Category: games

breaking the spell of procrastination

I’ve lateley spent some time thinking about procrastination. And not just about procrastination, but about procrastination. The word, that is. Perhaps because I’ve been spending a lot of time procrastinating. Inspired by Sage‘s Word Wise Wednesday tradition, I thought I’d share a bit that I’ve learned about the etymology of procrastination. Remarkably, the meaning of the word has not drifted far, at least according to the Online Etymology Dictionary:

procrastination
1548, from L. procrastinationem “a putting off,” noun of action from procrastinare “put off till tomorrow,” from pro- “forward” + crastinus “belonging to tomorrow,” from cras “tomorrow,” of unknown origin. Procrastinate is recorded from 1588.

It’s terribly unmysterious.

I was quite interested to note, however, the description of the word as a “noun of action.” In my experience, it often seems to be more of a noun of inaction. And what’s more, observe that one can spell the word inaction from a selection of the letters of the word procrastination. Coincidence? I think not.

Because let’s face it, without inaction, procrastination just wouldn’t be the same.¹

You may also be interested to learn that, in addition to inaction, the following words (and many, many more) can be made by using letters of procrastination:

pasta, carrot, onion, poi, toast, pots, coin, top
trap, scrap, ration, nation, station, Patton, stint, coot
tint, print, caption, croon, tiara, stair, star, icon, coop
scoop, poo, poots, crap, strip, carrion

and, you may be happy to learn

stop

And do you want to know what got me a-ponderin’ about procrastination, and the words one can spell from its letters? I realized that one can spell…pants.

Pants!

And of course, realizing that made me want to come up with a full-blown anagram for procrastination with pants. It’s been tricky, but here are my candidates.

Croatian roi pants²

coir pants ration³

I think my best attempt is this one:

Rio pants action: R

————————-
¹ Actually, without inaction, procrastination would end up something like prorast. And where would that get us?

² Using the a French word roi, meaning “king.” Or alternately “Croation iro pants,” using a Japanse word, iro, meaning “color.”

³ Where coir is a fiber that might be a bit rough for pants.

I’m a word freak, don’t you know

A few weeks back I wrote a post in which I claimed that some posts a few folks wrote (for a meme) had used too much of a thing. Too much, in fact, to fit the name they’d used for that meme. So I wrote a post of my own, played that same game, and stuck to the rule.

Well, I had fun with that post. I had to choose my words with care. And then I thought it might be hard to write a whole post that way. But I thought I’d give it a try. It’s not as hard as I thought. As I sit here, I can find quite a lot of words to use. (The sad thing is, I can’t name the thing, the rule, since to tell you would break that “one” rule of this post. You’ll have to guess what it is. Or in case it’s not clear, just go back to that old post. )

Since I may find it hard to write with much depth, as I find that there is a tense or two that I can’t use, I think I’ll tell a tale. Here goes.

There was once a young girl who loved words. She loved to say them, write them, and play with them like toys. She’d bounce them, flip them, or squish them up. She liked to roll them off her tongue.

She could talk all day, and use lots and lots of words. But the sad thing was, she did not have much to say. At least not much that was worth while. Most of what she said made no sense at all.”Truck, muck, shoe, socks!” she would say to her dog. “Boo, blue, too, true,” she’d tell her mom. “Dude, prude, dance, pants” she’d shout to the man at the store. All day long, words would pour out of her mouth. Lots of words, short words. But not much sense. Blah, blah, blah, blah, she might as well have said.

One day as she was on her way home from school, she saw a strange red cat. She stopped to have a look at the way the bright red fur shone in the sun. As was her way, she spat out some words of no sense. “Bird, turd, drop, fraught,” she sang.

“What do you mean by that?” asked the cat.

Kate, for that was the girl’s name, paused. She had not known that cats could talk. “Cow, crow, coo, phlegm,” she said, once her first shock had passed.

“Why do you talk like that? I don’t get it,” The cat said.

“Hmmpf,” Kate said. “Well, I’m not sure. I know I like to play with words, though,” she told the cat. (For she could make some sense when she chose to.) “It’s fun. Roof, tooth, duck, shale.”

“Oh,” said the cat. “I see what you mean.” He thought for a bit and said: “Flip, trip, burp, plow.”

Kate smiled. “Scoop, stoop, tree, sine,” she said right back. And the two of them walked off hand in hand.

The end.

