Unfortunate names
Over at the Bad Product Names blogspot, you can discover all kinds of rotten trade names. (I see they’ve picked up on the irony that is Publishit.com.) We’ve all heard about the Chevy Nova (bombing in Central and South America, since Nova = no va = “it doesn’t go”), but Kum & Go gas station? And I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks Wii is a hella stupid name for anything.
But tonight, I heard a commercial for a drug with a most unfortunate name.
Main Entry: qui·etus
Pronunciation: \kwÄ«-ˈē-tÉ™s, -ˈÄ-\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English quietus est, from Medieval Latin, he is quit, formula of discharge from obligation
Date: 15401 : final settlement (as of a debt)
2 : removal from activity; especially : death
3 : something that quiets or represses
The manufacturers are thinking of definition 3.
I (and who knows how many other folks) am familiar with the word primarily from its second definition.
Honey, did you remember to take your dose of Lethal tonight?
D.
Duggars on PEOPLE MAGAZINE!
It was bound to happen eventually: Michelle Duggar gave birth to a premie. Not just a premie, but a “micropremie,” scarcely heavier than one pound, born at 25 weeks gestation. When I was in med school and residency (late 80s, early 90s), 25 weeks was considered the lower limit of survivability, and few of these kids made it. I’m not sure what the current lower limit is, but I’ve met children who had been micropremies younger than 25 weeks.
So now we know how many kids you need to have in order to make the cover of People: 19. Not surprisingly, Michelle and Jim Bob say they would be delighted to have more, despite the scathing criticism of . . . what? On-line chat groups? Blogs? Says Michelle: “When I say we would love more children, we open ourselves up for attack.”
I picked up this issue of People because the cover hinted at reportage of the controversy. “THE DUGGARS UNDER FIRE.” “HOW MANY KIDS ARE TOO MANY?” But the story itself pussyfoots, with only a few hints of criticism. A quote from Dr. Jeffrey Richardson, a California obstetrician: “The risks of additional pregnancies start to go up dramatically after four.”
Get that? The risks to the mom. Or, perhaps, to the neonate. How about the children, who are left to raise their younger sibs or be raised by older sibs? Psychologist Michelle Gannon: “What tends to happen in such large families is that the older siblings parent the younger ones and begin to manage the family. The children, the very young ones, get their emotional and physical needs met by their siblings.” She goes on to say (wishy washy alert!!!): “Is it fair? I don’t know. Hopefully, everyone’s needs are being met.”
What do I know? I know that Michelle will have to stop some time soon.
They’re running out of J names.
D.
The Hitler YouTube meme
Are you familiar with the YouTube meme of taking the famous Hitler rant scene from Downfall and inserting novel subtitles? Here’s a good example:
I’ve lost track of how many of these I have watched. Hitler gets banned from Xbox Live; Hitler gets a girl pregnant; Hitler reacts to a ban on KFC nuggets. There must be hundreds of these. There’s even one in which Hitler rants against the proliferation of Hitler rant videos. Seems like anyone and everyone with video capture and editing software has made a Hitler rant video. Some of them are brilliant, some atrocious.
What’s happening, I think, is that we’re looking at the juxtaposition of (A) a stupendous performance and (B) that guy everyone loves to hate. Hitler himself has become so trite as a symbol of evil that it’s considered poor form to resort to a Hitler reference in an argument (see Godwin’s Law). You could try doing something like this with another great foreign language monologue, but if your subject ain’t Hitler, I doubt your video will find much traction.
The film itself, Downfall, is quite good, although depressing. Like most American Jews of a certain age, I was raised on Hitler this and Hitler that. I lost track of how many WWII movies my father dragged me off to. So for me to like a movie about Hitler, well, it says something about quality. Well worth a Net Flix rental.
D.
I’m reserving judgment.
Our Nook has arrived.
Our Nook has arrived with its seven-step instructional leaflet describing how to set up your Nook how to get your Nook out of its childproof packaging. I gagged on Step 5 (“While still attached in its tray, pull your nook and the tray straight up. Lift the bottom end first and then unhook the top, while holding down the bottom case against a flat surface, such as a table. Your nook and its tray should slide off of the bottom case.”) Karen figured it out.
Three minutes into the on-screen orientation, my Nook hung. I was attempting to navigate to the first page of Pride and Prejudice, which comes pre-loaded onto the Nook (along with Dracula and Little Women) when the little bastard froze on me. Karen figured that out, too. Or at least, she figured out how to reboot.
Right now, she’s downloading the update. We’re hoping that will take care of the freezing problem. For the time being, I’m going to reserve judgment about the Nook. I give B&N points for not getting cutesy (they could have written, “Your nook and her tray should slide off of the bottom case,” but they wisely kept the gender neutral) but jeez, guys, haven’t you ever heard of beta testing? What kind of word of mouth do you expect if you send out a buggy device?
D.
My musical Achilles’ heel
I will be the first to admit that my musical tastes are not for everyone. Even I find the Swans’ Michael Gira’s baritone to be deadly, and the best thing I can say about Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon is that she out-Courtney Loves Courtney Love. And while I can’t understand why anyone would dislike the swanging accordion riffs of Gogol Bordello, my wife and son both do, and since I love them, I’m honor-bound to concede there is a viable worldview that does not elevate GB to the level of, say, Devo, B-52s, or Talking Heads.
