Random Blatherationings For July 14th

OK, that was really weird – I had typed “Random Blatherings” into the title and the spell check doesn’t like “Blatherings”, but just to be even more goofy and stupid I changed it to “Blatherationings” and now it seems fine. “Blatherationings” is really, really a word? Really?

OK, this is either not going at all the way I expected or it’s going exactly as it needs to – or both.

Seventy-six consecutive days and seventy-nine posts into this adventure, brain fried, not in a “writing mood”, realizing that it’s exactly today that I most need to get something written, can’t even do an “Odds & Sods” post because I’ve gotten one half-written already with several follow-ups to previous posts but I need to do some actual research to finish that off; I really should be studying my Spanish numbers for tomorrow night’s quiz; it’s too cloudy to go out and shoot more astrophotos of the moon and/or Venus and/or Saturn tonight; and I think that I’ve finally made this enough of a run-on sentence (which I know that I tend to do and I try to limit it but sometimes it’s just my own thematic style, a work in progress) to really piss off my daughter the English teacher…

…so instead let’s do this. Three rolls of the “I’m feeling lucky” wheel on Google, I’ll spout opinion and bullshit, with luck some of you will read it, with more luck some of you will be moved to make some comment on it, we’ll get a conversation going here, and we’ll call it a night.

Going to a random word generator, my three seed words for Google are “unease”, “ichthyoid”, and “exit”. (This is going to be a disaster.)

Unease – I get the definition of the word at The Free Dictionary website. What this makes me think of first is how boring “The Free Dictionary” is despite its usefulness. It’s better than dictionary.com because you don’t have the ads and so on, but a much better site which I dearly love is The Urban Dictionary (guaranteed NSFW!!).

If you want to be uneasy, just get caught reading The Urban Dictionary at work by a prudish, conservative boss. But if you see some term in the press or on Twitter or FaceBook or whatever and you’re thinking, “Huh! Kids these days! I wonder what that means?” then The Urban Dictionary is the first place to go. Just don’t go if you’re easily shocked.

For example, on the front page of the site you’ll get the “Word of the Day”. The word for July 12th was “lane splitting”, a pretty benign term from the motorcycle world that I’m sure you can all figure out. On the other hand, the word for July 8th was “wub one out”, the definition of which contains a number of words that I can guarantee you my mother has never use or has never heard.

Ichthyoid – and we’re right back to the definition in The Free Dictionary (“a fish or fishlike vertebrate”) and whole page of other definition sources, so let’s page through the Google listings for something more interesting (they’re my rules, I just made them up fifteen minutes ago, I’ll trash them as I see fit!) and look at what’s on the “green ‘l’ in ‘Gooooooooogle'” page.

This is…promising. It’s a YouTube video from April of someone dancing in their living room wearing a blue & yellow “fur suit” to the song “Thrift Shop” by (apparently) Macklemore & Ryan Lewis? (Obviously, rap and contemporary pop are not my strong suit!)

First of all, the fur suit is kind of an anime/furry thing and it’s not bad if she (I’m assuming it’s a “she”) is going to ComicCon or something for some cosplay. (“Cosplay” is another term you can look up on The Urban Dictionary…) Or trying out as a mascot for the high school sports teams. The dance routine doesn’t suck and if she’s doing it impromptu to the song she’s doing a good job. Just recording this and putting it up on YouTube shows she has more guts than I would about that sort of thing.

I just don’t think she understands what “ichthyoid” means when she named her video “Ichthyoid Zombie”. She’s not fish-like – she’s a furry critter with a tail, like an anime fox or raccoon. And most of the zombies I see mentioned (except for Brad Pitt’s) don’t dance, they do more shuffling and stumbling. But perhaps I’m subscribing to an outdated stereotype.

What would really be cool (and this really isn’t a “me” thing) would be if I had an army of followers and readers like John Scalzi or Wil Wheaton. Right now this video has 218 views – if I were one of them, in the morning it would have 21,800 views. Wouldn’t that freak her out? THAT would be cool! C’mon, everyone reading this, go to the link if you haven’t already and get some friends to do it too, let’s see if we can double the view count overnight!!

Exit – so just maybe the “I’m Feeling Lucky” choices on Google are sponsored. This gives me the website for the Syfy show “Exit”, which a brief perusal shows to be a brand new (two full episodes available to watch online now!!) reality-television game show of some sort.

Eeeeeewwww!!!

I would like to give Syfy some love, but I just can’t. I’ve been a huge fan of science fiction and fantasy since childhood. I’ve been a card-carrying SF fan, going to cons, running cons, publishing fanzines, voting for the Hugo Awards, and so on for thirty-five years now.

I hate Syfy.

I never really hated them when they started out as “The Sci-Fi Channel” (not just because “sci-fi” is what mundanes called science fiction to belittle it while “SF” was what the fans called it) showing nothing but constant repeats of really old, really bad “B-movies”. I just didn’t watch them much.

I disliked them when they started making really bad “B-movies” of their own. I know there are some who think that they’ve now gotten so bad that they’re good (i.e., last Friday’s “Sharknado”) but I’ll say it – the Emperor has no clothes. Their programs suck.

And I really started hating them when they started committing a significant chunk of their schedule to showing “wrestling”, as in WWE or WWF or WWsomethingreallyfreakin’stupid.

Why can’t they be showing “Star Trek” re-runs, and “Twilight Zone”, and classic SF movies, and “Outer Limits”, and hell, even “Lost In Space”, “Time Tunnel”, and “Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea”? The worst episode of any of those shows would be better than the crap they have on there now.

And since they have the name “Sci-Fi” or “Syfy” or however they want to market it this year, that’s what a significant portion of the population thinks of when they think of science fiction. They’re taking something I love as wonderful and thoughtful and intellectual and mind expanding and they’re using it as corporate wrapping paper for stale dog turd and old fish guts.

I hate them. Won’t watch. Ever.

There, that was a pretty good rant, right? I guess maybe this idea worked as a blunt force exercise to jump start my muse for the evening. I like it!

And now to study some Spanish numbers. Uno! Dos! Tres! Cuatro! (Insert “Wooly Bully” here.)