Yo Duh Lay He Who?

About 50 years ago a young loner in Tokyo discovered yodeling on the radio. The story doesn't end there, though, no matter how badly you may want it to.

He taught himself how to yodel and... Hold on. How do you know when you've got it right? ... Oh well, never mind. Now he could yodel and he started to appear on Japanese television. My mind balks at the thought that those two things are connected.

But our story moves on to Switzerland, where Takeo Ishii performs at a beer hall in Zurich for money. For money! And it wasn't him paying the beer hall for the privilege, either. One thing (yodeling) leads to another (more yodeling) and he gets to be on TV in Europe, culminating in the greatest nickname ever conceived: the "Japanese yodeler."

And now, the sentence that inspired me to write this blog post. I'm just going to quote it directly because there's no way to improve on perfection.

Ishii met his wife Henriette in 1981 and proposed to her three years later at an onsen (hot spring) in Japan, where he yodeled his proposal to her.

That's good stuff.

A Story Too Awesome Not To Steal, I Mean Share

Stories about penises are hardly rare, but they're rarely awesome. That's why I'm elevating this one to a full post on my own blog even though I had nothing to do with this story. A tip o' the penis hat to my buddy Pete for the link to the goods.

The original can be found here, surrounded by a whole lot more awesome in a thread about a book that looks just as awesome. To give it a little context, this is a story told by someone who has worked in an HR department about a confrontation they were expecting to go very differently.

“Is this your penis?” I asked, as I pushed the printout of the e-mail over to him. I think I was expecting him to break into a sweat or try to jump through the window out of embarrassment, because apparently I’d forgotten about the fact that this was the same man who thought it would be perfectly fine to take a picture of his penis in the office bathroom to send it to a shocked coworker. Instead he grinned cockily (no pun intended), saying, “I think the better question is, Exactly how did you get a picture of my penis?”

“It was caught in the e-mail filter. The picture, I mean. Not your penis. If, in fact, that is your penis, I mean.” I was flustered, but tried to gain control of the situation again with a deep, calming breath. “Did you mail a picture of your penis?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Would it make it better if I said I was mailing pictures of someone else’s penis?”

I’ve thought about that question for fifteen years and I still don’t have a good answer. Instead I said, “Not really. Giving a coworker a picture of a penis is sort of universally frowned on. It’s in the employee hand book. Sort of. It’s between the lines.”

“Is there anything in the handbook about someone in HR handing you a penis picture and asking you whether it’s yours?”

Well-played, penis man. Well played. Awful and awesome should mean the same thing, and now they do.

Weekend Diversion

I found the first video on a site called Manboobz which listed it as a Steely Dan cover band. So you can be sure it's quality stuff. Yup.

Just one more practice and they would have nailed it.

See?

On a more serious note: I firmly believe that not everyone should have the right to buy a musical instrument.

Okay. Palate cleanser. Santana shreds!

World's Greatest Mystery, Solved!

I once heard tale of a young woman from Japan wandering the halls of a Canadian mall, looking for a taste of home to to fill the hole in her homesick soul. "Excuse me," she'd say to passers-by. "Where can I find shoe cream?" They'd point her to the nearby Footlocker store with a bemused smile. She walked dutifully to the shoe store, but never entered. She simply looked in with sad eyes.

She didn't want shoe cream. So what did she want?

Well, There Go My Followers

Gone are the days you could merely cull the eggs. Now the eggs have hatched, revealing the gooey but familiar image they contained, making a sound not unlike a random profile generator. It's a lot like someone describing themselves, but lacking any real sense. You can tell it's not real because, while people make mistakes, these mistakes are the wrong sort.

They come across as nonsensical rather than stupid.

It had been a while since I checked my list of followers on twitter, largely because I don't care. I only started on twitter as a way of making fun of it but it manged to out-wit me. My intention was to periodically baa like a sheep. Twitter doesn't let you make the same post over and over again. I gave in. I started to make real comments. Frustratingly short ones, but still real ones.

Should I be sad that a spammy spambot sometimes generates more interesting and amusing profiles than a real human? As I was going through the list, blocking eleven apparently fake followers in a row, I felt a strange sense of loss mingling with the usual hatred. Sure, most of it was just obvious gibberish. (eg. "Favorite movie - Woman in the Window, The" or claims to be 230 years old.) But other parts have a decided ring of Engrish to them. Who doesn't love Engrish?

