Why is it so much easier to blow out a candle if I put my hand a few inches behind the flame than if I don’t, and why did it take me until now to figure this out?
Why do I find giant squid so disappointing? I know they’re giant, yes, and I’m sure I’d be awfully frightened if one ever swam past me in the morning bath, but why aren’t they as big as the ones 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea led me to believe they might be? I know we haven’t explored most of the ocean; is there a chance there are really big ones squorting about in the depths? Eighty feet, at least. That’s what I think giant should mean.
Just how sure are we that the Hollow Earth theory really can’t be true? Very sure, or only mostly sure?
Why am I so often my most uncharitable and unkind immediately after I have resolved to treat a particular person better?
Why is it so common among a certain type of middling author to give a character two differently-colored eyes instead of distinguishing personality traits?
How am I supposed to pronounce this? It can’t possibly be pronounced like what I think it is, can it?
Tags: questions, things mallory does for no reason
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I think that the airflow hits your hand and bounces back toward the flame, making it more efficient to blow out. Either that or it creates an airless vortex in which no flame can survive.
DIET OF WORMS
“Ways Jules Verne Has Misled and Betrayed Me,” by Mallory Ortberg
It’s Diet (like when you’re trying to lose weight) of Vorms. (Worms with a “v”, because it is German) At least, that’s what I learned in my AP European History class.
As far as the unkind thing, I think it might be similar to how as soon as you resolve to be more fiscally responsible you end up buying a fabulous pair of boots, or as soon as you have resolved to eat better you down a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. It’s a weird rebellion thing.
Re: Squids. There are terrors within the deeps that we can’t even fathom. So yes, there are probably bigger ones we haven’t seen. We don’t see them all that often to begin with. We only just caught them fuckin’ like, 5 years ago.
Also, there are Colossal Squid! Squid in general are kind of terrifying, though, I’m pretty glad they mostly don’t get that big because we would be fucked.
Besides, we should really be more worried about the octopus
thanks for linking to that! it was fun to read with my morning tea.
Eek! This passage gave me chills:
“When she finished, she walked back to the first octopus to see if it had gone for the meal. The food was nowhere to be seen, but the cephalopod was waiting for Boal—waiting and watching. This octopus locked eyes with her and moved slowly sideways to the drain in the front right corner of its tank. Pausing above the outflow, it shot the stale squid out of its arms and down the drain, continuing its stare (or was it a glare?) at Boal, who got the message. Two, actually: This octopus was not going to tolerate crummy food—and maybe it even wanted Boal to understand that.”
This is why I can’t eat calamari any more. Cephalopods are just too cool for me to eat.
And have you ever seen a giant squid? I went to a special whatsit at the national history museum in London and oh good lord it was impressive. I wish it had been alive.
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/life/other-inv…
or the cuttlefish
Nope, changed my mind. Octopuses are the best/worst. Here’s one that eats sharks!
I’m pretty sure when we die out octopi will take over the earth. Or we won’t die out, they’ll rise from the oceans and kill us all.
On the one hand: poor shark! I love sharks.
On the other: go octopus! Impressive predatory skills!
Oh my god that video is a masterpiece! The editing! The music!
Colossal Squid have donut-shaped brains, which directly absorb nutrients before the get to the digestive tract. They go through the hole in the donut!
heh heh heh fathom. CUZ THEY COULD BE IMPOSSIBLE TO UNDERSTAND OR JUST TOO DEEP TO SEE. I got an inexplicable amount of joy from your wording.
Also re: recently discovered terrors of the deep, when whales die, their bodies become mini-ecosystems on the barren ocean floor and all kinds of strange and terrifying creatures mysteriously find their way to them. This phenomenon is called “Whale Fall” and marine biologists are still debating how exactly the ecosystems establish themselves and replicate, leading to one of my favorite article titles in the marine biology literature: “Whales do not fall like snow.” (BUT WHAT IF THEY DID??)
this is made of amazing.
I would love it if such characters automatically became David Bowie, and the middling authors were powerless to prevent it. I do not know if such consequences would discourage use of this trope, or not.
David Bowie actually does not have two different colored eyes. One of his pupils is blown out because he got punched in the eye in a barfight one time. *nerds off into the sunset*.
