You’re about as funny as a cry for help
May 3, 2013 § Leave a comment
Pornography search engine PornMD has released a country-by-country breakdown of top ten search terms (NSFW-ish), revealing some interesting online masturbatory habits, particularly amongst Chinese searchers.
The top 10 most commonly searched terms on porn sites over a 6 month period from China:
1 Japanese
2 Chinese
3 Chinese (gay)
4 Asian (gay)
5 Japan
6 Asian
7 Japan (gay)
8 Japanese (gay)
9 China
10 Korean
That Japanese porn, both gay and straight, is more popular than anything else is perhaps not surprising. Very little pornography is produced within mainland China (though some is), and China’s obsession with AV stars is well known. What’s interesting is the racial homogeneity of the top 10. Chinese porn watchers don’t appear to be very interested in anyone not of Asian heritage, a mild xenophobia that’s shared with Korea and Japan… read more
ART: Edouard Vuillard
When someone starts a sentence “I’m not being …”, they always are
May 2, 2013 § Leave a comment
Many people visiting the World (non-US) version of our website ask us why we spell words such as realize, finalize, and organize with ‘-ize’ spellings, rather than ‘-ise’. There’s a widespread belief that these spellings belong only to American English, and that British English should use the ‘-ise’ forms instead, i.e. realise, finalise, and organise.
In fact, the ‘-ize’ forms have been in use in English spelling since the 15th century: they didn’t originate in American use, even though they are now standard in US English. The first example for the verb organize in the Oxford English Dictionary is from around 1425, from an English translation of a treatise on surgery written by the French physician Guy de Chauliac:
The brayne after þe lengþ haþ 3 ventriclez, And euery uentricle haþ 3 parties & in euery partie is organized [L. organizatur] one vertue.
The OED’s earliest example for realize dates from 1611: it’s taken from a definition in A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, a bilingual dictionary written by Randle Cotgrave:
Realiser, to realize, to make of a reall condition, estate, or propertie; to make reall.
The first recorded use of the verb with an ‘-ise’ spelling in the OED is not until 1755 – over a century later! read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Mike McGregor
maximal stimulation of minimal, frictionless thought
May 1, 2013 § Leave a comment
In the first experiment, one side of the tunnel was clear and the other side was opaque. During the training, dogs were switched between clear and opaque tunnels so they would not have a preference for one or the other. The experimenter began by placing a piece of food in the tunnel in full view of the dog, and giving an instruction. In the first condition, they told the dog ‘No’, the food was forbidden, and then stood in a set location where they could see the tunnel but the dog could not see them. In the second condition, they told the dog ‘No’, and then left the room. In the final condition, they told the dog that it was allowed the food, as a test of motivation.
The dogs’ behaviour was videotaped and analyzed in terms of the length of time before the dog approached the tunnel, and the side which it approached. The results showed no differences between the conditions, and no preference for either the opaque or clear side of the tunnel.
So the dogs did not act differently in the case where the experimenter could see them, but they could not see the experimenter…
In the second experiment, auditory information was used instead. On one side of the tunnel there was a flat mat that did not make noise, and on the other side there was a mat made of crinkly material that was noisy when the dog trod on it. The dogs were trained using both mats, so they would not have a preference for one or the other. Again there were three conditions: the dog was told ‘no’ and the experimenter stood in a set location with their eyes closed; the dog was told ‘no’ and the experimenter left the room; or the dog was told the food was allowed.
This time, dogs showed a clear preference for the side of the tunnel with the silent mat when the experimenter was in the room. In the other two conditions, they had no preference for the silent or noisy side.
The authors conclude that “when taking forbidden food from a tunnel, the dogs preferred to be silent, but not to be hidden.” It seems the dogs took an egocentric approach in the visual condition, assuming that because they could not see the experimenter, she could not see them. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Francisco Garcia Ramirez
they invited me months ago, and I thought by the time it came round I’d be dead
April 30, 2013 § 2 Comments
The material needed another outlet. That outlet turned out to be a form of writing for which there is no exact English term: fait divers. This is a French expression, in common use for centuries, for a certain kind of newspaper piece: a compressed report of an unusual happening. What fait divers means literally is “incidents,” or “various things.” The nearest English equivalent is “news briefs” or, more recently, “news of the weird.” The fait divers has a long and important history in French literature. Sensationalistic though it is, it has influenced the writing of Flaubert, Gide, Camus, Le Clézio and Barthes. In Francophone literature, it crossed the line from low to high culture. But though a version of it was present in American newspapers, it never quite caught on in the English language as a literary form.
