Joshua Malbin

I realize that even asking this question marks me as being 120 years old in kid years, but what’s the deal with cheek piercings? Who started the trend? Are they supposed to be reminiscent of dimples? Why do so many kids have them now instead of, you know, tongue studs or eyebrow rings?

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You Are Not So Smart is a new blog in my Google Reader that offers a kind of Psych 101 along the title’s theme. The entry Fanboyism and Brand Loyalty discusses the misconception that we “prefer the things we own over the things we don’t because we made rational choices when we bought them.”

It’s an entertaining discussion; I’ll only add a conversation I had sometime in the late nineties in which someone said, “I use a Mac, I drive a Volkswagen, so yeah, I voted for Nader.”

(The truly horrible thing is that I’m pretty sure that’s how it went, but I may have the order of priority wrong.)

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This was what set off your Holy Land Outrage-o-Meter, this week?

[posted here because I am too smart/cowardly to get into it with you directly]

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“Hmm. This van has a Max Cargo Capacity instead of a Max Payload.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Max Payload is a much better porn name.”

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Although homicides still occur at a steady pace, the beheadings, massacres and dissolution of victims in lye that were Garcia’s terrorizing trademark have largely stopped.

Tijuana club scene revs up as drug-war fears ease, Richard Marosi, Los Angeles Times 5/9/10. Emphasis mine.

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The summer I spent in England I found Viz magazine, which ran a Hints from Heloise-parody called “Top Tips.”

The one I remember laughing at out loud in the middle of Piccadilly Circus (so disappointing, by the way) was “Paint a small red cross at the bottom of your teacup. When you see the cross, you’ll know it’s time to add more tea.”

Anyway, here’s a kitchen tip. You know how it’s endlessly frustrating to chase a bit of eggshell around a bowl of cracked eggs? If you use a spoon or your finger, the little bugger will still get tantalizingly close, then slip away from your grasp. Or spoon. (Also, don’t use your finger.)

Here’s a trick that works every time:

Use an eggshell. The most solid-looking of your discarded half-shells.

It’s thin enough to scoop out the runaway without just pushing around the protective layer of white.

A small collection of Viz Top tips can be found here. I recommend installing Readability in order to turn the unintelligible small-white-text on black into something easier on the eyes.

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Featuring an amazing guest starring turn from Werner Herzog. It’s been three years, but Aaron McGruder remains a genius.

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I learned a beautiful new word tonight, “haecceity.” Wikipedia:

Haecceity is a term from medieval philosophy first coined by Duns Scotus which denotes the discrete qualities, properties or characteristics of a thing which make it a particular thing. Haecceity is a person or object’s “thisness”.

It should be distinguished from “quiddity”, which refers not to the “thisness” of a thing but to the “whatness” of a thing, its universal rather than particular qualities. Quiddity (a word I’d much heard but never heard defined — is it the name of a board game? No, it seems, a literary journal).

Do you know the herring joke?

A jokester in Chelm once thought up a riddle that nobody could answer: “What’s purple, hangs on the wall, and whistles?”
When everybody in Chelm gave up, he announced the answer: a herring
“A herring?” people said. “A herring isn’t purple.”
“No,” replied the jokester, “this herring was painted purple.”
“But hanging on a wall? Who ever heard of a herring that hung on the wall?”
“Aha! But this herring was hung on the wall.”
“But a herring doesn’t whistle,” somebody shouted.
“Nu, so it doesn’t whistle.”

Maybe it’s not so complicated it needs an example, but if it does, there’s your joke. The haecceity (what a pair of dipthongs) of this herring is considerably different from the quiddity of herrings. Therein lies the humor.

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I don’t actually think it will catch on, but below the fold…
(continue reading…)

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“Please link to Haquelbac,” writes John Emerson, idiocentrist and soi-disant troll. “The world needs to be informed that Haquelbac exists.” Surely we can accomplish the former without affecting the latter one way or another.

Anyway, in case one of you vampire dental anatomy enthusiasts makes it over to this entry, you may enjoy John Emerson’s philology of the horrible octopus; the rest of you may enjoy comparing les bousingots to your hipster friends.

Emerson is a public intellectual in glancing contact with his public, a Lake Wobegonian of the above averagest caliber, and a grump of the highest order. And here, we know from grump.

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