by Garth Sundem
• Fukien AA: a Hong Kong soccer club
• Orange Crushers: a Guam soccer club
• Cockburn City: an Australian soccer club
• Admira Wacker: an Austrian soccer club
• The Calgary Flames originated in Atlanta in 1972. Actually, the flames themselves originated with General William Sherman during the Civil War when he torched the aforementioned Athens of the South.
• New York Knicks: Generations of New Yorkers claim to be direct descendants of Father Knickerbacker, despite the original Diedrich Knickerboker being a fictional character used by Washington Irving to narrate his political satire A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (the so-named style of pants/shorts came later).
• While there are precious few lakes in Los Angeles County, there are quite a few in the Lakers’ original home of Minneapolis. (And the Utah Jazz originated in New Orleans.)
• Phillies: In 1883, the team was known as the Philadelphia Quakers, then briefly as the Blue Jays (1943-44), before settling into the cheese-steak-eating, Big Head-worshipping Phillies briefly popularized by John Kruk.
Note: The completion of the $270 million, 32,000-person Wank-dorf stadium, new home of the Swiss football team Young Boys, spawned the Reuters headline “Young Boys Wankdorf Erection Relief.”
HYPNOSIS 101: HOW TO MAKE YOUR FRIENDS ACT LIKE CHICKENS
Like hacking, it is much easier to hypnotize someone once his or her firewall is down. Thus, you will need to find a way to gain your victim's confidence before you can exert your evil will, perhaps couching your hypnosis in terms of relaxation or memory techniques.
The first step is to make your victim comfortable. Ask him to sit or lie down. Then, in a soothing voice, ask your victim to close his eyes and focus on his breathing. Have him drift his consciousness into various body parts, relaxing each part in turn. Offer encouragement. Repeat for ten to fifteen minutes. Beware of any interruptions.
Voilà—your victim is now susceptible to your will, and will be for about the next ten minutes. Use your time wisely.
When bringing someone out of hypnosis, use one of the cli-chéd endings, such as, “I will count down from five, and when I reach zero, you will open your eyes, feeling alert and rested, and will forget that I have made you scratch around the watercooler while clucking, flapping your arms, and pecking at imaginary grubs while the rest of the office dissolved into hilarity.”
Note: The previous description of hypnosis is massively unethical. If you make your friends and/or family act like chickens, you are going to hell.
‘80S DANCE MOVES THAT DESERVE RESURGENCE
Some argue—and they may have a point—that every time someone commits the following dance moves to print, they doom future generations to repeat the mistakes of the 1980s. These doomsayers posit that even after 80s dance moves recede from our cultural memory, books such as this will lie dormant, like pods from the movie Aliens, waiting for discovery by some future teen, at which time they will burst forth to infect another generation.
The Running Man. Hop as you bring one knee up, then slide your grounded foot back as you bring down your raised foot, landing on this foot directly underneath you (as if running in place). Repeat. Consider combining with churning butter or other seriously funky hand movements. The Running Man and its variation, the Roger Rabbit, are basic repertoire for any aspiring 80s dancer.
The Typewriter. Hop sideways, alternating your toes in and out.
Funky Alien. Push a fist out from underneath your shirt to imitate alien birth from your abdominal cavity. For added effect, draw alien face on your fist and periodically let it peek from your neck hole.
TOUCH-TONE TUNES: THE KEYS TO SUCCESS
If you have perfect pitch, go no further. However, if your mind is open to the microtonal tuning systems of the Orient, you can employ rhythm to make up for what these songs lack in completely accurate pitch. To play these songs, it is imperative that you know them well before taking to your phone's keypad.
“Lean on Me” “Working on the Railroad” Olympic Fanfare
4, 4569, 9654, 45665 4, 4569, 9654, 45614 654, 99996, 69654, 456655 4, 4569, 99654, 9666154 42454864, 66426 42454864, 6662265 55556541, 6644556 44455446, 61621 3, 9, 91231, 2222, 32112312 3,9,91231,2222,32112321
Horn of the General Lee “99 Bottles of Beer” Monkees Theme Song
321112369993 6661116666, 9992229 333,3333, 1112236666 665466, 444445556 445564, 4444551
“You Are My Sunshine” “California, Here I Come” “Happy Birthday”
15333,35311 1536#, #963 1536#, #9631 153,35531 8888981 333 3634 112163, 112196 11085563, 008121
Hangin’ Tough. Pioneered by NKOTB. Left arm high in the air. Wave it back and forth (like you just don't care).