Oof, that’s horrible! (And thank you for nerding.)
It can’t be as disappointing as the Vampyroteuthis infernalis (Vampire Squid From Hell), which gets only about a foot long.
😀
🙁
Why am I so often my most uncharitable and unkind immediately after I have resolved to treat a particular person better?
I’m gonna say a lot of it is probably that, having made that resolution, you are now hyper-aware of your own behavior, and so it may not necessarily be behavior that’s more unkind than usual, but simply behavior that you’re more likely to notice and judge yourself harshly for.
I’m going to guess resentment at being made to feel guilty about your own behavior, even if the guilt is self-induced and entirely a product of your own actions.
not that I have any experience with this or anything, haha, what a weird feeling this must be for the people who experience it who are not me
Yes, I think this is sort of the social interaction equivalent of “I am not going to eat any more Chocolate EVER AGAIN” and then effectively blacking out and waking up in the display of a Chocolate shop, a la the Count in Chocolat.
Kristen Cashore wrote three books where certain characters has different colored eyes; this indicated their special abilities.
I have known two people with multi colored eyes and a few cats and dogs with this trait. They had no special abilities that I know of.
Would you identify her as a middling author?
The different colored eyes seemed like part of a larger whole to me, with her characters (odd eyed or not) being well developed and interesting.
Unlike other books I’ve read where people have different colored eyes or oddly colored eyes (purple! gold! silver!) and not much else going on.
Ooh. I think–about being unkind–that it might have something to do with the power of ideas: if you resolve to do it, you’ve somehow tricked your brain into actually thinking you HAVE done it.
I find giant squid disappointing because they aren’t nearly as terrifying or colossal as mythical seabeasts like the kraken and Cthulhu, and also because I bet all those antique map makers who would diligently fill in empty bits of sea with inventively horrifying sea creatures would also find giant squid disappointing.
What makes me angry about the giant squid is that the length includes its long-ass flimsy feeding tentacles. ARCHITEUTHIS I DON’T SAY THAT I’M 6 FOOT 6 BECAUSE MY HAIR IS A FOOT LONG.
I didn’t even know I was angry about that, but I now realize I have been my entire life.
Would you rather have different colored eyes, or two sizes of hands, because middling authors really only have that choice to make and once you go with one hand bigger than the other that throws the whole romantic plot between the flat-affect protag and the oversexed antag in a quandry.
Oh, and to answer the first question, you’re performing air magic between your mouth and your hand.
Air bending.
The level of certainty that we possess about the falseness of the Hollow Earth Theory is roughly the same as the level of certainty that we have that a princess of some kind will come trick-or-treating to our door this Halloween.
“A princess of some kind” could mean a lot of things, Doctor.
Like Buffy in spellthrall. For example.
The rocks that the Earth’s crust is made of are not strong enough to support their own weight if there should happen to be a large cavity underneath; this argument alone pretty much demolishes the idea of a hollow Earth. Also, earthquakes make the entire planet vibrate, we are really good at measuring the vibrations, and they would be different if there were a hollow large enough to be interesting. (This is, for instance, how we know that there is an “outer core” that is liquid but an “inner core” that is solid again.)
You might be able to get around the first point with MOLE PEOPLE SUPER-SCIENCE, but then you’d have to explain what they did with all the rock they removed, and it wouldn’t help with the second point.
I’ve known how the Diet of Worms is supposed to be pronounced (Vurms) for as long as I can remember, but it still gave me immense joy in my Lutheran confirmation classes when I was 13, and now again at 28 since my husband is going through the process of getting Lutheranized. It’s a diet of worms! It will never not be funny.
How did we even learn things before google? You probably had to wait until the next time you went to the library or something. And even then that wouldn’t help you with “Hey isn’t that that guy? What other things have we seen him in?” I mean what did we do before IMDB?
How did we even learn things before Google? We had to look it up in World Book and trust they knew what they were talking about.
Arguments never end!
You’re not wrong. My mother and I once had a weekend-long friendly argument about whether Burgess Meredith or David Wayne played the diminutive romantic interest in How to Marry a Millonaire, and we stopped arguing only because we lost interest, not because we learned the answer either by seeing film clips or by reading the cast list. (At the distance of 20 years, I feel compelled to say: I’m sorry, Mom, you were right.)