“Wait,” you say. “Cats don’t have hands.” Well, that’s true. But I made the rest of it up, too. So there.

One last thing. Can you give a thought as to how to end this phrase:
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their _____.

a shocking excess of syllables

I stumbled across a couple of meme-like posts last night that sparked both my interest and my concern. First this one, which referenced this one. The task described on the blog icedmocha was to:

Answer all thirty-five questions using only one word. It’s harder than it looks. Give it a try on your blog.

An interesting challenge. A provocative proposition. The particpants I read (the first two I saw, plus this third one) had come up with some fantastic single-word responses.

The problem? The posts, and apparently the meme, are entitled “Monosyllabic.” In spite of this, I witnessed a large number of polysyllabic words. Shocking, shocking. As someone who spends portions of her professional time finding syllables, hunting them down and tracking them in the wild, I felt it my duty to round up some bonafide monosyllables of my own.

1. Where is your cell phone?     bag

2. Relationship?     yes

3. Your hair?     brown

4. Work?     sounds

5. Your sister?     cool

6. Your favorite thing?     sleep

7. Your dream last night?     strange

8. Your favorite drink?     ale

9. Your dream car?     Peel’s

10. The room you’re in?     den

11. Your shoes?     docs

12. Your fears?     war

13. What do you want to be in 10 years?     prof

14. Who did you hang out with this weekend?     Phoebs

15. What you’re not good at?     hate

16. Muffin?     please!

17. One of your wish list items?     trip

18. Where you grew up?     earth

19. The last thing you did?     work

20. What are you wearing?     pants

21. What aren’t you wearing?     socks

22. Your pet?     gone

23. Your computer?     mac

24. Your life?     whole

25. Your mood?     calm

26. Missing?     Red

27. What are you thinking about right now?     words

28. Your car?     gray

29. Your kitchen?     mess

30. Your summer?     short

31. Your favorite color?     blue

32. When is the last time you laughed?     noon

33. Last time you cried?     days

34. School?     grad

35. Love?     John

There we go. 35 monosyllables that are more-or-less true responses. Another challenging task would be to come up with monomorphemic responses to those same questions. Or to come up with 35 questions, the answers to which could all be pants.

monosyllabic1.jpg
A view of a production of the polysyllabic monosyllabic, displayed in Praat, with approximate syllabification into 5 syllables marked. (No commitment to the affiliation of potentially ambisyllabic consonants intended.)

pants1.jpg
A view of a production of the monosyllabic pants, displayed in Praat, with syllabification into 1 syllable marked.

requited

I wanted U
I hoped for U
I waited for U
Time after time
I looked for U
But U passed me by
U went to others
I thought U would never come to me
Then when I had given up all hope
That I would ever be able to hold U
U appeared
U came to me
Finding U fulfilled a need
Because without U
I might well have finished
Forlorn, distressed and clutching
That little tile
Imprinted with
The letter Q

extra cheese

You know what really cheeses me off? When I finish a list and realize I’ve forgotten something.

It’s like going to the grocery store to buy bread, eggs and milk, and then remembering I need cheese too as I’m driving on my way there, but I figure I’ll wait to add it to my list, since it would be hazardous to write while driving, even if it is only one word, and then when I get there, going into this trance as I wander the aisles with my shopping cart, and wondering what it means that supermarkets now play music that was actually popular when I was in high school, and feeling up the melons and squeezing the toilet paper, then browsing the cereal aisle and feeling nostalgic for the days of my youth when lucky charms were an exotic unattainable bowl of cereal at the end of the rainbow because my mother insisted on having us eat healthy cereals like wheat chex and when I finally tried them, they really weren’t that thrilling, and resisting the urge to buy cookies and redi-whip and donuts, and before you know it, I’ve filled up the cart and then I head home with my bags of groceries, and after I put away my bread and my milk and my pint of organic blackberry sorbet, which seemed like a healthier choice than the chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, but screw it, I bought that too, and bananas and maple syrup and zucchini and oatmeal and frozen peas, and then find a crumpled up paper in my pocket, and it’s my grocery list with its three measly items (bread, eggs and milk) scribbled on it, and realize that I’ve forgotten the eggs, and (crap!) I also forgot to get more cheese.

You know what I’m saying?