Popcorn. Hop side-to-side in time with the music while shaking your head in the opposite direction and smiling as if Molly Ringwald had just agreed to be your prom date. This should be as cheesy as possible and is thus best performed ironically (as, in all honesty, are most of these steps).
Popping. Like the robot in its percussive tensioning of isolated muscles. Best accomplished to electro-funk.
Waving. An outgrowth of popping—stretch out your arms and start a wave at your fingertips that travels the length of your arms, ending at your far fingertips. Consider multi-person waves.
The Smurf. One heel up, the other down. Switch to the beat.
The Sprockets Dance. C'mon—don't pretend you don't know it.
Dance Imitates Life. The shopping cart, the fishing pole, the sprinkler, milking the cow, churning butter, mugging the goat, etc.
Dance Imitates 80s Personalities. The Hammer Dance, She Bop, Axel Rose, Risky Business, the Ed Lover, the Icky Shuffle, etc.
THE EVOLUTION OF LINK, THE GAMING CHARACTER
In 1986, when Link first appeared in Nintendo's Legend of Zelda, he looked to be in his midteens, implying a birth year of around 1971. However, despite many physically, intellectually, and emotionally demanding trials while traveling through Hyrule in search of the Master Sword and Light Arrows needed to defeat Gannon, Link appears to have aged little since this time, implying that the aging rate for the Hylian species is different from that of humans. While bending the rules of aging, Link also disobeys the rules posited by the linear, one-way progression of time. For example, in The Legend of Zelda, Link is a young boy, and Gannon has stolen the Triforce of Power; in Ocarina of Time, Link is still a young boy and still hot on the trail of Gannon and the Triforce, but this time he is a tree-person; in The Wind Waker, Link—again a young boy—travels a flooded planet Hyrule to rescue his sister from the Helmaroc king, who is controlled by a surprisingly undead Gannon. (This multiplicity seems to prove physicists’ many-worlds theory.)
Throughout, the brave but reticent Link's only spoken line in addition to grunts and cries is “Come on!” which he yells in The Wind Waker. It is worth noting that Link has never been seen in the same room as Orlando Bloom, who played Legolas in Peter Jackson's film version of Lord of the Rings.
MACGYVER WINE MAKING
Almost anything that contains sugars can be made to produce alcohol as it decomposes—fruit of any type makes especially good wine (or, as it is commonly referred to in the business, “hooch”). In the following recipes, extract juice from your fruit (if not inherently juicy, this may require pouring boiling water over it and letting it sit for forty-eight hours) and mix together all ingredients minus the sugar and yeast. Add a crushed Campden tablet to stop any wild yeasts from influencing the batch. Then, use a hydrometer to measure the wine's specific gravity, and add sugar to adjust the specific gravity to the desired level. Add the yeast of your choice and let ferment for five to seven days (until reaching a specific gravity of 1.010–1.025). Then, transfer to a carboy and ferment for another thirty days, until it dips below a specific gravity of 1.000. At that point, add ascorbic acid to avoid making vinegar and nuke it with potassium sorbate to avoid any further f
ermentation. Sweeten to taste and bottle. Consume while listening to bluegrass and/or petting hound dog and/or shooting at squirrels from your porch.
THE MATHEMATICS OF SPAM FILTERS
The English mathematician and Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes was born in 1702 and died well before the incorporation of Microsoft in 1975 or CERN'S 1991 publication of the World Wide Web project. Before Bayes, statisticians had been able, given the number of black and white balls in a barrel, to predict the likelihood of drawing a ball of a certain color Bayes's theorem provided tools to describe—having drawn a certain number of balls—what the ratio of black to white balls remaining in the barrel was likely to be.
