the mofo with the info.

1. Meditations on Babel

Look at units of measurement. I’m pretty sure that every kid in the civilized world, when they first learn of the differing units of weight, measurements of length, and degree scales for temperature, thinks to themselves at some point… what the fuck? Every seven year old that struggles remembering how many inches equal how many centimeters (and that it’s actually centimeters, you damn Yank), must think to themselves, what purpose do these competing systems offer?

Look at driving. Someone, somewhere, at some time invented automobiles and motorcycles, and through word-of-mouth, demonstration, and those nifty Mitsubishi ads with über-cool music, convinced the civilized world that they were a pretty neat thing to have. Now… how, in the spreading of this idea from person-to-person, did some people decide that it was a good idea to drive on the left side rather than the right or vice versa? If it wasn’t for my local friends and relatives, I would have been turned into roadkill 10 times over now, with my 26 years of experience looking left before crossing a street.

Look at spelling. This topic is too exhausting to cover right now, but the American version of spelling “check” just makes more sense. Right now, Australians spell the bill at a restaurant “cheque”, and then the v-shaped mark that you put in a box “check”. However, when signaling for the “cheque”, they make a “check” in the air towards their waters. Unless this is some sort of hilarious visual pun, then their system is just inconsistent, and silly.

And you don’t even want to know how many power adapters I’m lugging around in my suitcase.

Maybe it’s because I just read Snow Crash or because I’m doing my “Australasian tour” at the same time as everyone else I know, but I can’t help but notice that most of the differences dividing Americans and our pseudo-English speaking brethren here are basically standards issues. So many of these ideas are tied into our concepts of nationalism, and serve as a large part of our cultural pride; I know that a lot of the American spelling differences were a conscious effort on the part of American revolutionaries to rebel from their tea-sipping bastard parents. Is there any hope for a unified system of standards, such that a global coalition could eventually be formed, which will eventually join the United Federation of Planets in the distant future? For the sake of the possibility of First Contact and the Prime Directive, I beg that all people of the world unite behind a common standard! Naturally, we should just use the American systems, as they’re pretty much a global standard, right? While were at it… It’s pronounced “soccer”.

2. The Prophet of Coolness

The great thing about being an American tourist, is that you can be the most out-of-touch loser in the United States, and still be more ahead of cultural trends than every single person you meet. Though not one of these Wallaby-eating Aussies (dat’s pronounced “ozzies”) has heard of “Death Cab for Cutie”, I can tell them with total certainty that they will be huge here in about two months, and they nod eagerly, as if I have shared with them some secret gem of cultural importance; they look around nervously, as I have surely violated the space-time continuum by delivering this gooey nugget, stolen from their future airwaves. Despite never having watched a single episode of last season’s American Idol, I know who won; this information is apparently toxic to the local television viewers here, who constantly beg and barter with me not to reveal this classified information (Note to self: make a t-shirt). In an age of the blogs, Wikipedia, and BitTorrent (for the non-savages out there), it seems that the people here live in constant fear of having their cultural future revealed to them, and only remain ignorant through extreme diligence. At the same time though, they sit enrapt as I regale them with tales of the modern United States, and, by inference, their own dark and unavoidable path. I guess it’s no difference from Californians waiting 3 hours to find out who their Next Top Model or American Idol, or Survivor, or Apprentice is… but I guess I’ve never understood them either.

On a separate note, I also have haunted-looking girls ask me pleadingly to explain what a “Hollaback girl” is. Unable to abate their confusion, I look away, as if I have not heard their question…

3. Touristy Crap

ZOMG! Kangaroos!!one!

Drawer is a weird word. It’s about the weirdest word I can think of at this moment. The more I look at the word drawer the more and more freaked out I get.

For one thing, there’s the whole pronunciation thing (ugh, “pronunciation” is a weird word too… I’ll have to get back to that later). According to dictionary.com, the correct pronunciation (!) is “drô’ər” or “drôr”, but I’m pretty sure that I say “drōr’ər”. Wiktionary doesn’t even list the pronunciation I seem to use, but it lists several others… of course, that list may have just been created three minutes ago by a crack addict planning on using wiktionary in an elaborate scheme to scam the Russian government. Furthermore, the word has a different pronunciation as “drawers” when referring to underwear. Though I do not personally use this construction, but I am familiar with it, having watched “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air”; I recall that Will Smith pronounces it “drôz”, and I defer to The Fresh Prince as an authority on urban matters such as this.

Above all though, drawer is just… one of those words. If you look at the word drawer too often, it becomes unpronouncible (!), incomprehensible, alien. Is there a word for words like that? Words like spies or police that you use every day, but if you flip that switch in your head and just start saying that over and over, you wonder if, the next time you open your mouth, you might be unable to form the syllables that make up the word. You could even be sitting there at your computer, mouthing out the word to yourself, and think “is that really right?”– you’re pretty sure you know what noises to make, but even when you say it out loud, you question if you’ve been saying it that way your whole life, or only now that you think about it? Drawer. Drawer drawer drawer. The whole loop just feeds on itself until the word is to awful, terrible, heavy to even comprehend anymore. Is there a word for words like that? Or, if this is true for all words if you look at them long enough, is there a word for this phenomenon as a whole (ugh, I’m not liking “phenomenon” too much either… or “liking”)? Until I find out the correct word, I’m going to call these words “Schwerwörter” because everything sounds more important in German. Banjax. Banjax to the whole lot of them, I say.

Ö = { all song titles x : | R(x | > 1 }

Where the function R is a function enumerating all songs with that title that totally rock, but are completely unrelated to one another.

Thus,

Ö = {
“Forever Young”,
“Changes”,
“One”,
“Photograph”,
“Push It”
}

NOTE: “It’s My Life” was a close contender… but the Bon Jovi song really only has cheese factor.

Whilst IMing a friend, I discovered a huge flaw with the English written language. Wanting to comment on a recent blog post of his, i told him, “I read your blog.” I realized that there were two different meanings for that sentence, usually clearly disambiguated in speech, but in the casual medium of typed communication, the pronunciation was lost, along with any useful meaning. The above statement can mean one of two things, based upon the two tenses of the word “read” which share the same spelling:

1. The past preterite tense: “I read (rěd) your blog” - I happened across your recent post, and am now commenting on it.
2. The simple or repeated present tense: “I read (rēd) your blog” - I watch your blogspot, constantly hitting refresh, straining for some glimmer of information on your opinions, ideas and possibly what you had for lunch. Also, send me a lock of your hair.

The past tense of the verb “to read” is spelled the same as the present tense conjugation “read”. As demonstrated in my simple example above, this is a huge problem that affects IMmers around the world. Er, that speak English. What we need is swift, decisive action to end confusion of this matter once and for all. Luckily, decisive action is what I do best.

To eliminate this ghoti-esque confusion, we should simply change the conjugations of the verb “to read” to match the conjugations of the verb “to lead”. Hereforth I shall now conjugate the past tense of the verb as “red”. There is little chance of a conflict with the color “red” as one is a noun and one is a verb. Other than the slight problem of verbing, the plan is pretty much foolproof.

From tomorrow on out, if you see me online, tell me “I red your blog”. If you tell me “I read your blog”, I’ll have a restraining order on you so fast it will make your hed spin. For those of you keeping score at home, this means, of course, that Red is the new Schmool.