The Whisper of Elitist Whorfianism Is an Awful Sound, particularly when the "original" meaning you defend is incorrect; particularly particularly when the incorrect meaning you're defending as the Last Noble Carrier of Such Meaning in Human Thought is already covered by another, equally apt phrase; particularly particularly particularly when your Chicken Little language schtick has been so overdone that you must defend yourself against strawmen springing up from its corpse.

The L.A. Times needs some funnier commentators, stat.

My car has a case of pixies. Found this out Saturday afternoon as it clicked ominously, spluttered and died on the freeway, got towed to the shop, and then closed up any and all coolant/oil leaks before the mechanic could find 'em.

D'oh! At least I didn't melt the engine block. All's well that ends well, minus $125 and some time spent getting all excited about nebulous diesel Volkswagen Rabbits that would one day run on french fry grease.

Two days thinking the car was ready for the junkyard made me realize a very important and basic fact: I love shitty cars. I love the feeling of continually overcoming adversity while driving, the selfish glow that comes from knowing no one else will ever understand my car's little quirks, and the constant search for replacement parts rusting on the side of the road. I love hurling freeway invective from the underdog's perspective and winning endless games of one-downsmanship. And of course I love not having to pay for comprehensive or collision insurance.

By all accounts an '81 Rabbit would be a very shitty car, certainly shittier than is practical given my lack of interest in the dirty work of repairing and maintaining automobiles. But I want one! Owning one would make me hard core and awesome! Kind of like how smoking makes you cool but is also way more expensive and less fun than you realize when you start.

Update 30/4: Hmm. Got home tonight after a particularly lousy run of stop'n'go traffic, and turned off the engine only to hear a nasty hiss. Opened the hood and out came clouds of steam, emanating from a point just behind the engine block and somewhere below the plastic circle throttly-thing that blocks the view into the rest of the car. Do any of you fine readers know things about stuff?

A couple of my coworkers have been saying things like "they're giving you responsibilities, that means they must like you!" but seems to me that's kinda like saying "that bear ate your son, it musta really thought the boy was tasty!" - tasty or not, it precludes heavy lifting on the blog, anyway.

• Are people with eczema more disgusting than slugs? I don't know, 'cause the Beeb's disgust survey hasn't shown me any slugs yet. But there've been lots of plates of colored goo! And evolutionary psychologists predicting that kittens are yucky!
• dog found!
• Last night I dreamed that there was an earthquake. Then I dreamed that it wasn't an earthquake, just Peter getting really cold and shivering to make the futon rumble. It was neither! How's that for accurate prophesy?
• Surely some clever genius can combine elements from the old roll-yer-own sarcastic Bush/Kerry campaign sign generators with this custom McDonald's promotion sign generator? I'd like my banner to have a flag on it or something.
  
• Two comments on transitional spaces which would probably taste great together on a more thinkier day: joseph on Los Angeles (scroll down, it's a comment; joseph's own blog is well worth noting too) and Rana on that little slice of land between on-ramps.

(two links via BoingBoing)

The Final Theory -- A Scientific Revolution has Arrived! Reclaim your birthright of understanding, and get answers to all those pesky unresolved questions your high school physics teacher refused to talk about, like:

Q: How can a fridge magnet cling against gravity endlessly without draining a power source?

A: It can't ... fridge magnets are impossible according to today's science. [...] Endless magnetic energy apparently emanates from permanent magnets without any explanation in our science. The only explanation that any physicist will give for this mystery is that there is no mystery at all since the magnet isn't moving, which gives a zero result if you plug this into the Work Function. No physicist will discuss this matter further.

Is there anyone on the Internet who has not yet grasped the nearest book in their grubby little carpal tunnel afflicted paws, opened it to page 23, and typed the fifth sentence into their blogs? No? It's just me then.

You know why I held off so long on this? It's not because I'm above the replication of such uninspiring exercises (though of course I have been above such things in the past, and will likely resume my policy of firm disdain in the future), it's because I couldn't figure out which book was closest, because there aren't any on my desk. How shameful is that? Rather than lazily stretching out my hand to have my fingertips brush against Gravity's Rainbow or Wallace Stevens or even a smartly utilitarian programming manual, I bash my knuckles on two empty glasses of milk before finally reaching an old utility bill:

Any amount over $25 will be assessed a delinquency penalty of 3%.