But I can’t take more than a half hour of country music TV. I discovered that today in the gym. Here I was doing my best to strain my back on the lat pulldown when some young buck with his trendy li’l soul patch turns the TV on to the country music station.
It’s not the music that bugs me. I know this because I’ve been in restaurants where country music plays in the background, and I don’t lose my appetite. It’s the musicians. It’s this nagging hunch I have that they’re all posers. That their cowboy hats and vocal twangs are props, and if I could see them in the privacy of their own livingrooms, I’d find them sipping sherry and speaking perfect William Powell-esque English. That if I tugged on their beards I would discover just how well Krazy Glue binds to skin.
Country music also tweaks me because it’s yet another member of the set, Things That Are Immensely Popular That I Don’t Get. Like football, for example. A couple of weeks ago, Jake and I went to a pizza parlor after our workout. While we were waiting for our pizza, we had a good thirty minutes to observe the American couch jock in one of his favored habitats: in a restaurant with beer in one hand, pizza in the other, surrounded by fellow couch jocks. I don’t understand all the yelling and hooting and whistling. If I tried to mimic the behavior, I would yell, hoot, or whistle at inappropriate times. The best I can do is exclaim “OH!” a few hundred milliseconds after everyone else reacts.
Perhaps football fans bother me because I can’t seem to work up that degree of enthusiasm over anything.
D.
Dragon Age meta
First, a hat tip to Portal:
The writing on this game rocks.
Sexuality here is pretty open-ended. Here’s a conversation between the protagonist (you) and Alistair, the future king.
Oh, and if you go to the local brothel, whatever you do, don’t tell the madame, “Surprise me.”
D.
Pride of the savannah
Last night, I dreamed I had become some sort of naturalist, a fieldworker in the African savannah, sent to a nature preserve to study lions in the wild. I was fresh off the boat and raring to go, and without any special instruction or preparation I began hiking my way across the preserve. Say what you will about me, I’m not shy.
Within a matter of minutes, I realized I had been spotted by a lion and lioness, who were heading over to greet eat me. I also realized I was dreaming, but I still didn’t relish the thought of experiencing this, even in dream land. So I hit the ground and pretended to play dead.
The two came loped over, sniffed me. And then the male mounted the female and they went at it.
One word for what followed: messy.
Interpretations, anyone?
D.
A B&W redux
I had been trying to think up a fun topic for tonight’s post when I remembered Kakabekia. Then I had the thought, “Kakabekia is such a neat story, I’ll bet I’ve done this before,” and crap, I was right! When I found my old post — one of the Thirteens — I had so much fun rereading it that I decided to post it as a redux. Hopefully y’all will have forgotten it as well as I had, all the better to re-enjoy it.
A note on the Kakabekia story: I learned about this organism in a biology class I took during med school. Early Evolution of Life, or some such. I remember I wrote a pretty cool term paper for that class, suggesting that within the genetic code of most life on earth (not all life forms share the same code, although all codes are quite similar) one could demonstrate evidence that the code itself is a product of selection. My teacher liked my term paper so much he suggested I write it up for publication, which I never did. This would have been, oh, 1988 or 1989? And guess what, on that Wikipedia page I just linked to, there’s a link to a paper published in 2003 making just that point.
I can’t tell you how many times this happened to me back in those days. I would have a great idea — perhaps something theoretical, like this genetic code bit, or perhaps something technical, like a way to fish for genes encoding promoter-binding proteins. Someone in authority would say, “Hey, good idea, get to work on it,” and I wouldn’t. There were always other things to do. My ideas were top notch, but my ambition, or perhaps my sense of perspective, insight into what was REALLY important, whatever . . . sucked.
Sorry. I didn’t mean to turn this into a kvetchfest. I was meant to be a doctor, right? Not a scientist. Or, if I was meant to be a scientist, it was only after skipping over all that dull gruntwork as a grad student or post-doc. Yup. Go straight to the finish, have my own R01 and scads of my own post-docs and grad students doing my bidding, turning my fine ideas into realities. Shame life doesn’t work that way.
Below the fold: thirteen cool microorganisms. (And, hey! It’s even Thursday!)
Just one question: where did I find time, in the old days, to write such detailed posts?
iPredict: iFlop
So Apple released the iPad today. For $499, you get an oversized iPod. I think this one’s going to belly flop because it’s the wrong size. It’s too big to fit into your pocket, too small to serve as a nice viewer for movies, TV shows, videos. (We’re big screen people, I guess.)
It's a lidless laptop!
I want something that will fit into my shirt pocket yet give me the experience of an 18 inch monitor (or better). VR goggles with internet access, perhaps. I want to be able to type, too, but that technology is with us already. There are those cool gizmos that project a keyboard onto a flat surface, so that you can type anywhere, on just about anything.
THIS cracked me up (from the Seattle Times):
Yet the iPad didn’t receive the warm welcome given the iPhone in 2007, with some pundits shrugging and others making jokes about the name, which some thought conjured up feminine-hygiene products.
Can you imagine anyone shlepping one of these things around? Other than to show off his new toy, I mean.
What new tech would you like to see? I’m still holding out for teleporters.
D.