Mermaids in the Love Canal

There are various degrees of unlikelihood; some events, while improbable, just might occur.  Upsets happen both in sports and in politics.  Sometimes a blind hog finds an acorn in the woods.  And Diogenes might find an honest man (but he would not be an honest ad man or politician.)

It's true that reality can be surprising; but there are definite limitations as well.  

I use the category Mermaids in the Love Canal to lump together those beyond imaginable unlikely events.  Even after 30 or so years the Love Canal in Buffalo is still remembered for its unparalleled ecological disaster; not likely to be a site for exotic creatures.  So here in Angélique's list of things for sure not likely to be real.

1.  Homeopathy -- Damn, people!  All homeopathic remedies are is water.  Good ole Dihydrogen monoxide is good to drink or to bathe in; but the law of conservation of energy goes against the notion that unmeasurable doses of a drug work better.

2.  Screen doors on submarines -- They literally do not hold water.

3.  Claims made in spam -- No, creams do not enlarge your bust, those Nigerian princes are fake, and you cannot make $200 a day by working in your home calling people.

4.  Anyone who says "Trust me" or "I feel your pain" being sincere.

5.  Pyramid power

6.  The Loch Ness Monster -- Honestly, this sort of monster has been reported for a long time.  So why hasn't anyone found evidence of his or her mama and papa?

7.  Chiropractic -- Support your local professional masseur or masseuse instead.

8.  The putative dangers of vaccine -- Actually, it's more related to disease risk, both individually and socially.  Also, do you really want to take your cues from a former model who posed on the porcelain throne?

9.  Pat answer to any social, personal, or political problem.  Also, especially be mindful of how well worked out are the solutions.

Billy Bob Opts for a Life of Crime

Billy Bob was not one of the sharpest knives in the drawer.  He tried various pursuits, but was not especially good at them.  So, he decided to try the romance of bank robbing.  But he wanted to keep his day job which was delivering pizzas.  So he planned this money-making scheme for after work, and spent his time planning his robbery while delivering pizzas..  

At 7 PM, after he clocking out, he headed for the bank with his shotgun, only to find it closed.  The best access to the bank he could find was the ATM.  He scribbled a bank robbery note on back of a pizza delivery checklist, folded it  up, and stuck it into the ATM slot.  Nothing happened.  

So Billy Bob tried a verbal approach.  He shouted to the ATM: "Give me your money, or else."  Nothing happened.  So Billy Bob let fly with a quail load.  The pellets bounced around the place, including back at Billy Bob.  

So Billy Bob went home and watched television instead.  

The next day, a nearby F.B.I. office heard about someone vandalizing an ATM; jamming its mechanism with trash and shooting it with quail shot.  The Agent in Charge said, "Damn it, another trip to pick up Billy Bob.  I wish he had decided to be a moonshiner instead; then he would be ATF's problem instead of mine."

Are You Goody Two-Shoes?

The term Goody Two-Shoes has passed into the language to refer to an excessively virtuous person.  It derived from a 1765 children's story sometimes questionably attributed to Oliver Goldsmith.  Anyway, the desire to look good is a common human trait, only occasionally devolving into antisocial ways: the metaphorical form of a wolf wearing sheep's clothing.

The need to present oneself as looking good, or the need for social approval was subsumed in the term social desirability years ago.  Think of this as a form of impression management.  Most of us engage in situation-specific impression management; for example, this guides our dress and deportment on first dates, while visiting grandparents, going to job interviews, or meeting the President.  Obviously, most of us would not expose a bare midriff, use profanity, slouch, tell a dirty joke, or wear flip-flops in those settings.  Right?

The original scale for developing this trait was the 33-item Crowne-Marlowe Social Desirability Scale developed back in 1964.  I have not been able to find the original scale, and it's kind of long for a blog anyway; however here is a brief measure of social desirability developed by Rahman Haghighat (2007).  

http://ejop.psychopen.eu/article/view/417/html

To find out how much of this trait you have, just answer these five items either true or false:

1.  Would you smile at people every time you meet them?

2.  Do you always practice what you preach to people?

3.  If you say to people that you will do something, do you always keep your promise no matter how inconvenient it might be?