This is what a fait divers looks like:
Raoul G., of Ivry, an untactful husband, came home unexpectedly and stuck his blade in his wife, who was frolicking in the arms of a friend.
Here is another:
A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frérotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake.
These examples show what the fait divers is about: an event, usually of a grim nature, animated sometimes, but not always, by a certain irony. A fait divers is not simply bad news. It is bad news of a certain kind, written in a certain way. The two examples above were written around 1906 by the French journalist Félix Fénéon, for Le Matin.
Fénéon, who wrote his pieces anonymously, was probably the greatest practitioner of the form. He gave it more wit and bite, more emotional unease and formal perfection, than it had had before. In his hands, it became a modernist form. His collected fait divers, published in English as Novels in Three Lines (a beautiful translation and introduction by Luc Sante on the NYRB Classics imprint), inspired me to try to do the same for the current news from Nigeria. I felt the form would migrate well from one language to another, and from one social context to another. In order to acquire an audience for this daily practice, I began to post the pieces on my Twitter account.
In Ikotun, Mrs Ojo, who was terrified of armed robbers, died in her barricaded home, of smoke inhalation. read more
ART: Jocelyn Allen
Relevance I can get at home
April 29, 2013 § Leave a comment
In a courtroom scene from The Simpsons that has since entered into the television canon, an argument over the ownership of the animated characters Itchy and Scratchy rapidly escalates into an existential debate on the very nature of cartoons. “Animation is built on plagiarism!” declares the show’s hot-tempered cartoon-producer-within-a-cartoon, Roger Meyers Jr. “You take away our right to steal ideas, where are they going to come from?” If nostalgic cartoonists had never borrowed from Fritz the Cat, there would be no Ren & Stimpy Show; without the Rankin/Bass and Charlie Brown Christmas specials, there would be no South Park; and without The Flintstones — more or less The Honeymooners in cartoon loincloths — The Simpsons would cease to exist. If those don’t strike you as essential losses, then consider the remarkable series of “plagiarisms” that links Ovid’s “Pyramus and Thisbe” with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, or Shakespeare’s description of Cleopatra, copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch’s life of Mark Antony and also later nicked by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism…
KEY: I IS ANOTHER
This key to the preceding essay names the source of every line I stole, warped, and cobbled together as I “wrote” (except, alas, those sources I forgot along the way). First uses of a given author or speaker are highlighted in red. Nearly every sentence I culled I also revised, at least slightly — for necessities of space, in order to produce a more consistent tone, or simply because I felt like it. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Jacques Habbah
Only losers take the bus
April 26, 2013 § Leave a comment
On 11th September 2012, late at night, a group of 4 or 5 people staked out my home. It was only accidentally that I avoided being ambushed (my motorcycle had a flat tire and I thus returned home in a friend’s car). Upon noticing the stalkers I called the police and asked them to come quietly. The police arrived noisily and went to a nearby house first, thus giving the men plenty of time to make their escape. For days, the police refused to investigate properly or to call eyewitnesses to make a statement (later, after I published the story, they did). Since then, I have been denied police protection (unlike most other journalists) and have had to resort to private security.
Soon after the failed ambush, a woman visited my office insisting that I should see her to discuss “the bankers’ designs” on me. I decided to meet with her. She was a frightened woman who claimed to be in grave personal danger. She said that she had been, and was, part of a group comprising former agents and salaried members of the Greek intelligence services, connected to business interests who worked on, at first, wrecking my public image and, later on, planning my physical demise. She added that it was her who, following specific orders, had forged the document ‘proving’ that I was on the payroll of the secret service – a document which her group then circulated to the various blogs that used it.
