news! It wasn’t a hobo spider, but the giant European house spider instead. Having the GEHS spider around is good, since it competes with and drives the hobo spider away.

I opened the little door leading into the attic from my room and it was a scene out of the Alien franchise. Huge cobwebs hung from the beams, while spiders scurried around in dark corners. I should mention that my roommates are severe arachnophobes and on being confronted with the frozen specimen and realizing that there were more there, they simply left the house and wouldn’t return for a few hours. Once they found out there was a giant arachnid factory in the attic, they bought me crates of RAID and asked me to empty them in the space beyond the little door.

We all moved out soon after, but at least now I knew the source of the scrabblings noises and furtive rustles in the dark. Click to enlarge the pictures below.

This makes me think there’s a bug in Thunar’s time-remaining code.

Only 292 billion years left to delete this file? No hay problema!

Today I’ll talk about subscriptions. Not to magazines or anything so banal, but subscribing to the bigger things in life.

So, what is a subscription? A subscription is the amount of emotional investment in a system, belief or otherwise. I suppose the word “belief” is redundant, since there can be no emotional investment unless you agree or disagree vehemently. Consider the case of sports. A subscriber to sports, any sport, is emotionally invested in their sport.  They know many things about their sport that the average layman doesn’t know, and presumably are well-versed in the sport itself. A firsthand knowledge of the system is not required, as seen in the millions of people who follow sports with breathtaking fanaticism but don’t play them.

How can we measure the intensity of such a subscription? It’s not an easy task. A good indicator is the age at which someone was exposed to the system. Any system which can impress someone has a much higher chance of making a subscriber out of them, and you’re always more impressionable when younger. Religion makes spectacular use of this. Witness the Jesuit saying “Give me the child until he is 7, and I will show you the man”.

The amount of friction generated between two people is a direct result of their subscriptions. Perhaps the easiest way to avoid friction and get along with every body is to simply be subscription-free, thereby making you well lubricated for any form of social discourse. This may not be tenable in all contexts, since people usually have subscriptions to their welfare, their kids’ welfare and so on. Apart from the bottom layer of Maslow’s hierarchy, why would anybody commit to anything on an intellectual level? It almost seems as if the minute you subscribe to something, you shear off numerous alternative possibilities that might have been worth exploring.

But is believing in nothing really freedom? Surely one must have some principles to live by. Hoary old apes will tell you about morals and ethics and other watchwords, things you simply must subscribe to, in order to function in society and so on. I’m tempted to say that believing in nothing is possibly the greatest form of freedom you can achieve in the world we live in. Concerned about anti-abortion or pro-life arguments? Not if you don’t care either way. How about religion? The same applies if you breezily ignore them all. What about politics then? Surely, your political views impact your way of life. Not if you skirt that entire can of worms by a mile. Who’s in power and who will be in power has scarcely ever mattered to the average Joe, who is too busy getting skewered by whoever’s in power to even care.

How about holidays like Christmas or the Chinese New Year? Again, a liberating dose of apathy will help you AND your chequebook while others rush to give each other gifts destined for landfills. Plus, you can get so much more done when not surrounded by sycophantic supplicants of whatever man-made festivity is upon you. What about sports? Worried or excited about the Olympics? The World Cup? Some tennis tournament or other ball-and-stick sport? Well, now you don’t have to be if you simply don’t care.

How about things like TV shows or books or movies, where people over-analyze and pore over fictional characters and harangue each other to death over the imagined characteristics of people created by people they’ve never met? How hard do you laugh at people who know too much trivia about a particular TV show you considered stupid and beneath contempt? Exactly. Not worth subscribing to, right? Right.

But, if you cut out music, movies, sports, books, religion, politics and holidays, what are you left with? Some might argue that that makes for a drab existence. I beg to differ. You’re free to sample any of those, just not to subscribe to any of them. The difference is that you’re not burdened with unnecessary obligations to stay updated on anything that you’re not subscribed to. Picture a hockey fan fretting over the trade of one player to some team or another, since that is how those free-wheeling mercenaries operate. Now picture me, who’s blissfully unaware of anything to do with hockey or hockey players or anything as involved as hockey trades. Ignorance truly is bliss.

But what if you really, really like something? Let’s say you really love books by Waugh. Is it not natural to pore over his every word, to analyze the merits and undercurrents of his life’s work? Surely a genius like Waugh deserves a little bit of your time. I’d have to argue that he deserves only as much time as he warrants out of the pantheon of great writers. Perhaps a little less than Dostoevsky or Kipling, but certainly more than someone like Stephen King. But to someone not subscribed to books, these names mean zilch.

So, how does one cultivate a sophisticated, empty veneer through which no subscriptions get through? The answer is simple: cynicism. A cynic knows that there is only one possible outcome to a situation, the worst. He differs from the pessimist in that he can spot the fatal pitfall in the situation and laugh about it, while the pessimist doesn’t exactly chuckle when things go wrong.

Back to subscriptions. This graph shows the proclivity of the average person for the average subscription, based on their age. The average person starts off eager to subscribe, and then it fades with age. This is only natural, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks and all that rot. A person who’s more gullible than average might be more willing to subscribe to other things as they age as well, the trick is not to be so open-minded that your brains fall out.

Keep in mind that these are just my initial musings and ramblings on a topic which I’ve been pondering for some time now. Expect the theory to get more polished and refined as time goes by and I come up with a better system for it.

There are certain times of the year when it would be more opportune to be “afflicted” by the most common type of colour-blindness.

You know it’s a prison state when….

Created by Online Education

As promised, the next in the series, albeit a little delayed.