Bachmann Bachs Off

Michelle Bachmann, holder of the coveted "Not quite as misinformed as Sarah Palin" award, dropped out of the GOP race after being told by the citizens of her birthplace to sit down and shut up. See here for my ongoing scorecard.

Never realized ...

I recently purchased my semi-annual new pair of jeans. I was aware that it was necessary to specify waist and inseam, but I never knew that gender preference figured in the sizing of mass market clothing.

Voted most likely ...

... to be overlooked in the great scheme of historical commemoration, 2012 (coming right up, here -- a matter of a few hours) begins the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812. For a good summary of this clumsy little sideshow of the Napoleonic wars, see John Elting's Amateurs to Arms!. For an even more abbreviated and less readable summary, look it up in Wikipedia. And for a completely abbreviated list of 1812's main events, see below.

Date	Event	Approx Location	Notes
6/18/1812	Declaration of War	38 52 N 77 2 W	Pres. Madison was honked off about the Brits stopping our trade and hijacking seamen ("Hello, Sailor!")
7/12/1812	US invades Ontario, from Detroit	42 19 N 82 02 W	As noted below, this didn't work out all that well for us.
7/17/1812	Surrender of Ft. Mackinac	45 51 N 84 37 W	The Brits in Ontario got the memo about war first and staged a preemptive strike on Mackinac Island.
8/16/1812	Surrender of Detroit	42 19 N 82 02 W	The US invasion force in Ontario turned around, retreated to Detroit, and then surrendered. Most of the Northwest Territory -- certainly Michigan and the western Great Lakes -- were now back in British hands.
8/19/1812	USS Constitution vs HMS Guerriere	41 42 N 55 33 W	The first of a series of disheartening defeats suffered by the Royal Navy at the hands of US heavy frigates
10/13/1812	Queenston Heights	43 9 N 79 3 W	Another US attempt to invade Canada went very wrong, with a thorough defeat at Queenston Heights, near Niagara.
10/25/1812	USS United States vs HMS Macedonian	30 39 N 27 11 W	Another of our heavy frigates trounces a British ship of nominally (but not actually) equal force.
12/29/1812	USS Constitution vs HMS Java	13 21 S 31 21 W	Just barely in 1812, a third British Frigate is administered a whuppin' by the fledgling US Navy. The Constitution, of course, is the famous Old Ironsides (42 22 N 71 3 W).

Banned words

Lake Superior State University has published its annual list of "banned" words. It should be noted that the words are not really "banned," in any sense at all (for example in the sense that kids saying "naked chimichanga" in schools seems to be banned -- don't ask) except the opprobrium which appearing on the list brings to the utterer. Nevertheless, although using them won't get you an appearance on COPS, here they are, with my own take on the choice.

• Amazing: LSSU essentially caved to overwhelming pressure from around the English-speaking world to include this word, which people perceived as amazingly overused. I tend not to watch/read/listen to the media that were blamed for overusing it, so I have no comment.
  
• Baby bump: meaning the visible evidence of pregnancy. Vulgar, for sure, but again, not widely used in the flow of communication that reaches me, so I don't care one way or the other. I guess I would have banned other phrases beginning with "baby" first -- "baby momma," "baby daddy," etc. Even more vulgar, in my considered opinion.
  
• Shared sacrifice: huh? Who says that?
  
• Occupy: I agree completely. If I never hear it again, it'll be too soon.
  
• Blowback: apparently meaning, according to LSSU, push back or resistance. Technically, it means a simple form of automatic weapon action, in which the direct pressure backwards of the propellent explosion on an unlocked breach forces the gun to cycle and chamber a new round. I would not expect the folks at LSSU to know this.
  
• Man cave: Evidently, this is the new "den." I don't care if you don't.
  
• The new normal: Whatever the speaker thinks is inevitable, as in "Being a moron is the new normal." Well, OK, as long as I can continue to define myself as not normal, I don't really care what some imbecile thinks is the new one. I think I'd have preferred to just ban "The new *" -- essentially, any trend-spotting banality that claims something other than X is the new X. "Type II body armor is the new black," for example. If "the new" is banned, I pledge to edit this post and remove the list item above.
  
• Pet parent: I hadn't even heard that one. I prefer Linda's description of herself as a dogma, personally, although I guess it makes me a dogpop.
  
• Win the future: meaningless rubbish. Right up there with "How's that ... working out for you?" Ban it, by all means, for all the good it'll do. They'll just think of something worse.
  
• Trickeration: oh, come on. Never heard it, don't believe anyone actually says it. The claim is that it has something to do with football, which would explain why I'm not familiar with it, I guess.
  