Fast forward to the Bayesian spam filter, which says, If you tell me whether a specific e-mail is white or black, I will be able to tell you about the composition of your inbox. To do this, a modern filter compares words in new mail to words in messages marked spam, using the following formula, in which Pr(spam/ words) is the percentage that an e-mail is spam, Pr(words/spam) is the probability of finding given words in a spam e-mail, Pr(Spam) is the probability that any e-mail is spam, and Pr(words) is the probability of finding the given words in any e-mail:
This formula needs to be trained—it doesn't work very well until you teach it which words are high indicators of spam. Therefore, a Bayesian spam filter uses artificial intelligence to learn your needs. If you work in a lending office, you may want to read e-mails that contain the word refinance; by keeping these in your inbox, your spam filter learns this is a desirable word. If you repeatedly mark e-mails containing the word Pen1s as spam, your filter will eventually be able to reach a threshold of spam certainty (say, 95 percent) and automatically throw these messages away.
E-mails that contain only images mixed with random words are trickier for spam filters.
PETER PIPER PICKED A KEPPLER-POINSOT POLYHEDRON PATTERN
Copy and cut five of this shape. Cut anywhere a triangle's short side touches a long side. Fold the long lines backward and the short lines forward (taping or gluing the tabs to hold it in place). The tab marked N is where the next of the five pieces will attach; the side marked P is where this piece attaches to the previous one. When joined, you will end with the shape immediately recognizable as a great stellated dodecahedron (or “spiky-ass ball” if for some reason you happen to be unfamiliar with complex polyhedra).
Courtesy of Gijs Korthals Altes at www.korthalsaltes.com.
AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION GAGS REQUIRING PROPS IN THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW
There are more than three hundred customary verbal responses to the film, almost all of which contribute to a viewing experience that's NC-17 at best. For example, in the first, rather innocuous paragraph spoken by the film's disembodied lips, the audience responses reference edible underwear, sex play with fruit topping, and aimed ejaculation. It gets worse (or deliciously better …) from there. Included here are the instances of participation that involve props.
• Throw rice as the newlyweds Ralph Hapshatt and Betty Munroe exit the church near the film's beginning.
• When Brad and Janet are caught in a rainstorm, Janet holds a newspaper, the Plain Dealer, over her head. If in the back row, simulate the rainstorm with a water pistol; if sitting toward the front, cover your head with a newspaper, à la Janet (if at all squeamish, consider leaving head and eyes covered throughout film).
• When flame shows on the screen during the song “Over at the Frankenstein Place,” hold up a lighter or the legal equivalent—a flashlight.
• When the movie's lead, the transvestite, bisexual scientist Dr. Frank-N-Furter, thrice snaps his rubber gloves, snap along.
• Noisemakers greet the end of Frank's creation speech.
• When Brad cries “Great Scott!” throw rolls of Scott's brand toilet paper in the air.
• Offer confetti along with the Transylvanians at the end of the Charles Atlas song.
• When Dr. Frank-N-Furter proposes a toast, give it to him—throw toast in the air.
• When Frank dons a party hat, do the same.
• When Frank asks if we heard a bell (while singing the modern librettist's masterpiece “Planet Shmanet Janet”), provide the noise with your own bell.
• Frank: “Cards for sorrow, cards for pain.” Response: throw cards.
• Optional props include a bouquet, rings, doughnuts, sponges, and a paper airplane.
Note: It defies logic that Susan Sa-randon received an Oscar for her role in Dead Man Walking and not for her sensitive yet clear-eyed portrayal of Janet Weiss in RHPS.
