From an unknown source, possibly George Carlin:

Four for Fore

We’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes;
but the plural of ox became oxen not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
why shouldn’t the plural of pan be called pen?

If I spoke of my foot and show you my feet,
and give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
why shouldn’t the plural of booth be called beeth?

Then one may be that, and three would be those,
yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
and the plural of cat is cats, and not cose.

We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
but we say mother, we never say methren
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
but imagine the feminine, she, shis and shim.

So here are some reasons to be grateful if you learned to speak English by immersion:

>The bandage was wound around the wound.
>The farm was used to produce produce.
>The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
> He could lead if her would get the lead out.
> The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
> Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.
> At the Army base, a bass was painted on the head of a bass drum.
> When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
> I did not object to the object.
> The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
> There was a row among the row of oarsmen about how to row.
> The buck does funny things when the does are present.
> After a number of Novocain injections, my jaw got number.

Let’s face it – English is tough.

There is no egg in eggplant not ham in hamburger; neither apple or pine in pineapple. English muffins weren’t invented in England or French Fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren’t so sweet, are meat.

We find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. And why is it that writers write but fingers don’t fing, grocers don’t groce and hammers don’t ham?

Doesn’t it seem strange that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one, what do you call it? If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?

In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell? How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which an alarm goes off by going on, and when the stars are out, they are visible, but when a light is out, it’s invisible.

How do you write about one of the best weekends you’ve ever had?

A simple chronology doesn’t seem to do it justice: My new girlfriend S came over on Friday night, we went out to a goth club, spent the afternoon together with kellyv Saturday, my ‘other’ girlfriend M came over Saturday night, we hosted PolyTampa Sunday, went out to dinner with S’s other significant others afterward.

The weekend as I remeber it isn’t really a chronology anyway. It’s more like a series of impressions, strung together like beads on a necklace:

Making out with S, who normally is moe inhibited about public displays of affection, on the deep couch on the edge of the dance floor, while alternating scenes from “Tron” and “A Clockwork Orange” play on the screens over our heads

Her hands and lips and tongue on me later that night

Waking up to the smell of kellyv‘s cooking the next morning, spending a lazy afternoon curled up on the couch getting some serious cuddle time in

M’s whirlwind arrival, and the first real in-depth conversation she and S have had; delighting in how well they get along together

M crawling into bed very late in the morning, waking me up just enough to untangle and curl up with her; falling asleep again between her and S

S’s teeth on my neck that morning, arousing me from my sleep; her evil giggle and her Wy don’t you see if M is awake?

The look of sleepy delight on M’s face when, voyeur that she is, she woke to S’s soft moans

kellyv laughing: I hear you! I know you’re awake!

Discovery: Yes, three people can fit in the upstairs shower; finding out how much fun it is to be sandwiched between two soapy bodies

More kellyv cooking; later, a house full of friends

Dinner, and conversation: Philosophy, mishaps with liquid-fuelled model rockets, plans for a trip to Atlanta for decadent chocolate fondue

More extended cuddle time with kellyv that night, and Monday morning

Flirting with S on the Webcam while getting ready for work

Even that doesn’t do it justice, not really. I feel very blessed and very fortunate to have made the connections I have made in my life, and that the people around me have chosen to share a part of their lives with me.

Her: “I’m going to hurt you. With my elbows.”

Yes, the tattoo is real.

And where she stops, no one knows…

Last Thursday and Friday: Spent some time in Port. St. Lucie, across the state, setting up a computer network for a client. Met the new person in my life out there; she spent the night with me.

Her: You just love to torture yourself and everyone around you, don’t you? (Yes, in a good way. Sometimes, the anticipation of a thing can make the consumation of that thing so much more intense…)

Saturday: PolyTampa Christmas party. Spent some more time with her and with a number of other friends, where we carried on a lively and spirited discussion on the merits of my plan to build a full-sized, working trebuchet, a piece of seige equipment used to destroy castle walls during the Middle Ages.

Her: I’ve changed sides. I agree with Kelly…you shouldn’t build a trebuchet.
Me: You can’t do that! You’ve already agreed to be my henchman.

After the party, she and her two significant others spent the night with kellyv and I. And Kelly cooked breakfast for everyone…

Me: Bacon is one of the things that makes life worth living.
Her: I don’t eat mammal.
Me: Yeah, but…it’s bacon!