• Ginormous: meaning "big." This I have heard, and I'm fine with banning it as long as "huge" goes with it. I use that one far too much, myself, and I'd be glad to have someone dope-slap me every time I do.
  
• Thank you in advance: for not whipping out an Uzi and shooting everyone in sight. For not molesting the rattlesnakes. For not voting Republican. Back in the Eighties, we were at a national park in Ireland, and they'd created or restored a traditional cottage, complete with thatched roof. Apparently, there'd been some vandalism (or just sheep nibbling at it,) since they had a very polite sign that read, "Kindly do not interfere with the thatch." I would support a global replace of the "Thanks in advance" phrase with something more along these lines, if I thought the average Joe Bagadonuts would have any idea what it meant.
  

Although I applaud LSSU's ongoing attempts to sweep out the linguistic stable floors from year to year, there are a few words or phrases I'd have nominated for banage ahead of the entries above. Here are mine.

• Making a noun, describing a process or attribute, by adding "age" to a verb, like I just did above when I said "banage." Again, if it makes the banned list, I promise to quit doing it.
  
• Poop: can we just stop? What changed to make this extremely vulgar word OK? It's not cute, it's not any more acceptable than some other euphemisms for feces or the act of defecation, and I'm really tired of hearing adults say it.
  
• Newt Gingrich: another highly vulgar term, but if we banned it, a large amount of useful mockage would go to waste. So I withdraw the nomination, at least for now.
  
• Tea Party: not the phrase, the group, a crew of feces-heads whose moronage is so amazing that if I were to win the future, I'd be tempted to demonstrate some blowback by confining them in a man cage.
  

Oh, enough for one night. Time to go think about making dinner.

A dangerous man

I don't often agree with the Manchester Union Leader, but this time, I couldn't have said it better myself. Come to think of it, I did. Over and over again.

Really. The man is brilliant.

Over and over again, the same refrain: no matter what you think of Newt Gingrich, he's brilliant.

Maybe so. Maybe there's a method to the madness of a candidate who can't even staff his campaign with people smart enough to get him on the VA ballot. Of course, others didn't, either. In fact, only Mitt Romney and Ron Paul did. As far as I know, none of the other losers called for write-in votes, since they appear to have known (unlike Newt) that Virginia doesn't allow write-ins in its primaries. This adds up to a flaming mistake, followed by a proposed solution that would be illegal. Maybe, somehow, there's some kind of underlying tactical thing here, a brilliant scheme to accomplish ... something. If so, it's beyond my limited experience with tactics. Maybe someone else can explain it.

But ever ready with an asinine statement, drawn from his extensive study of history and massively limited understanding of it, Gingrich says that this was his Pearl Harbor. He doesn't say who played the part of Japan in this version. Whoever it was got in the first blow and destroyed all his battleships, but will eventually go down to defeat when up against his awesome industrial might. Or that's Pearl Harbor, anyway. Whether it works out for Newt quite that way remains to be seen. And of course, the guy who helped him come up with this dumbass analogy, campaign director Michael Krull, would be himself analogous to US admiral Husband Kimmel, who was Commander-in-Chief of the US Pacific Fleet at the time of the attack, and who was canned subsequently. Whether or not Kimmel deserved it, Krull certainly does -- or not, depending on whether you think it was another piece of Newt's alleged brilliance.

Here we go again

Sketchy linguistics and a vast amount of wishing-it-were-so are leading a couple of under-qualified researchers to claim that a Maya city existed in -- wait for it -- Georgia. At least they're referring to the US state of Georgia, and not the eastern European country, but the chances are about as good, either way.

Perhaps this is the 2012 apocalypse that was supposedly predicted by Mayan calendars: "In the year 2012, a future people will discover that instead of a great central American civilization, we Maya were really a bunch of rednecks from Georgia."

In a related development, two amateur archaeologists from Los Angeles reported finding an ancient Chevrolet in the Yucatan peninsula, resting on a set of ancient concrete blocks.

Just in time for holiday giving

I believe I meant to post this, at some point

The first issue of a whole new scholarly journal, focusing on things not previously discovered, described, named, or frankly, cared about.

---

Previously Undescribed: The Journal of Abstracted Breaking Research

Worminster's Monkey
First reported in 1879 by the Reverend Thomas St. Jude Worminster, this small creature was thought to be extinct, primarily because no one but Worminster ever subsequently claimed to see one; some reservations were expressed by others on the grounds that, as far as can be determined, Worminster himself never left England. However, recent extensive surveys of remote Sumatran forests have produced one blurry trail camera picture, backed up by numerous cell phone shots taken by students on holiday, of a small monkey that clearly matches Worminster's description: an animal with four legs, two ears, and a coat of brown fur. (This is Worminster's description of the monkey, not a description of Worminster - Ed.) Worminster's notes on the animal's call -- something like a first-year Divinity student, reading Milton aloud -- could not be confirmed. On the strength of the photos, though, Worminster's Monkey, Cercopithecus Miltoni Worminsterii, was immediately given IUCN's Critically Endangered status.