My friends used to call me. At least for the IMDB things.
Also, when I worked at a specialized research library reference desk, I would get phone calls to settle bets and arguments. This was in 2000, so google was still new and not universal.
I have a friend who people still call about this sort of thing, for some reason, although I don’t even know if he was born before Google. Once we were both in another friend’s car going someplace, and he had to take a call from someone who wanted him to explain Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The rest of us were pretty bemused, but he just acted like it was normal.
Haha I love this.
I am this person to my family. I have been woken up at 1am by a phone call from my sister, asking me to explain how oysters have sex.
Ha! My family are like that too, particularly my little sister. She once texted me to ask how she knew when the biscuits (cookies) she had in the oven were done. (To be fair it was a recipe I’d given her that she had never used before, but still…)
Remember those big ass movie reference guides? They were called something like Golden Movie Retrievers and it had a drawing of a dog with sunglasses on it? That was the reference/cross reference guide for all things movie before the internet.
This is precisely why my dad bought himself a fresh yearly copy of the World Almanac up until very recently.
When we played the what’s this guy been in game in my family, the answer was always Silverado. Always. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090022/fullcredits?ref_=tt_cl_sm#cast)
Squids: I watched a NG documentary about giant squids that had attacked fishermen so I’m ok with the size of most squids. Honestly, everything in the ocean scares me anyway, including tiny jellyfish and seaweed.
Giant squid, much like the disembodied portions of the human anatomy they resemble, are terrifying in their natural environment and totally flaccid and disappointing once they wash up on the shore. Here is a LADYSCIENTIST doing a TED talk about catching one on film – http://www.ted.com/talks/edith_widder_how_we_foun…
this is the greatest dick joke that has ever been joked
😉
You know what has the opposite of the giant squid problem? The sunfish. It sounds like a nice little insignificant fish, right? NOPE.
The crazy thing is that we live in an urban neighborhood that happens to have a very clean little beach abutting the local harbor. You can swim there. My husband swims there in the summer. And one day, just after he had gone for a swim, the local paper reports that one of these guys was IN THE WATER. They’re harmless, but can you even imagine that thing sidling up next to you?
Holy crapadoodle. That fish is simultaneously comical and terrifying.
OMG it’s enormous. I had no idea they were so big!
AHH. I had exactly the intended reaction. Why is it called a sunfish? Why isn’t it called a cubist fish? Cubie for short? I asked Siri and she was NO HELP
Yes. Sunfish is very misleading. Cubie is much more suitable.Though the other name for sunfish is “mola mola”. That DOES sort of sound like the low, guttural mutterings that this fish might use to communicate as it glides right up next to you.
mola mola mola mola mola
doo doo de doo doo
mola mola
doo doo de doo
this made me laugh way too hard at work
Ahhhhhhhhh it looks like a whale that’s been cartoonishly smashed
WHAT’S ON THE SIDE OF IT?? THEY LOOK LIKE GIANT HUMAN EARS
OK, it’s like, a gill flap, and right next to it is a small pectoral fin. The effect of the two together looks a lot like EARS. It’s such a weird, prehistoric-looking monster.
Why that eye. Why that eye
This is both amusing and terrifying:
“They’re not considered dangerous. In fact, only one man has ever been killed by a sunfish – and that was because it landed on him and squashed him.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/4192566.stm
Regarding candles and the blowings outs of such: When you blow on a candle, you cool it enough to extinguish the fire. (You also displace the air with carbon dioxide, but I think that’s secondary, since gusts of wind can also extinguish candles.) It’s possible that, when you form a barrier behind it, the cooler air sticks around instead of jetting away, so you need less of it to extinguish the candle. It’s also possible that it’s much more complicated than that and to really get at the truth you’d have to either a) stick an infrared camera in front of your face to see what the heat flow is like; b) write a simulation to model the system (but it might get tricky because the flame itself is affecting the air too); or c) come up with the right set of terms to Google because someone else has probably solved this problem already (I wasn’t able to, sadface).
“How Could I Make The Ocean Even More Of A Nightmare Place?” by Mallory Ortberg
WAIT BUT IS IT “DEE-EHT” OR “DIE-ET”
I definitely learned it as “DEE-uht.” Like Dieter, from SNL!