Found in Translation

It's commonly said that things get lost in translation. I think that the opposite is also true, that new meanings emerge.

Cocker - I - I heard there's your problem with the sauce in a hospital that got unplugged from the growth of hair in the ears.
I Bless you Mr. Shin
Yan dying old man - I like that (laughs).

Is this how it feels to be an anthropologist? To find meaning in a jumble of words in the dead language of a dead culture? Teasing out real ideas from what looks to be lunacy? There was probably a coherent train of thought in the original. What was it? Is it possible to know from what we have?

There's a problem with the sauce, indeed.

Nightmares and Other Odd Dreams

Last night I had that same old dream
It rocked me in my sleep
It left me with the impression
That the sandman plays for keeps
~Larry Norman

We were in a castle. My best friend was sitting in a window sill. Over his shoulder I could see a hilly landscape on a sunny day. Suddenly and strangely, the dream turned ugly. My friend, laughing, ordered a man with both Down Syndrome and an axe to kill me. I ran away, completely overwhelmed with terror. To make things worse I started to feel an incredible fatigue, almost as if I was, ironically, falling asleep. My steps shortened and my muscles relaxed, but my terror remained. I stopped running and crumpled to the ground, incapable of any kind of movement yet still very aware of my surroundings. My friend was still laughing.

I woke up, terrified, as the axe blade started to bite into my neck.

It's Stifling in Here!

Photo by David Shankbone

Said Fox News chief Roger Ailes of the reasons behind Glenn Beck's departure: "Advertisers who get weak-kneed because some idiot on a blog site writes to them and says we need to stifle speech, I get a little frustrated by that."

I spent a little time wondering what he meant by "stifling speech". It's obviously not about Beck's ability to speak. That's unchanged. And he can do it in public, too. Then there are the books that he publishes. He's losing his TV show at Fox, but I haven't heard that his radio show is over. Oh, and he has a website.

So what does stifling speech mean to Roger Ailes? I guess it means that nobody is willing to pay Beck millions of dollars to speak on TV. With that it mind...

Stop stifling my speech!

Quote of the Day

From a comment on Anthony Watts' delightful blog, "Watts Up With Dunning-Kruger?" comes this gem from Dr. Dave (I can only assume that's his real, full name):

We have many fine spokesmen on the side of realism; Anthony Watts, Christopher Horner, Patrick Michaels, Roy Spencer, John Christy, Richard Lindzen, Fred Singer, etc. Lord Monckton is unique. He is an eloquent, gifted orator.

Why list all those ineloquent, un-gifted orators? Isn't it enough to simply say that Monckton is unique in that he is eloquent and gifted? Isn't that enough of an insult without having to specifically name all those without talent? And the first one is the host of the blog! Normally, Watts comes down hard on anyone who uses a pseudonym while not kissing his ass...

Anthony Watts

Seriously, Rosemary?

At the start of 2010, a company that makes music software (Image-Line) announced a new product that they would soon be selling: Drumatrix. It combined a physically modeled drum set and an internal step sequencer. And you could name your own price. And they would donate some of the money to Haiti. How cool is that? Very.

It wasn't long, however, until they were sent notice that "drumatrix" was a term already in use by someone else; somebody named Rosemary Schonfeld, who has written a book on "a different approach to drumming" called Drumatrix. I should point out here that I don't know the exact order of events. It may be that Image-Line started work on their project, noticed the name after doing a search, sent an inquiry and then received a negative reply.

Signed, Onymous

I was meandering my way through the climate science wing of the internet the other day when I came across something that amused me. Besides my longtime, nerdy interest in actual science I also find the psychology of the participants quite fascinating. Not only do you get exposed to such exciting concepts as denialism, authoritarianism, projection, Morton's Demon (aka confirmation bias) and Dunning-Kruger syndrome - you also get to see them in action!

The following excerpt of a comment comes from someone claiming to be Tim Curtin (who?) on a climate science blog called, "My view on climate change". Hmm. What the name lacks in creativity it makes up for in simple honesty, I guess. Anyways, nobody else seems to have noticed this section of comment at all (or didn't feel it worth commenting on) and it's off-topic so I won't clutter that thread up. Also, I find it to be a subject worth a full posting of my own, so I'm writing about it here.