Sunday afternoon: lordfuckbeast and I discussed plans to attend AVN in January, the large yearly sex toy convention held in Las Vegas.

Her: AVN! I so want to go.
Him: Okay, but you won’t get to see much of the show. I’m going to keep you in the booth and give you orders.

Sunday night: Photo shoot for the new Web site some friends and I are working on. Midnight nudity in busy downtown Tampa.

Security guard: You’ll have to leave. No photography is permitted in this parking lot.
Him: Why, is this a SENSITIVE parking lot?

The next few weeks are going to be chaos, distilled, refined, and concentrated into its purest essence. Virginia in two weeks, for obligatory visits to the inlaws, then on to San Francisco on January 4th, and Las Vegas (if all goes well) on January 9. Miami in the end of January. Meetings, business, parties, and other ancillary chaos-related accessories between now and then.

Life should be lived to its fullest. All things to excess. Moderation is for monks.

Goddamn if kellyv doesn’t know me better than I know myself.

The weekend before Thanksgiving, we spent at a party with the members of our local polyamory group. I had the good fortune to be able to spend some time talking with an intellegent, fun, fascinating woman I’d seen in passing a few times before, but never had the opportunity to get to know.

Something clicked, and we discovered we get along really quite well.

Fast-forward to this last weekend. kellyv and I invited her over for the weekend. She spent Saturday night a nd a good deal of Sunday with us.

Fireworks.

Something unexpected and completely wonderful passed between us, something neither of us had expected at all.

Which brings me to kellyv–who was the only one of us to be completely unsurprised. She says she could see it in the way we were talking at the Thanksgiving party. Would’ve been nice if she’d warned us about it, but…

It’s nice to know that even at my age, I can still be surprised. it’s nice to know I don’t know everything about myself, and it’s refreshing that life can still find a way to kick me in the pants every now and then.

It’s also nice to be able to welcome someone like her into my life. She really is a rare and unexpected gift.

My “other” girlfriend, M., took it all in stride: Yeah, you seem to stabilize right around a wife and two girlfriends.

Things Franklin Hates #117:

Writing a post in response to someone else’s comment, then having the post bounce because that person’s journal accepts posts only from friends (and the owner has at some point removed him from her friends list without him noticing, because he’s not very detail-oriented that way).

Some time ago, lordfuckbeast and I ran an interview with William Gibson, in which he compared the formation of online communities in cyberspace (a term he coined, by the way) with the development of the world’s first cities and the change in human society from agrarian to urban.

A bit over the top, I thought, but now I’m not so convinced he isn’t right.

kellyv has on many occasions expressed doubts about the depth of one of my romantic relationships, on the grounds that I first met her online, and most of our contact was online, so I couldn’t really have known her all that well.

Had I never experienced that kind of connection, I would no doubt be skeptical myself. But the fact is, online communication can be a remarkably intimate thing. It is, in its way, even more intimate than the telephone–because the apparent anonymity, the very lack of the immediacy of a verbal or face-to-face conversation, can itself facilitate lowering one’s defenses to this other person. After all, it’s only text on a screen, right?

The thrust of Gibson’s argument is that, throughout human history, every society that has ever existed has been predicated on geography…until now. Before the Information Age, you belonged to the society in the place where you live. Now, for the first time in history, societies can form without regard to geography or physical location at all.

But it’s a mistake to think that those societies are “less real” than the geographical kind. They take on a life of their own, just as traditional societies do; they grow and change over time, they form bonds as strong and as intimate as those you see in more conventional societies.

I still prefer the physical ones to the kind that exist in cyberspace. Maybe I’m a traditionalist; I do like to get to know my friends in person, and I prefer physical touch to its more ephemeral online counterpart. (Though that may change one day…)

Anyway, I was amused to see that I had a user on my friends list when I first joined the LiveJournal community, whos eventually deleted her journal; and now it’s been long enough that someone else, entirely unrelated, has begun a new journal with the same name. Does that make me a grizzled elder of the community? (Or does it just mean that I neglect to update my friends list for so long that everything old is new again?)