According to her testimony to me, a group stationed in Skopja was engaged to “see me off”. Part of the same plot concerned the defamation of another woman, a former bank manager with The Bank, who had been fired on false charges of embezzlement because, in truth, she possessed damning evidence concerning The Chairman’s family’s activities. Their plan, vis-a-vis this former bank manager was to plant narcotics in a restaurant that she owned on the island of Zakynthos and to orchestrate a very public arrest so that, in the future, if she ever revealed her evidence against The Chairman’s family, the press could dismiss her as a ‘drug dealer’. To prove her story, my interlocutor handed over a sequence of photographs that were the result of the surveillance of the former bank manager taken by her group. The woman further claimed that she had not dared distance herself from that group but she was afraid that she would be killed upon completing her ‘tasks’.
On our part, we immediately investigated her claims. We subjected her to an accredited graphologist’s test who comfirmed that the forged document showing that I was, supposedly, on the secret agents’ payroll (as published in various blogs) was in her handwriting. We also confirmed with the ferry company that the car in which that team of operatives was supposed to have travelled to Zakynthos (to plant drugs in order to frame The Bank’s former employee) had indeed travelled there. We also established that the car was registered to former intelligence agents who had been prosecuted for an number of misdeeds – and whose court case is pending.
I met with this woman a number of times in an attempt further to establish the truth of her allegations. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: sylvain-emmanuel
Hilarious Foreign Uncle Becomes Viral Star For Expressing Deep Emotion About Death Caused by Family Members VIDEO
April 25, 2013 § Leave a comment
Beck’s Paris Metro map is clearly related to his schematic map for the London Underground, all its angles at either 90 or 45 degrees, any unnecessary details erased. The Seine river’s meander through the city is stylised into a symmetrical sweep across the map’s bottom left quarter, its bracket-like shape broken only by the Île de la Cité. The smaller Île Saint-Louis has been erased off the map: unlike its larger neighbour, it doesn’t have a metro stop.
Capturing the Paris Metro in a schematic map proved even more challenging than reducing the London Tube to the now-famous diagram: the Parisian stations were more concentrated in the centre, and its lines were much more interwoven, leading to a higher number of interchanges – and to some very curvaceous lines. Beck picked out a few metrolines to form what seems to be the eternally recurring, basic matrix of a metro map: an axial line (the Ligne 1, running east-west), and a circular line (by juxtaposing Ligne 2 and Ligne 6 on the map to form a rounded rectangle). He added in the other lines, straightening them out as much as possible.
Beck’s initial proposal was rejected by the Paris Metro operator RATP – but the same fate had befallen his first suggestions for the London Underground. Undaunted, the draughtsman returned to his drawing board. But his second, improved, full-colour map, presented in 1951, was also given le cold shoulder. Some speculate that Beck’s oversimplification of Parisian geography was simply too unpalatable for local tastes. It could also be argued that the map looked too ‘British’ for Paris. The map fell into oblivion, and was only published for the first time in Mark Ovenden’s 2008 book on the Paris Metro.
But in the end, Beck won – albeit posthumously. read more
ART: Martin Creed
if for example I had you over to my house and you were admiring my beautiful Chippendale desk and I offered to make you an exact reproduction of that desk for a thousand pounds, and you accepted that and gave me the money, and then a week later I delivered to you a drawing of that desk you’d be quite cross with me
April 24, 2013 § Leave a comment
As part of English football’s ongoing commitment to self-parody, I should like Carlos Tevez to resurrect his baby’s dummy goal celebration next time Manchester City play Liverpool. Between that and Luis Suárez running around biting people, the pitch would resemble a giant nursery. Ideally, half-time would see the ground staff lay out lots of foam mats on the pitch, and players would be given a cup of milk and told to lie down on one of them for a nap.
The supernanny figure in all of this, of course, would be David Cameron, whose inevitable intervention into the Suárez nonsense this week read like another wrong answer to cult cartoon strip You Are The Prime Minister.