Page 2, page 23, close enough. But-- do I really keep books at such great remove from my everyday life that I have a more intimate relationship with Pasadena Water and Power than with the imaginative splendor of the English language? How can I remain in this modern company of letters, purporting to correspond as an equal with those who would never allow Lord Byron to drift more than 10 feet from their sides? I am a traitor to the global nation of the mind!

But wait! The stack of bank statements and pay stubs and hair scrunchies and tape also includes my sewing machine manual! Page 23 is in Spanish:

Si no lo hace, puede da�ar el gancho pase por el ojo de la aguja y enganche el hilo.

And so you see I am a sophisticated intellectual after all, and my life is full of books. Some of them are even properly bound and not just stapled. That is why I maintain a blog, to indulge, express, and display my reified intellectual whimsy and thereby deepen my relationship with sophistication!

You may express admiration amongst yourselves now, for I am going to bed. Good night.

I am an industrial solvent marketed as TECSOL Special Industrial Solvent by Eastman Chemical Company. I am available as both 95% and anhydrous. I am denatured with methyl alcohol and methyl isobutyl ketone.What industrial solvent are you?

A bit disappointed that I'm not one of the ground water pollutants I butt heads with at work... but you can't expect your industrial solvent identity to be handed to you on a silver platter I suppose.

Also, the first person to develop a convincing folk etymology that relates bunyips
to Paul Bunyan wins a prize!

I must remind you all that even though I now work as a highly sophisticated GIS'n'Excel monkey, I'm still a geophysicist, god dammit. And someone's been sucking the physics right out of geophysics, to replace it with stupid not-at-all trendy math:

Keilis-Borok's team now predicts an earthquake of at least magnitude 6.4 by Sept. 5, 2020, in a region that includes the southeastern portion of the Mojave Desert, and an area south of it.
...
Still, not all seismologists are convinced. "Application of nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory is often counter-intuitive," Keilis-Borok said, "so acceptance by some research teams will take time. Other teams, however, accepted it easily."

Dude that is so last decade! Chaos theory hasn't been cool since Stephen Wolfram wrote that book and ruined it for everyone; you may as well just get drunk and watch Pi while wearing nothing but your most-falling-apartest pair of underpants, for all it's going to help you pick up cute grad students at AGU. On the other hand, a casual mention of the snakes in Haicheng can work wonders. Snakes are sexy classics that are currently back in vogue!

Sure, my house falls more or less within "the southeastern Mojave, or maybe Palm Springs, or someplace in the San Bernardinos or near one of those other places starting with San" but I'm not falling out of my chair to stock up on bottled water.

New stylesheet, featuring one of my beloved potato-leaf tomato seedlings (try it here if you've got a style-cookie set) and I'm still feeling kinda nerdy, so I might try some more hacks tonight. Maybe everything will break, maybe it won't. WHOOSH!

8:56 PM Just installed the MT rebuild type mod. It's meant to improve commenting speed, mostly, by making MT smart enough not to rebuild everything every time I get a new comment. No noticeable improvements, but then again, ain't nothin' broke neither.

Someone is pointing fingers:

jocelyn wertz

Yes, she is awesome and we have the same birthday but I haven't seen her for years! Are you stalking her, mchsi.com? I can't help you with that.

Update 13 Apr: hmm, maybe I can help you with that. But first you have to answer just one question: Dude, what the shit?

Anyone else who wants to find someone I went to high school with, please put their name as Googlebait in your own semi-coherent natterings. I'm not the alumni association, you know, and I can only handle so many small-world Internet coincidences.

Longer spout from danny:

if you run into joe euclid, please ask him to e-mail me. he was an icon around Stanford before he got to caltech. we lost contact, but tell him that i ran into Irwin who told me that he (joe) was in the Los Angeles area.

Sure thing, though I'm not sure I'd know Joe Euclid from Millikan Man. If any of you dearest readers run into him, pass on the message, eh?

Purple Alert! Purple Alert! Your daylight is unsafe!

Oh yeah? It's all kinds of safe now, thanks to Time and the Pacific Ocean! They have teamed up for some serious daylight-saving. It's like the Justice League, but better because Martian Manhunter never helped me spend more time in the garden after work, and Wonder Woman doesn't have tide pools.