Anyhow, I realized that I left off some key pieces of cheese from yesterday’s cheeseful bounty. Such as:

  1. Richard Cheese, a musician who, along with his band Lounge Against the Machine, provides cheesy lounge music reinterpretations of so many your favorite contemporary songs. Also in the music category is the band The String Cheese Incident. Then there’s the apparently sadly now-defunct Cheese Patrol, a

    yearly homage to all the songs that people vociferously hate but secretly know all the words to. These are the songs we grew up with; overorchestrated. overwrought, oversynthed, over the top.

  2. Somehow I also managed to leave off the appearance of the cheese guy in the Buffy episode “Restless“, as well as a few other cheesy references. And in my research I came across this brilliant essay “An Analysis of Cheese as Metaphor in Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. Apparently, the layers of cheese in the Buffy series run far deeper than I’d realized.
  3. For more on cheese philosophy, you can check out this essay “on the non-existence of cheese.” Is there proof of the existence of cheese in the universe? Perhaps not.
  4. Then there’s the Cheese Burglar. But I’m not really a big fan of the cult of which he is a member. So instead I offer this cartoon mouse classic, The Cheese Burglar (1946). (You can even see it on YouTube. Though I admit to not having watched anything close to the whole 7 minutes.)
  5. I actually like the animation of this (shorter) shortThe Cheese Trap better, which features a cg version of the board game Mouse Trap, one of my childhood favorites.
  6. Do you hanker for a hunka cheese? Do you remember this rather creepy cartoon psa from the 70s? You might also be interested in the hunk-hankerers guest appearance on the Family Guy.
  7. Yesterday’s cheese did not include much in the way of cheese activities for those of you with too much time and not enough cheese on your hands. Options include: a quiz to let you know what kind of cheese you are. (There’s also a similar-veined one-step cheese “comparator,” but the reviews are not stellar.)
  8. There’s even an experiment with cheese that you can perform at home on your own. (However, the author does recommend exercising caution if you are lactose tolerant.) (And no, my dear seester, this is not the same cheese experiment you tried with me that one time when we were little. I’ll write about that later.)
  9. Most thrillingly, you can actually watch cheese *live* online. That’s right, you can watch watch cheddar cheese aging. Not only is it just as exciting as it sounds, it is also apparently the cool thing to do. (If you don’t have the months to spare to see the change in progress, you can also check out this time-lapse video encapsulating 3 months of the cheese-aging process.)
  10. And even though I offered it up yesterday, no cheese list would be complete without The Cheese Shop sketch. This time, I serve it up in its youtubiful glory:

morning bowl of flakes

Last week, I told you about a book I have in my collection written by none other than J. H. Kellogg, a book of “plain facts” about sex which offers inadvertent amusement on nearly every page. Last week, I offered up some choice bits I’d found. And as a game, I asked for people to give me numbers so that we could look for something entertaining from those pages. We had 5 participants, who each requested 1 or 2 numbers each. Here are the results:

maverick roark requested pages 3 and 12. Page 3 is the title page, which I’ve typed out in entirety.

Plain Facts for Old and Young by J. H. Kellogg, M. D.
Member American Public Health Association, American Society for the Advancement of Science, American Society of Microscopy, Member Mich. State Board of Health, Medical Superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitrium, Author of Numerous Works of Health, Etc.
Published by I. F. Segner, Burlington, Iowa, 1882.

Just so we know he’s qualified to say that sex should be avoided.

Page 12 gets you this bit from the table of contents:

The Social Evil.
Unchastity of the ancients–Causes of the “social evil” –Libidinous blood–Gluttony–Precocious sexuality–Man’s lewdness–Fashion…

NotSoSage requested a bit from page 323. This one is from the chapter called “Solitary Vice”:

The entrance of a single corrupt boy into a school which may have been previously pure–though such schools must be extrememy rare–will speedily corrupt almost the entire membership. The evil infection spreads more rapidly than the contagion of smallpox or yellow fever, and it is scarcely less fatal.

Mind you, we’re not actually talking about an STD or some such here, we’re talking about the spread of the “solitary vice” itself.

ericalee requested pages 46 and 72. These are from the chapter “Sex in Living Forms”, which actually does seem to contain some fairly scientific information. Page 46 is mostly about plants:

Nothing is more interesting in the natural world than the wonderful beauty, diversity, and perfect adaptaility to various conditions and functions, which we see in the sexual parts of plants.

He does get a bit excited about plant sex…

Page 72 covers male anatomy:

As the production of seminal fluid is more or less constant in man and some animals, while its discharge is intermittent, the vesiculae seminales serve as reservoirs for the fluid, preserving it until required, or allowing it to undergo absorption.