The best thing you can say about Cameron’s contribution is that it didn’t set a precedent. That precedent, naturally, was set by his predecessor-but-one. In seeking to pinpoint the exact moment prime ministerial perspective was irretrievably lost, many will cite the time Tony Blair went on Richard and Judy and called for the then England manager Glenn Hoddle to quit (I shall leave it to more eminent theologians than I to determine the precise level of irony in someone who believes in transubstantiation seeing fit to query the eccentricities of someone else’s religious beliefs)…
As the self-styled heir to Blair, Cameron simply refuses to keep Ordinary People in the dark on these vital footballing matters, perhaps imagining that he is speaking to them in the only language the poor dolts understand…
On sporting matters that intersect more significantly with his day job, however, Mr Cameron is conspicuously silent. On the breaking of coalition promises not to continue the sell-off of playing fields, he declines to be drawn. Last year, he refused to comment on the Bahrain Grand Prix despite the backdrop of protests and allegations of human rights abuse, insisting that it was only “a matter for Formula One”. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Michiel Hendryckx
– but it’s all parenthetical, isn’t it? –
April 23, 2013 § Leave a comment
Why do people use “Nope” even though “No” is easier to say and shorter to spell?
This is an example of sound change.
No, particularly when said in isolation, and abruptly, ends in a glottal stop – you can feel your glottis (vocal chords) closing, if you pay attention. Glottal stop is easily confusable with the standard English sounds p, t and k. When you combine this with the rounding of the lips from the o sound, you get something more p-like versus k-like. (Note the position of the lips w/ a p; in contrast, many languages had glottal stop ~ k sound changes, e.g., Hawaiian).
This results in acoustic cues at the end of no that make it sound like maybe possibly there is a p at the end. Some people misperceive that as a full-on p then start purposefully adding the p and the rest is history(cal linguistics).
More generally, it’s likely incorrect to presume that language has an explicit drive towards being easier. Rather, there are tangible forces at play that result in it generally being easier, but not always (e.g., nope).
EDIT: This reply got far more attention than I would have ever expected given what I thought was an otherwise obscure topic. And while I was on vacation, no less. So, I’d like to circle back and expand on the answer and provide a much more thoughtful reply that includes other hypotheses that we might want to consider…
Another thing we can do is look at when nope and yup started appearing in the English language. If nope came far earlier, then it would suggest the acoustics of no is important. Recall that I suggested that yup came about as analogy with nope. There is no phonetic way to get p from yes. So, if they came about in tandem, it would suggest sound symbolism. If yup came first, it’s back to the drawing board. What sayeth the OED? Nope first attested in 1888. Yup is 1906 – a decent gap. But wait, what have we here? Yep, attested 1891. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Ben
Unpleasant? Strange. I’ve been told I have a very winning personality. The very best shoe clerk the store ever had
April 22, 2013 § Leave a comment
NASA’s Kepler mission has been hunting for worlds beyond our solar system for a little over four years now, and it’s been enormously successful. In that time, it’s spotted literally thousands of planetary candidates. Today, three distant worlds – dubbed Kepler-62f, Kepler-62e, and Kepler-69c – have achieved planetary confirmation, while joining an elite cadre of so-called habitable planets.
Kepler-62f and 62e possess radii just 1.4- and 1.6-times that of Earth’s, respectively, and orbit a star some 1,200 light years away, along with three other newly discovered planets. Kepler-69c, on the other hand, has a radius 1.7-times that of Earth, and orbits a star around 2,700 light years distant from our own. Together, the three newly discovered worlds have become the second, third, and fourth known bodies to wear the badge of “Earth-like, habitable zone planet.”…
“Kepler-62e probably has a very cloudy sky and is warm and humid all the way to the polar regions,” said co-author Dimitar Sasselov in a statement. “Kepler-62f would be cooler, but still potentially life-friendly.”
The pair belong to a five-planet system that includes 62d, 62c and 62b. These latter three planets vary in size, but orbit far too close to the system’s parent star to have any chance of harboring water or life.
“There may be life [on 62f and 62e], but could it be technology-based like ours? Life on these worlds would be under water with no easy access to metals, to electricity, or fire for metallurgy,” said lead author Lisa Kaltenegger in a statement.
“Nonetheless, these worlds will still be beautiful blue planets circling an orange star — and maybe life’s inventiveness to get to a technology stage will surprise us.” read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Patrick Joust
my nerves are bad to-night 