THE LONGEST WORDS IN MANY LANGUAGES
There are many caveats accompanying languages’ longest words. Do you allow hyphenation? Do you allow place names? Do you allow medical and chemical terms? Drawing on the rules of Scrabble, the longest word in the English language is ethylenediaminetetra-acetates, at twenty-eight letters (which, of course, would not fit on a Scrabble board). The longest nonchemical word in English is electroencephalographically, at twenty-seven letters. The longest one-syllable English word is scrootched, at ten letters. In German, a suborganization of a prewar shipping company on the Danube was known as the Donaudampfschiffahrtselektriz-itatenhauptbetriebswerkbauunter-beamtengesellschaft. In French, the longest word is anticonstitution-nellement, which means—as you might guess—”anticonstitution-ally;” similarly the longest word in Spanish is anticonstitucionalmente, and the longest in Portuguese is almost identical. In Italian, precipitevolissimevolmente means “as fast as you can.” While there is intense Internet debate over Norway's longest word, the word describing the chairman of the Norwegian Supreme Court (høyes-terettsjustitiarius) is the consensus favorite. In Dutch, the word hot-tentottensoldatententententoonstel-lingsterreinen refers to the tents of the Hottentot soldiers. Certainly, the word hääyöaieoionta (having to do with the intentions of the wedding night) is not Finland's longest, but it is perhaps the world's most difficult to pronounce correctly.
CREVASSE RESCUE USING COOL PULLEYS
Enviros and the evil scientists paid by megacorporations to deny global warming both agree that Earth's climate warms and cools in cycles. Generally, like a playground swing, the higher the oscillation in one direction, the higher the corresponding swing in the other. This means that, while flip-flops made from recycled tires may currently be a hot investment, before long (geologically speaking) we will be roaming the permafrost with (cloned) mammoths. So buy a good coat.
you are not among those who consider hyphenated chemical names to be cheating, then the world's longest word is the description of the Dahlemense strain of the tobacco mosaic virus, at 1,185 characters long, starting with acetyl and ending much later with serme.
Along with the upcoming, post-global-warming ice age will come the increased daily danger of crevasses—giant cracks in glacial ice, which may or may not be covered by a thin layer of snow and thus pose as solid ground. The first step in protecting yourself from crevasses (which can suck you in as surely as the burrow-bound Sarlaac in the Dune Sea) is, whenever you walk, do so as part of a rope team. A two-person rope team is adequate if you are both very skilled, but rope-pooling with three or more is safer and in the frozen future will allow you to use walking lanes denied to smaller teams. If a fellow member of your rope team falls into a crevasse and cannot ascend the rope, you will need to pull him or her out. With three or more team members remaining on the surface, you may be able to “haul tuna” simply walking backward to raise your team member.
However, with fewer than three, you will need to engineer a bit of mechanical advantage as shown in this picture provided by the Association of Canadian Mountain Guides (who have retained their expertise in roaming mammoth-infested glaciers). As you can see, padding the lip of the crevasse with a pack keeps the rope from cutting into the snow (jaunty chapeaus also appear necessary). In this picture, the rescuer has dropped a loop of rope to the fallen climber, who has clipped the loop into a cara-biner so that it runs through like a pulley. Above
, one end of the loop is secured and the other end runs through another pulley (connected to the anchor). This free end then passes back through another pulley (clipped to the rope) and is yanked by the rescuer. Without friction, this system offers a three-to-one advantage (you have to pull three times the distance, but with only a third of the force). With the realities of system inefficiency (a rope running through a ‘biner doesn't pull smoothly, and even a Teflon-coated pack would provide some unwanted friction), it will still be useful to have two people hauling on the loose end.
ORIGAMI FROG HIGH JUMP CHALLENGE
Many geeks adhere to stiff paper theory (SPT), holding that frogs made of expensive company let terhead will jump higher than those made of flimsy copy paper. However, while SPT adds gid-dyup to any origami amphibian, it also adds weight. The trick is to find a paper that offers the happy combination of high spring at low weight. In this regard, linen papers tend to underperform; so too do cardboard mailers, as they lead to bulky, bullfrogesque hoppers. Like the Mongols conquering much of the known world with their invention of the compound bow (horn and sinew grafted into the wooden grip), some forward-thinking geeks have developed a Fran-kensteinian technique whereby cardboard legs are grafted onto a lightweight paper body, but this technically falls outside the rules of traditional origami and thus in most arenas is considered cheating. And remember when choosing your frog's overall dimensions that success doesn't necessarily depend on the size of the origami frog in the fight but rather on the size of the fight in the origami frog.