Yeah, yeah, so it's April Fools Day. Big whoop. Never liked it. Now it's lame. Even third grade boys think it sucks. Let's move on.
Why?
There are six questions that get you to the bottom of things, sometimes called the Journalist's Six or '5Ws and an H.' Of course I am referring to who, what, when, where, why and how. Answer those, and you've got a pretty good picture of an event or news item.
But there is a hierarchy in the six questions. The first four have one answer. In some cases why and how could have multiple, correct answers. Take, for example, 'why.' A philosophy professor gave his students a quiz that consisted only of the word 'why?' Some students took a long time to compose long, lengthy answers. They received poor grades. Others turned their papers in quickly, and received Bs and As.
The B students had written 'because.' The teacher explained the B by saying that 'because' did not incorporate the question into the answer, while the students who got As had answered 'why not?', which did. This was desirable behavior back in college.
There are three other reasons why I personally find 'why not?' a much more satisfying answer. First, 'because' is a definitive, shut-down answer. There is nothing else to be said. You can almost hear 'I said so' tacked on to the end of the statement. In contrast, 'why not?' maintains an open endedness, inviting further discussion and exploration.
Second, it's sort of a throwback to my Irish heritage, where questions are typically answered by another question. It may be frustrating sometimes, but often leads to another pint of stout and lively discussion.
Finally, I like the insouciant nature of 'why not?' It's cheeky, a little flip in a devil may care way. 'Insouciant' is fun to say, enough to make it the word of the week.
What a plastic crock of horse excrement!
Autistic Barbie. Yes, there is one.
Don't have to wait that long.
USA Today asks Is the end of the world getting closer? We'll know more next week.
It doesn't matter what happens next week. Anything that hasn't happened yet is getting closer. Like Tax Day. Or the 2028 Summer Olympics. Tomorrow is getting closer. Even, yes, the end of thee world. And I'm glad. The alternatives are just too awful to contemplate.
'Toons day.
After the bathroom is visited and coffee and toast made, I like to start my day with cartoons. There's maybe a dozen on my go-to list. On my way to them, I pass dozens and dozens of original comics (I'm not counting the classic reruns like 'Peanuts' that are no longer produced, or the comics translated into Spanish, like 'Perdito' (AKA 'Nancy'). I also pass comics that once were tops on my reading list, like 'Bloom County' and 'Funky Winkerbean.'
But as I scroll, I wonder what kind of merriment and opportunities I might be missing, if dedicated 'toonists are offering brilliance and wit that might make my day even fuller.
But I'll never know.
The other thing I don't know is why I stopped reading some comics. Many, I suspect, got dropped when I moved and the new newspaper didn't carry a favorite. Others, like 'Hagar the Horrible,' kept working slight variations on the same joke/punchline, and just weren't adding much to my world.
The ones I still read give me entry into other, slightly askew worlds. They are familiar, and sometimes provide coping mechanisms in addition to humor. If they deal with this world, they do it obliquely, or, as is the case with a strip like 'Doonsberry,' I know what I'm getting into. They all make the day easier to tolerate. I mention all this because two comics stuck out today. 'B.C.', in its politically incorrect way, had one character running a personal ad reading 'short, visually impaired man with lots of money seeks attractive woman.' Which once again raised the question I've been asking for a long time, 'what is attractive?' Now, I know that attractive is something that we have control over, that we can do things, project things to draw others to us. And yes, 'great personality!' is one of them. More later.
In 'Non Sequitur,' a character explains to a ghost that 'with this blog I can communicate virtually with thousands of people around the world.' The ghost asks, 'and why would you want to do that?' Struck me as a good question. Why am I doing this, throwing a thousand disconnected words out into the universe once a week (you just know that aliens in their spacecraft hovering over Phoenix are listening in, right)? I do it because it makes me happy.
Sorry–didn't mean to go all mopey-maudlin-weepy on you there.
And as a quick follow up.
I've mentioned before that I don't care about analytics for from a comfy chair. They are readily available, however, and so every few weeks I'll peek, even though I have no idea what they mean. I am surprised at the number of visitors they claim I have, overstated by what I believe is a factor of ten.
One of the ways of looking is to arrange visits by country of origin. As I write this, in the past week I have had:
- 382 Visitors from the US
- 196 from France
- 96 from Brazil
- 29 from Canada
- 24 from Germany
- 2 from Sweden
Even odder are the figures for the sister site, augiesez.com There, we see 369 from Canada, 304 from Spain, 104 from Germany, 129 from the US, 108 from Indonesia, and 18 from the Ukraine.
Overall, this is not what I expected. Way high, for one thing. There are always one to five visitors from a non-English speaking second or third world country or two, but each week, it's from a different 'n-Esc' country like Malaysia, North Korea, Zaire, Japan or Iran. All I can imagine is that in these countries, there's a bot industriously scraping facc and augie into the giant maw of the large-language models that fuel A.I., thus ensuring the continued unreliability of its demon spawn.
Happy to do my part.
Next week, I'll probably have about the same number of visitors from the US and from the British Isles as this week, but where the dozen or so visitors from other places will be from is going to be a surprise.
Lawyers ruin everything.
A recent Buzzfeed article highlighted actors who won Oscars for on-screen performances that lasted less than a half-hour. Fair 'nuf.
But the most surprising/annoying aspect of the list of 41 was on the one hand how precise the times were, like 9:58, but on the other how all but one time was preceded by 'about,' 'approximately,' 'roughly,' 'around,' or other waffle words. Crisis of confidence? Can't count? Bullied by lawyers? Fear of the legions of on-line pickers of nits who are just waiting to pounce and demonstrate their superior knowledge and point out that no, James Coburn was on screen for 17 minutes and 14 seconds, not 17:10 as claimed.
The mush-mouthing definitely takes the edge off my reading. If it's x minutes and y seconds, say it! Stand behind your research! Plus, I don't care.
Rock, paper, scissors.
The latest object to find itself under the magnifying glass of my 'who invented that?' microscope is scissors.
Well, the individual (or group) who invented the first scissors is lost to time, but scissors supposedly were made in China from the mid-1600s, which is surprisingly recent.
If you can cut something, someone has probably developed specialized scissors to cut it.
And related questions:
- Why is scissors plural? I know there are two parts, but if they are separated, it's still broken scissors.
- Who came up with 'rock, paper, scissors' as a selection method?