Hmm…I didn’t really find anything amusing on this page. Perhaps someone with more knowledge of anatomy would, though.

bs requested page 208, which is in the chapter “Incontinence”:

No continent man need be deterred by this apocryphal fear of atrophy of the testes, from living a chaste life. It is a device of the unchaste–a lame excuse for their own incontinence, unfounded on any physical law.

I hadn’t realized how old the expression “a lame excuse” was…

jwbates requested 69, which is also from the “Sex in Living Forms” chapter:

We have sufficient evidence of this in the fact that among barbarian women, who are generally less perverted physically than civilized women, childbirth is regarded with very little apprehension, since it occasions little pain or inconvenience.

Yes, well, you know how barbarians are…it’s amazing they notice at all when they’ve just given birth.

Okay, them’s the numbers you requested. Thank you for playing. Come play again with me soon. (Because as we learn from Kellogg, you wouldn’t want to play with yourself.) If you throw some more numbers (between 1 and 512) at me, I’ll offer up some more nuggets next week. We’ve barely scratched the surface!

crispy flakes of wisdom and crunchy nuggets of knowledge

One of the prize books in my collection is a book by none other than J. H. Kellogg, M.D. Yes, of corn flakes fame. Many have heard of this notable personage from the book The Road to Wellville by T. C. Boyle (and movie based on the same).

I stumbled across this book while browsing in a used book store in East Lansing, Michigan. (I was there for Linguistics Summer Camp.) Having heard of Kellogg, I was intrigued. And with a title like Plain Facts, and a publication date of 1882, I had to see what it was about. I opened the book to a page at random. And laughed out loud. I flipped through more pages, and laughed again. (snort, snicker…) I had to buy the book before I was thrown out.

It turns out that the “plain facts” are all about sex. As written by someone who felt that sex should be avoided whenever possible.

I don’t remember what the first passage I read was. But the beauty of this book is that nearly every page offers some piece of wisdom that I just couldn’t make up. I must share it with the world at large.

For example, we learn from page 87 that young women must not get their feet wet at certain times of the month, or they may do permanent damage:

A young lady who allows herself to get wet or chilled, or gets the feet wet, just prior to or during menstruation, runs the risk of imposing upon herself life-long injury.

Even babies may be in danger from the “stamp of vice,” as we learn from page 183:

Sometimes–rarely we hope–the helpless infant imbibes the essence of libidinous desires with its mother’s milk, and thence receives upon its forming brain the stamp of vice.

And not to leave out the dangers to men, there’s page 366, which offers this dire warning about the perils of auto-eroticism:

Many young men waste away and die of symptoms resembling consumption which are solely the result of the loathsome practice of self-abuse.

So I offer to you a game. Please give me a random (or carefully selected by whatever means you like) number between 1 and 512, and I will attempt to locate some notable nugget of wisdom for you in the vicinity of that page.

[Note: I’ll get back with the nuggets for you next Tuesday, April 10th.]

creepy new airport security technology can look under your pants

I saw a NYT article this morning describing new airport security technology: passenger x-ray machines.

X-ray vision has come to the airport checkpoint here, courtesy of federal aviation security officials who have installed a new device that peeks underneath passengers’ clothing to search for guns, bombs or liquid explosives.

This creepy new technology can let TSA employees do a virtual strip-search. It actually looks very impressive, giving an outline of the passenger’s skin. And I guess I find it fascinating. But, and I repeat. I also find it creepy. And unsettling.

Anyhow, this news story reminds me of a number of things. So here. Have a list:

  1. Superman (eg. 1978). He had x-ray vision. Could look through Lois Lane’s clothes to see her undies.
  2. Total Recall (1990). Shows security screening of the future with people walking along through full-body x-rays. We get to see skeletal structure in this movie, though. Not skin.
  3. The image the article shows looks a little like a 3D ultrasound. (Though the technology is totally different.)
  4. And I’m reminded of the airport security game (Hat-tip to Schneier, who has lots of interesting things to say about the games we play relating to “security.”) This game lets you play an airport security employee, screening passengers and their bags as they try to pass through security. Your task is to keep up with the ever-changing, and frequently random, restrictions on items that passengers may have on their person or in their carry-on bags as they pass through. For example, sometimes passengers are not allowed to wear their shoes as go through the security gate. And sometimes they are not allowed to be wearing pants.