4.  Do you ever lie to people?

5.  Would you ever laugh at a dirty joke people might make?

Scoring:  Count one point for every "true" answer on the first three items, and "no" on the fourth one.  The fifth item does not count in the scoring for various reasons; but mainly because it does not discriminate between people making a favorable impression and those who do not.  For example, common social roles limit visible enjoyment of a dirty joke based on sex, age, age of the raconteur or listener, and other factors.

In general, her are some rough (Angel's) guidelines for interpretation:

4 points -- You're either lying shamelessly or expect canonization in the next go round.  If the former, you qualify for public office.  

3 --  You're high in social desirability.  You are strongly motivated to be approved of by others.

2 -- You have some tendency to frame how other people think about you.  This is not bad, though.

1 -- Possibly you have mild social desirability tendencies; but are not dominated by them.  Or, you have a single quirk.  Or you have internalized some guiding rules for your conduct.  Anyways, don't worry.

0 -- You don't give a flip about what other people think about you.  Bad kitty!

Croquet Hooliganism

It was going to happen sooner or later.  Added to the already-present plague of soccer hooliganism was a new form, also sports-related.  

It started when some middle class yobs congregated in a Manchester pub to have a pint or three or perhaps a glass of single-malted.  It so happened that another group of the same type, these from Leeds, were in the same pub.  At first there was a good-nature trading of insults, then voices rose and challenges were offered.  The pub gatherers decamped for the outside, where they rudely drove wickets and pegs into the ground, and brought mallets to this at hoc setting for intercity conflict.  Unfortunately, the bobbies were nowhere in site to disperse this unruly assembly!

The matched started tamely enough, despite the participants being inappropriately dressed for an outdoor sport.  However, the joint presence of more pints of ale and the heat of an impromptu intercity conflict soon brought things to the boiling point!  It was sure to happen.  A Leeds solicitor rudely laughed when a Manchester physician got a sticky wicket.  Now the Manchester contingent thought this was dirty croquet manners; so insults and eventually fisticuffs were traded.  Ultimately, the police finally arrived and arrested six brawlers, some of whom unsportingly used their mallets in debating the pros and cons of this departure in manners.

Anyway, from this single catalytic event croquet hooliganism was born!  The croquet players adopted uniforms, and their followers wore specific colors and traveled en masse to cricket matches.  Their feminine supporters went to matches wearing risqué clothing and body paint, and egged their teams on.  I'm sad to say that these new yobbos engaged in quite a bit of aggro; and the line from Gilbert and Sullivan was well apt: "When constablatory work is to be done, the lot of a policeman is not a happy one."

This disorder spread to other parts of England, even Cornwall and Northumberland.  The croquet hooligans spread from Knightsbridge and Sloan Square to East London and thence to Hastings.  St. John's Wood was defaced with graffiti.  Stockbrokers and Members of Parliament showed up on the tube wearing black eyes and scratches.  The English middle class, when suitably aroused, could be as anarchistic as those of other orders.      

Where to Meet Men Who Still Live with Their Parents

One unusual form of sex discrimination is still common nowadays with regard to there being a social stigma associated with young adults living with their parents.  However, this is one in which guys come out on the short end:  It seems as if it's more okay for women in their twenties or thirties to live with their parents than it is for guys.  (Remember the premise of the movie Failure to Launch?)

Reductress recently had an article on the top ten cities in which to meet men who still live with their parents.  The apron strings may be thicker in these locales, or possibly employment prospects are harsher there, according to their somewhat snarky comments:

1.  Davenport, Iowa
2.  Staten Island, NY
3.  Salt Lake City, Utah
4.  Homer, Alaska
5.  Odessa, Texas
6.  Flint, Michigan
7.  Homestead, Florida
8.  Myrtle Beach, SC
9.  Dayton, Ohio
10.  Stockton, California

Anyway, the venerable Huff Post took up this story lately too. 