Bishop's Lacklustre, Warwickshire, UK
Bishop's Lacklustre is a small port on the Yangtze River, thirty versts below Copenhagen. In 1809, Viscount Nelson turned a blond eye to his orders from Neville Chamberlain and burnt the town, along with its copra-processing facilities. In the mid-nineteenth century, the eponymous Bishop attempted to undercut Canadian fur prices by establishing huge beaver farms along the plashy verges of the Nile tributaries, resulting in municipal, Episcopal, and moral bankruptcy. Bombed by both sides in the Second World War in an effort to destroy the Voysey Wallpaper Works, the town no longer exists. In 2003, a paper published by Lars-Erik Flendt of the Max Planck Institute seriously questioned whether it ever had.

Girl with a Chip on Her Shoulder, by Vincent van Gogh
While the light and the rustic scenes of Arles may have driven Van Gogh's high period, there is a body of documentary evidence that the local people had their effects as well, perhaps in a less positive fashion, on the output of his last years. The somewhat sardonic expression of Madame Ginoux in 1890's L'Arlésienne is explained by a newly-authenticated letter from the artist to his brother, Theo, in which he describes a cousin (or perhaps housemaid?) of Ginoux as being "... très difficile ..." and " ... toujours se plaignant au sujet des tripes ... " (always complaining about the tripe.) The girl in question is thus almost certainly the one depicted in his last portrait from Arles, showing a young woman of about 30, standing, dressed in a blue gown, and threatening the viewer with a broom. A dog, prefiguring in many ways Matisse's much later Interior with Dog, is scrambling, with a greater sense of motion and urgency than we often see in Van Gogh's work, to get under the couch.

The Battle of Old Sodbury, 1513
For many years, the battle of Old Sodbury was considered to have been a skirmish between mounted elements of the Scots and English armies, maneuvering in the week prior to the more conclusive fight at Flodden. Only one contemporary chronicler, Auld Wattie's Daub (the Bard of the Bog) provided any details. However, nothing loathe, a number of recent historians have used differential analysis and applied numeric norms to arrive at estimates of the forces engaged. By working from the typical composition of early sixteenth century armies, both Parker and his Belgian colleague, Henri-Joost Wafle, estimated that 150 to 200 Scots light cavalry or “prickers” rode south toward Old Sodbury on the morning of September 1st, 1513, where they discovered a slightly smaller force of English scouts, numbering around 130. A short engagement resulted, with both sides falling back toward their respective main forces. On the strength of these analyses, the Town Council of Old Sodbury erected in 1972 a stone cross on the high street, giving the date, a brief description, and the names (somewhat speculatively) of the commanders of each party.

Unfortunately, more recent scholarship, involving a better translation of Daub's Scots/Flemish manuscript, has revealed that in fact, the forces engaged on each side numbered exactly one each; the battle consisted of a disagreement between a Scotsman and an Englishmen who were drinking together in a public house and who fell out over the attentions of a bar maid. Neither was killed, since they set upon each other not with sword and lance but with ale flagon and bar stool, and when last seen, the combatants were walking away, arm in arm with the bar maid, in a generally easterly direction. Furthermore, the fight took place not at Old Sodbury, nor further south at Market Sodbury, nor even as has been suggested, a bit farther toward London at the hamlet of Miserable Old Sodbury, but somewhere along Jamaica Street in Glasgow, some 96 miles to the Northwest. The town council has so far taken no action to revise or remove the monument.

To be reported In next month's issue:

• The Late Woodland Bark Biter Culture of Central Ohio
  
• Stocking Sorter's Syndrome
  

I have no idea ...

... why this comes to mind now, but it did and you're gonna hear it.

In government contracting, there is the concept of the Woman-Owned Small Business. To paraphrase the legalese, " ... the Women-Owned Small Business (WOSB) Federal Contract program authorizes contracting officers to set aside certain federal contracts for eligible Women-owned small businesses (WOSBs) ..." A laudable provision, and nothing especially funny about it, except the last time I heard it mentioned in a business context, several years ago, the speaker referred to "small woman owned businesses." No comma or even a pause inserted.

I close my eyes and see female hobbits with Gucci briefcases hanging around DARPA headquarters. I will be writing my congresspersons shortly to propose similar set-asides for SBCOWGOBs -- short, bald, cranky old white guy owned businesses. Although now that I think about it, it's already in place, at least de facto if not de jure.