contest results, Blair contest, other fascinating things

This is gonna be a hell of a long post. This is because I have lots to mention, and it's all you'll have from me for at least another week, since this is such a busy time right now. Since I know few of you have attention spans long enough to read it all in one go, I'll spread the stuff of least general interest out to force you to at least skim it. However, do bear in mind that I wouldn't be "publishing" it here if I didn't think you'd find it at least somewhat scintillating. Also you could just read it in installments, to tide you over until next time.

First the good news: apparently Bush's grip on the US and its policy is loosening. As you know the Republicans lost control of both houses to the Democrats this week, and also Rumsfeld is stepping down. I thought I'd take this opportunity to say goodbye to him.

Dear Mr. Rumsfeld,
I see that you are stepping down. I for one am disappointed, but only because this means I won't be able to marvel anymore at how immensely evil you appear on TV. I always half expected you to pull out a Nalgene bottle full of crude, or perhaps goat's blood, and start chugging during a press conference.
Likely, you aren't actually an evil person, and I paid little attention to what you actually did while you were around, but your appearance, at least, gives me ideas for Hallowe'en costumes. That and the fact that you held a position of obscene and ungodly power over the world while looking like that.
Toodles! G.

For some reason I keep having intensely vivid and physically realistic dreams about driving very powerful cars with standard transmissions. Last night it was a bright yellow amalgamation of a Ford GT40 (the old one) and a Ferrari F40. The point was that I wasn't racing or anything, just trying to drive it normally to the racetrack in Geary from home in Fredericton. The engine was deafeningly loud and high pitched, and generated so much torque that it was almost impossible to keep the rear wheels from spinning every time I touched the pedal, no matter what gear I was in. I don't know why I've been having these dreams just recently, as opposed to all my life, but I hope it continues, and that I get retro-paid for all the car dreams I should have been having for the last 22 years.

Today this caught my interest, and had me in stitches for literally several seconds. It's a book (album insert for a band?) with French phonetic translations of English nursery rhymes. For instance the name of it: Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames (literally: Words of Hours: Pods, Oars), can be roughly pronounced "Mother Goose Rhymes." As a more full example, try saying this, the phonetic translation of Hickory Dickory Dock:

Et qui rit des curés d’Oc?
De Meuse raines, houp! de cloques.
De quelles loques ce turque coin.
Et ne d’ânes ni rennes,
Écuries des curés d’Oc.

I took the French phonetic versions and ran them through some online translators, and got some great lyrical poetry, such as the following from parts of the French phonetic translation of "Monday's Child is full of grace":

Beg for this shawl and this iron with the buttocks.

is this demarcating two clog-makers?

And this fascinating translation of "Mary had a little lamb":

myraids avoid blades,
and harm smooth fires.
Where sat and ring high.
In the trough, debts annoint town hall,
two blue blades of Iago.

Hickory Dickory Dock is also quite hilarious:

And who laughs at the priests of Oc?
From Meuse groove, houp! blisters.
Of who wrecks this Turkish corner.
And of neither donkeys nor reindeers,
Stables of the priests of Oc.

Funnily enough it's all far superior to any of the lyrics I've ever come up with for my own tunes. Also it should be abundantly clear that I took way more than a 'few seconds' to amuse myself with this. Anything (especially blogging) to avoid doing actual work.

Thanks to advice and files from Joe, I've been listening to the Now Show, a BBC radio 4 comedy show, sorta like 22 minutes. It's hilarious, including jokes like "what do you get if you cross an NHS manager with a pig? Nothing, there are some things even a pig won't do." (from a monologue mocking the National Health Service, the UK equivalent of our Healthcare system) and, from the same monologue, quoting graffiti on the wall of a men's room stall in the Department of Health "There are a thousand people who work in this building, and at this precise moment you're the only one who knows what he's doing." That absolutely kills me... I'm tempted to graffiti it in a bathroom in the teaching hospital on campus.

Anyway these guys made a mock 'synopsis' of Lord of the Rings, skipping some 'twiddly bits'. I've added a few appropriate links (most for non-Brits, some for fun). It's spoken in a highly derisive tone:
Scene: Tubby Hill. Offensive leprechaun midget gives face-like-a-slapped-arse midget a little ring that he nicked off a mentalist in a cave. Slapped-face-Elijah-Wooden takes ring to elves, all of whom look suspiciously like former members of Status Quo. More midgets, dwarves, and people with longer names than Welsh railway stations decide to take ring via longest most mental route, back to ringmaker's at hot mountain, and throw it away. Or possibly exchange it, if they can find the receipt. On the way pissed-wizard fights with camp dracula wizard, loses, then fights acid-jazz hero breathing fire, loses again and falls down a hole; Sean Bean gets shot four times before he finally stops milking it and dies; and the ring is taken off by slappy-faced big-eyed midget Frodo Baggins and his idiot friend, Middle Earth's answer to Forrest Gump. Brief irritating pause of two years, and then finally throws the ring in the hot mountain by mistake.