DEE-ET, like the Diet of Bugs from Fifth Elephant/Monstrous Regiment.
Or as in die bart, die. From the Simpsons.
A+ to both of those references!
“No one who speaks German could be an evil man!”
If you want to make giant squid terrifying again for a moment, watch this oil-rig video of a Magnapinna squid and misinterpret it (as I did the first time I saw it, and as my monkey-brain insists upon doing for the first few seconds each time I see it) that it is the squid and not the camera that is zipping about with unearthly speed.
God, I love to be freaked out by that video. Total horror-movie footage.
I’m pretty sure that footage spontaneously erupted out of a Lovecraft story.
I don’t know the answers to any of your questions, but my husband and I went to Worms purely because we were amused by the name. (And we were driving through the area and needed a place to sleep.) There was a lot of yelling “Worms!” during the drive there.
Turned out to be pretty nice, for a destination randomly chosen on a map. Lots of churches. Or maybe just one big church, I forget.
In a similar vein to the question about treating someone unkindly: How come every time I notice that things have been going extra great in my relationship, we end up in a horrible argument within the next 48 hours? EVERY TIME.
OH GOOD IT’S NOT JUST ME
Why is this not also tagged “squorting about in the depths”?!?!?!?!
Such a useful tag!
I feel like that’s going to get us some weird google hits.
BRING IT.
My grandmother has two different colored eyes but one is kind of fucked up, so the green one is normal but then the blue one has a weird wedge of a kind of green-tan color? It’s never like it is in the books. I always notice and am annoyed by that quirk in books.
That’s sectoral heterochromia, one of the heterochromia variations. Eyes are fascinating!
By strange coincidence, I was just reading about how they figured out the earth wasn’t hollow. When surveying the Mason Dixon line in the 1760s, they noticed that their measurements were consistently off in one direction. Nevil Maskelyne realized it was because the gravitational pull of the Allegheny mountains was pulling their plumb-bobs (weights on strings) in one direction (the plumb bobs help ensure the equipment is set up correctly). He and Mason also figured that if they could measure the gravitational pull of a mountain as well its volume and density, they could estimate the density of the earth, for which they knew the volume and gravitational pull, but not the density.
Maskelyne then went off to Mt. Schiehallion in Scotland to make the measurements. Their resulting estimate of the earth’s density wasn’t exactly right, but it was pretty impressive given the technology of the day. Plus, I imagine there was a lot of scotch and terrible weather involved. At any rate they correctly realized that earth was super-dense, even denser than the surface rocks. This ruled out a hollow earth, and suggested that there was a lot of metal at its core.
Or instead of two different eyes, purple eyes? (the Trebonds in Tamora Pierce are exceptions to this because <3 Trebonds/Tammy forever)
I’m too lazy to google, but I wonder if the purple eyed redheads were:
1) her riffing on lazy cliched fantasy tropes
2) something lazy cliched fantasy writers picked up on and drove into the ground
3) something else I can’t think of right now
I’ve read a LOT of really horrible books where the protag has purple eyes (often paired with red hair) and only one good series (Lioness Rampant).
okay listen all of you are wrong about this, giant squids are PLENTY TERRIFYING, everything that lives in the ocean is the worst and if you’re not terrified of it you just haven’t educated yourselves enough.
like did you know giant squids and sperm whales are nemeses and have been locked in an eternal battle since time began and literally BOTH EAT EACH OTHER. scientists used to find the beaks of giant squids in the corpses of whales and they thought it was the shell of some undiscovered horrible thing, and then they were like NOPE IT’S JUST THE MOUTH.
THINK ABOUT THAT.
“Why is it so common among a certain type of middling author to give a character two differently-colored eyes instead of distinguishing personality traits?”
Perhaps the author is hoping that David Bowie will play the character in the movie adaptation, and leaving room for Bowie’s portrayal to fill in the empty spaces in the character.
"Why is it so common among a certain type of middling author to give a character two differently-colored eyes instead of distinguishing personality traits?"
Perhaps the author is hoping that David Bowie will play the character in the movie adaptation, and leaving room for Bowie's portrayal to fill in the empty spaces in the character.
I was enamored of the word squorting as soon as I read it. But then I googled it.
😉