Ikea

Just a random Citizen Dog that gets the Ikea feel just right.

Another Person's Invisible Pain

This Citizen Dog reminds me of a long time pet-peeve of mine: people cannot see most of the pain a person can suffer. Unless there's a cast/bandage/missing limb, the pain is invisible. And many of our words for ailments or injuries are not menacing enough: headache, allergy, a cold, and depression. These terms each have either a range (headache can go from mild to migraine), or are used colloquially (when a person is feeling 'depressed' it can mean either they are feeling the blues or are clinically diagnosed and can be a suicide-threat).

Bellyaching personally [warning: the next paragraph is wangsty], I suffer from many problems that are invisible: allergies, stomach weakness, back pain, etc, that make me appear normal but on the inside can render me inoperable. And, self-conscious that I am for appearing as a malingerer, I have fantasized that as a type of super-power to throw my maladies onto another person for a minute. And, as part of this fantasy, once the person is suddenly stricken, he will collapse stunned and agonized. In fact, this led to my enacting a basic curse: for anyone who thinks I am lazy/shirking or making my problems up/exaggerating, my curse is that they should suffer my pains for a minute, like in the fantasy.

OK, enough unseemly ranting. But this observation comes from a greater point which is the need to exaggerate a self-description in order for your listener to take you seriously. See the Dilbert above for my point; transcript (from here):

That's right...cough-cough! ...I won't be in to work...cough-wheeze-cough... - Bad cold? Well, no, actually I have a bad headache... - But I don't know how to make a headache sound over the phone.

[I actually worked on this idea, within semiotics, for my Princeton JP and one day I will publish it BE"H.]

No Snowflakes Alike?

Prompted by this Citizen Dog: I've long doubted this factoid. First of all, how many snowflakes are there in 1 snowfall on 1 day in 1 square mile? Millions? In the world at this second, there must be billions or even trillions of snowflakes. Today alone. And of those snowflakes none are 'alike'? Well what level of similarity are we restricting here? This seems to render the definition of 'alike' useless.

The wiki quotes the claim that:

It is next to impossible that two snowflakes are exactly alike due to the roughly 10¹⁸ water molecules which make up a snowflake, which grow at different rates and in different patterns depending on the changing temperature and humidity within the atmosphere that the snowflake falls through on its way to the ground united.

So thank goodness, the resident genius of the Straight Dope is on the case: whose answer demonstrates that we think so much alike that I should declare here and now that we are not the same person:

Chances are, in fact, that there are lots of duplicates. What the snowologists really mean is that your chance of finding duplicates is virtually zero. It's been calculated that in a volume of snow two feet square by ten inches deep there are roughly one million flakes. Multiply that by the millions of square miles that are covered by snow each year (nearly one fourth of the earth's land surface), and then multiply that by the billions of winters that have occurred since the dawn of time, and it's obvious we're talking unimaginable googols of flakes. Some of these are surely repeats.

See!

Second pic from here.

Which is the Most Goyish Holiday?

Depends what "goyish" means. Most people think it's a synonym for "Christian," or just "non-Jewish antgonist" but I'd say the range would be from 'another religion that's not Judaism' or 'super-duper pagan.' Christianity and Islam are serious monothesitic religions and so their most serious days could be the most 'goyish' but they also have pagan aspects (especially Xians). So the most goyish could be Easter on one side and possibly Halloween the other. See above for Citizen Dog's take on Halloween.

Bert and Ernie

This Citizen Dog emphasizes a point I've made on other occasions, that Bert and Ernie are are archetypes - which is why they're on an educational show aimed at children. They exemplify personality types, just like Oscar as the child "grouch" (similar to Charles Schulz's Lucy), Grover as the earnest self-assured klutz, Big Bird as the mistake-ridden, invisible friend having, insecure klutz; Telly Monster as the worrywart; Elmo as the annoying late addition who angers GenXers who pre-dated him, Cookie Monster as the fat kid (and/or personal hero of millions), and Herry Monster as the, uh, hairy kid.

They are also brothers. I emphasize this first of all to work against the perverted/pedophilic drive to call them gay. I always thought they were brothers because they acted exactly like me and my brother. I was Ernie, if that's any surprise.

I see it with my two boys as well; and as Citizen Dog shows, it's a common life and comedic pairing.

Second pic from here.

Crosswalk Button Morality

One thing that impressed me in New Haven, and now in Newton, is that the crosswalk buttons actually work. Not so in NYC, they were like elevator 'close door' buttons - something there to amuse the police on closed-circuit cameras. Like in the above Citizen Dog from January 04, 2009.

Note, a moral question I struggled with when I first arrived is whether or not I should use these crosswalk buttons - which will stop all traffic going in every direction, costing drivers a batch of time - or whether I should cross on the red-light like I did in NYC (and in previous hometowns). The question is: is it justified for me to waste the time of every driver at a cross-roads (could number in the dozens of people!) for my own needs. Selfishness is one of my main pet-peeves and I consider it the root of most evil I witness in life. I especially hate behavior that gains advantage at another's expense: it's basically robbery. So, is using the cross-walk button robbery?

After a few weeks in Newton/Boston I realized that the drivers here are truly the worst I've ever seen. They are stupid, aggressive and selfish. Thus for reasons of life-and-death, I feel it's justified to use the button.

The THX Menace

This may be my favorite, or at least most quoted, Citizen Dog: about the evil of the ear-blasting THX intro. Does anyone enjoy that? It seems designed by bullies and braggarts: "we need to hurt your ears, and waste your time, to show you how great we are." A pox on whoever invented that promo and for every filmmaker that includes it at the start of their film.