From C|Net news:

“A secretive federal court on Monday granted police broad authority to monitor Internet use, record keystrokes and employ other surveillance methods against terror and espionage suspects.

At a press conference Monday afternoon, Ashcroft applauded the ruling, characterizing it as a “victory for liberty, safety and the security of the American people.”

Ashcroft said the ruling marks a new era of collaboration between police and intelligence agencies such as the CIA and the National Security Agency. ”

Maybe I’m being a bit slow here, but I fail to see how granting law enforcement broad, warrantless espionage powers, and allowing the FBI to call in the CIA and NSA in domestic cases, counts as a victory for liberty. Obviously, I should be sent to a re-education camp to bone up on my doublethink.

For quite a while now, I’ve made a small project of collecting things that everyone knows are true, but really aren’t true anyway. I’ve been working on this project on and off for quite some time, and come up with a few examples of such “common knowledge” so far. For example:

“It takes the police 2 minutes (or sixty seconds or some other amount of time) to trace a phone call.”

This has long been a staple of bad Hollywood thrillers–“Keep him talking! Keep him talking!”–but the fact is, tracing a phone call takes zero seconds. The call is traced before the phone has finished ringing. You don’t even need to answer it.

“There are three states of matter.”

Actually, there are six states of matter: Einstein-Bose condensate, superfluid, solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Of the six, five occur naturally thorughout the universe (Einstein-Bose condensate occurs only in the lab); and four of those–solid, liquid, gas, and plasma–occur naturally on Earth.

“Someone who passes out on his feet will fall over backward.”

Also a staple of Hollywood. In reality, if you lose consciousness standing up, you fall over forward.

“There are three primary colors.”

The human visual system responds to photons with a wide range of diffeent wavelengths. Most people have three distinct receptors in their eyes, which are maxinally sensitive to a relatively narrow range of wavelengths; however, all three receptors do respond to all visible frequencies of light. (Some people have only two kinds of receptors; these people have red-green color blindness. A few people have four, and can distinguish colors most people can’t.)

Because all the receptors do respond to all frequencies of visible light, it is impossible to model certain colors based on any one set of primaries. For example, pure, 100% saturated yellow can not be modelled by any combination of red, green, and blue light. You can get yellow, but you can’t get pure yellow.

“Science says bumblebees can’t fly.”

Actually, science says bumblebees are aerodynamically unstable, which means they can’t glide. Many things that are aerodynamically unstable can fly–including bumblebees and Stealth fighters.

An aerodynamically unstable object can fly if it has an active stabilization system. In a bumblebee, that system is the animal’s sensory apparatus, brain, and muscles; in a Stealth fighter, it’s the plane’s gyroscope, onboard computer, hydraulics, and control surfaces.

In all such objects, if the active stabilization fails, the thing glides about as well as a rock.

“The Eskimoes have fifteen words for snow.”

This idea comes from a linguistic hypothesis called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which postulates that a civilization will develop more words for concepts that are most important to it. In practice, it doesn’t quite work that way.

The Eskimoes have three words for “snow,” which translate roughly as “snow,” “sleet,” and “slush.” They also have a distinct word for snow on the ground versus snow in the air, but then, so does English; “blizzard” and “snowstorm,” as distinct from “snow.”

“The rubber tires on a car will protect the car’s occupants from lightning.”

This common misconception is downright dangerous. Yes, rubber is an insulator; however, rubber tires and rubber-soled shoes offer zero protection from high voltage. Air is also an insulator! Anything that can get through six miles of air is not going to stop for a few inches–or even a few feet–of rubber.

You are safe in a car, provided you do not touch any metallic object, because of the shape of the car, and its construction, not because of its tires. The electrical discharge will tend to travel around the car’s metallic shell, rather than passing through the metallic body and into the car. Rubber-soled shoes do not protect you from lightning (or other high-voltage discharges) one little bit.

“Water conducts electricity.”

Another common misconception about electricity. Pure water is an insulator. It does not conduct electricity. Water becomes a conductor only if there is a polar compound, such as salt, dissolved in it. It’s actually the salt (or whatever) that is carrying the electricity–not the water.

Over for times worse, in fact. Don’t believe me? Just ass Bill Gates, the man who gave $100 million to fight AIDS in India, and gave $421 million to fight Linux in India.

So now you know.