10 Mini-Articles

Truth, like infinity, comes in all sizes, and lessons learned are by no means proportional to what they’re learned from. Here’s a small list of truthlets that beg to be expanded into full-sized articles.

1) The hallowed i-pod won’t let you sort your albums. Hence Handel gets hemmed in by Genesis and Iron Maiden, Tom Waits’ Swordfish Trombones gets slung among Sunday’s sermons, and twenty-five differently named Bach albums are strewn through the library like the beads of a broken bracelet.

Since sorting options only show per song and not per album, one solution is to add a three-letter code to all fields of the get-info function at the multiple-items level.

After weeks of weeping, typing and teeth-gnashing my Handel albums are now named CHA: Handel (CHA stands for Classical HAndel). My Bachs are known by names such as BAC: Brandenburgers On A Hammond, or BAC: Flute Sonatas whistled by Mitch Miller. And my Tom Waits collection is now impressively sorted by year: PZX 1983: Swordfish Trombones; PZX 1985: Raindogs, etc.

Which other unauthorized household tricks greatly improve devices that everybody uses?

2) I invented the portable hard disk! Me!

It was fifteen years ago, after my first hard disk crash. I saw how swiftly my computer guy pulled out the afflicted disk and inserted another one, so I asked him if he could perhaps solder a wire to that little golden comb on the inside, and a similar little golden comb on the other end of the wire. But no matter what I said, drew or pantomimed, I was unable to explain to him what I wanted and how every computer user in the world would benefit from my vast insights. Another fortune missed.

Which other great inventions were made by people who never got a dime out of it?

3) Making a vow to no longer drink makes you wake up hung-over and guilt-ridden.

4) The border of the United States is largely guarded by foreigners.

I travel a lot and cross borders all the time and I’ve noticed that a good nine out of ten US-border strip-searchers don’t speak English well enough to convey their demands or comprehend my replies. All the jingle-jangle that you get to suffer when you’re trying to cross a US border is of course not intended to impress terrorists but rather to generate the illusion of safety, which is fine with me. And besides, if I’d want a chat, I’d get a taxi.

Click here to apply for a job at CBP (Customs and Border Patrol).

5)There’s a famous-person nip-slip in the movie The Love Letter and I’m the only one who knows about it!

FYI: The Love Letter was shot in Rockport, Mass, and I was living there at the time. The same goes for The Perfect Storm, which was shot in Gloucester (same zip-code as Rockport). The fair town of Gloucester, pronounced “Glosta”, is mentioned in The Love Letter and shown to be within biking range of Rockport. The fictional town that staged the story was called Loblolly By The Sea. The book by Cathleen Shine taught me more English words than Webster’s Biggie. About the movie Shine says, “I had nothing to do with anything, but everyone was extremely nice and I especially like all the scenes that were not in the book.”

Why are so many people so crazy about famous nip-slips that there are entire websites devoted to it? Apart, of course, from the curious effect that one exposed nipple can earn you an R-rating, which would be unwanted and detrimental if your axe-wielding psycho-thrilling adultery-glorifying story targets the PG-13 group.

6) Galaxy Quest is the best-cast movie of all time.

7) Most people think that the word hosanna is an exclamation of joy, like hallelujah, but in fact it is a construct derived of a Hebrew verb that means “to save someone,” and “na,” the common particle of entreaty. Hosanna means “save us, please!”

The confusion comes from hosanna’s most famous application, namely in the scene of the Triumphant Entry (Matt 21, Mark 11, Luke 19 and John 12). Because Israel had been continuously occupied for centuries, the people joyfully hailed Jesus as their liberator by quoting Psalm 118:25-26.

The name Jesus, by the way, comes from that same verb “to save.”

The Dutch language area is in uproar because a hideous message was found by reversing a song of the famous girl-group K3. Extra consternation comes from the fact that K3 targets young kids. The message (chastened and translated) states, “great mass murder; … lots of fun.”

The phenomenon of hidden messages in backward running songs (called backmasking when done deliberate and phonetic reversal when not) was famous in the eighties, when folks still had turn tables and tape decks. The origin of unintended messages was never identified, although suggestions ran from common subconscious communications to the devil’s dastardly doings. Most experts contend that perceiving meaning in chaos has more to do with faces in clouds or Rorschach blots than with factual existence, and says more about the hearer than about the artist.

9) Scores of abbreviations exist of which most people don’t realize that they’re abbrevs and certainly don’t know what they’re abs of.

The word abs (nice abs, Bob!), for instance comes from abdomen if Bob’s a bodybuilder or from abbreviation if Bob’s a copy editor. ABS is also among the most popular acronyms: Wikipedia lists a whopping thirty one! And who could have thought that the American Bible Society has something in common with an Adult Book Store?

Another example is the word fan, which may either mean one of those wind-making things, but it can also denote someone who’s fanatic about something or someone, like, say, Lady Windermere (which gaily refers to a play written by Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, who would doubtlessly rank supremely high on a list of people with the weirdest names ever).

10) In the time it took me to write this article I could have made six bucks at MacDonald’s. I would have made more people happy that way. And I probably would have gained greater fame too.

On the cover of the 2008 Writer’s Market it says “Over 5 Million Copies Sold” in big greasy sadistic letters. The best selling book ever (as everybody knows) is the Bible. The second best selling book used to be Euclid’s Elements but I’m sure Rowling’s sold more by now. But what about Tolkien? And Dan Brown?

At the time of this article’s publication, Amazon.com’s hourly updated list of best-selling books has no Bibles, Euclids, Rowlings, Tolkiens or Browns in the top 25.

I wonder what would be the most profitable text ever written, apart of course from the Bible, the United States Declaration of Independence, or the MacDonald’s manifesto. If that can be figured out, it would be fun to see which word in that text occurs only once. Divide the total profit of that text by the word count, and you have a price tag for the most expensive word ever written!