On a sidenote, how does one pronounce "Glyndyfrdwy"? Depending on which faction of syntax fanatics you adhere to, there are no vowels. And how do you pronounce the "frdw" part without inadvertently inserting your own vowels? In Welsh, any time you see two L's together (eg Llangollen, Llwyngwril), it's pronounced as a hacking sound, as though you were assembling a mass of phlegm at the back of your mouth, in readiness for the rest of the name to cause you to disperse it liberally onto your interlocutor. It seems to me that most Welsh names and words are created by doing an impersonation of grinding the gears of a car, then attempting to transcribe your sound effects; or perhaps by dragging an enraged, chained goblin through a knee-deep pool of boiling oil in a trench lined with shards of glass, and then writing down his blubbering curses and shrieks. Of course Glyndyfrdwy is as nothing compared to that long one, in which there are four l's in a row at one point. Note that the incredibly long one was made up just to surpass Llanfair-(etc).

On to some rather frightening global warming stuff. Today in my 707 grad class we had a quaternary geologist, who gave us an introduction to late glacial activity around the Calgary area, and ended the class with some quite shocking material related to climate change. Recent research into ice cores in Greenland and the Antarctic has shown strong evidence that very rapid climate change has occurred in the past, with sudden spikes into very cold temperatures during interglacials (warm periods) and spikes into temperatures like today in the middle of very cold periods (these spikes are superimposed on the 50-100 thousand year glacial-interglacial cycles). For instance, the latest such spike (called the Younger Dryas) occurred about 11,500 years ago, as temperatures were well on their way to recovery from the Wisconsinan glacial period (last major ice age). According to oxygen isotopes in the ice cores (it's reliable), there were dramatic temperature plunges from nice and warm (like the present), to 2/3rds of the way to a full-on glaciation in less than ten years. Possibly as little as 3. And they're not entirely sure what sets these things off. Frankly this makes the frenzy about 6 degrees and a metre rise in sea levels over the next 90 years rather pointless. There is no way that current infrastructure could handle this sort of climate shift. It's thought that these shifts are caused by massive changes to the thermohaline cirulation in the oceans (currents), which distribute warmth around the world. Some of the "alarmist camp" (as the prof referred to them) have claimed that this could be caused by the destabilisation of the environment, say, by the influx of billions of tons of CO2 to the atmosphere per year, though this hasn't been shown.

In case you were wondering, the movie The Day After Tomorrow was partially based on the earlier stages of this work, although the two week change is just a touch faster than the predicted rate. Oh, and a normal transition from interglacial to glacial takes many tens of thousands of years, and (ignoring anthropogenic influences) isn't projected to start naturally for another 8 to 20 thousand years.

Anyway I could ramble on and on about climate change. I'll just say this: I don't believe there's enough data to form strong opinions one way or another, plus there are more worrying things around, which we can actually help to fix. The main one is pollution; of air, rivers, lakes, and groundwater. This we can change, and the conservatives' "clean air" plan actually addresses this instead of placing so much emphasis on climate change. Therefore I support it in principle, but it's useless, because it's (a) not aggressive enough and (b) won't pass anyway.

Okay that's enough soapboxing for today. It's time for Contest Results!

Joe wins; any comparison of Harper to a freeloading hitchhiker is excellent. But I gotta apologize to Jenn and Shannon, as it occured to me that since Joe and I have a similar sense of humour I'm inclined to find his suggestions more amusing. But you have to admit he is very witty. I would have suggested "Hey Stevie-boy, I heard you guys have some oil! So where can we park our tanker trucks?" "Parking lot of the Fort McMurray Walmart, but first just dump your nuclear waste in Ontario somewhere."

And now the New Contest!!! This time, and next time, it's the antics of British PM Tony Blair. Three shots to mock, including the one up top that got your attention.Mock away. Just so you know, parallels have been drawn between Blair and our own Harper, as the puppets of a certain Texan and his (collapsing it seems) regime. Also "Number Ten" is 10 Downing Street, residence of Brit PM. Just like 24 Sussex Drive here.

That's all folks.