But I feel a necessity for the Devil's Advocate role here: why is continuing to live with the parents a bad thing?  It might suggest successfully being able to live in a multi-generational situation, and probably maintaining good relationships with one's parents.  They may not be parental domicile basement-dwellers who are otakus or internet trolls.

No, I'm afraid that one element behind the bitchiness inherent in the article is that the places named are not on the list of Cool Places to Live!  Seattle, Atlanta, New York City, Miami, Austin, and San Francisco did not make the roll call of these places where males live with their parents.  (At least stereotypically uncool places like Bakersfield, CA, Cleveland, OH, Omaha, NB, and Montgomery, AL were not mentioned!)

And if living with parents means having a lack of feck, or money, or independence, how come women in their twenties get a pass on it?   No, normal families (speaking from personal experience) do tend to adapt to the realities of one or more of the children going into adulthood while staying at home, and in a number of cases there may be some who return to their parents' home.

Regional Accent Reduction

There was a recent news item regarding the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, TN offering a Southern accent reduction class; this was canceled after numerous complainants found it to be offensive.  My first response was: How stupid and insensitive they were to offer such an offensive class.  And I got slightly pissed, besides.  (Sorry for the language.)  But, then, I wondered whether this was special negative treatment for Southern accents; or whether this kind of accent reduction treatment is given to other regional accents as well.

So I did a Google search.

I found that accent reduction classes were offered for reduction of Texas accents, New York accents, Boston accents, and several others in addition to Southern accents.  In general, some people in several different localities want to change how they sound.  It may be because they perceive their accents as burdened with certain lazy, media-supported stereotypes (i.e., the dumb Southerner, the brash, in-your-face New Yorker), or they see their accent as a handicap to career development.  In other words, accent reduction, for some, is part of a life or occupational strategy.

So is there a more desirable accent?  Apparently, it's a dialect called General American; most similar to a Midwestern accent.  Think of it as sounding like you're from Iowa, mid-state Illinois, or Nebraska.  Actually, this is what newscasters sound like.  One former newscaster, Linda Ellerbee, put it succinctly: "In television you're not supposed to sound like you're from anywhere."

I suspect that there are many who adopt a pattern of having a pattern more approximate to General American in occupational settings but switching to a back home accent or dialect when one returns to a familiar setting.  For example, the second person plural in the Southern dialect could be dropped when one hazards to go north of the Mason-Dixon line or west of Texas.  (Click on illustration to enlarge it.)  I had to learn not to sound Cajun and avoid New Orleans dialect terms.  

Okay, having been a little heavy about accents, I'll leave you with a joke about the Boston accent:

Researchers for the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority found over 200 dead crows near greater Boston recently, and there was concern that they may have died from Avian Flu. 

A Bird Pathologist examined the remains of all the crows, and, to everyone’s relief, confirmed the problem was definitely NOT Avian Flu. The cause of death appeared to be vehicular impacts. 

However, during the detailed analysis it was noted that varying colors of paints appeared on the bird’s beaks and claws. By analyzing these paint residues it was determined that 98% of the crows had been killed by impact with trucks, while only 2% were killed by an impact with a car. MTA then hired an Ornithological Behaviorist to determine if there was a cause for the disproportionate percentages of truck kills versus car kills. 

The Ornithological Behaviorist very quickly concluded the cause: when crows eat road kill, they always have a look-out crow in a nearby tree to warn of impending danger. They discovered that while all the lookout crows could shout “Cah”, not a single one could shout “Truck."

The Weirdest Airplane Imaginable

At first, I thought this was an aviation hoax.  I always took for granted that there was some kind of physics principle that required airplanes to have the right side and left side mirror images.  However, the German Luftwaffe had a reconnaissance plane that was radically asymmetrical.  This was the Blohm and Voss Bv. 141.  It must have to be the weirdest airplane ever designed, built, and actually flown!  Why the Germans decided to design this airplane, I have no idea.

But also, the three guys (pilot, observer, and gunner) that rode in the cockpit must have had a lot of daring.

They made about 20 of these planes; and they were described as 'operational.'  

Here is an old film of it flying:

700th post!