Dispatches from the Eccentric Frontier

divertimento recently lent gave me E. Haldeman-Julius’ The Outline of Bunk, including the Admirations of a Debunker (1929), which opens with a lovely definition of bunkum:

When our Republic had the proud though sometimes awkward strut of youth and before the growth of culture and skepticism had recruited a lively army of debunkers, there was a Congressman from Buncombe County, North Carolina, who achieved notoriety even in that day for the flood of bombastic nonsense that he poured forth. He talked, as he said, “only for Buncombe.” All of which was intended simply to tickle the ears and swell with vanity the diaphragms of the voters, assuring their support for the good old Congressman from Buncombe, a man of the people. Shortly, Buncombe became a common descriptive term— buncombe— signifying remarks uttered, without regard to truth or sincerity or pertinence, for the purpose of swaying the crowd in behalf of a candidate for office, or any man who wanted something, or any movement that was trying to put itself over.

“Buncombe” meant a tricky, specious appeal to the crowd. It implied, not sound discussion and a genuine effort to place the truth on view, but oratory consisting of catchphrases, platitudes, sentimentalities, and the like.

If political discourse ever moved past the era of the blathering of Felix Walker, it has surely devolved to that point in these benighted times. But it reminds me that the English language has quite a number of delightful terms for bullshit that have fallen out of common use. (If the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds true, it may reflect on our culture.) Here are some choice ones that are rather apt for the present day:

• balderdash has its origins in a worthless mixture of liquors. As a term for nonsense, it is particularly appropriate for the arguments put forward by the opponents of evolution and global warming, where people cherry-pick facts to deceive their audience.
• poppycock has “dung” in one of its root words, which makes it an excellent prime-time replacement for bullshit.
• humbug is a general term for hoaxes and fraud, such as the pack of lies that led the United States in to the Iraq war.
• calumny refers to the malicious attempts to tarnish character without bringing in the legal weight of such words as slander and libel.
• claptrap’s origins lie in contrivances for gaining applause, making it an appropriate description for any talking point calculated to trigger knee-jerk reactions.

The English language has many terms for nonsense; are there any others that should return to common use?

I’m planning on going on vacation for the week of July 4th, so I wanted to put together a guide for people who need to solve Windows problems while I’m out. I titled it “Fenestral Haruspication”— literally “divination by inspection of the entrails of Windows”.

(Update: changed from “fenestric” to “fenestral” when a bit of searching showed that the latter is actually in the dictionary.)

So there’s much ado about Iran right now, with claims being touted that they’re close to being able to create nuclear weapons. (The claim that they could produce nuclear weapons in sixteen days is predicated on their getting 54,000 centrifuges working in series, from a mere 164 now. They’re years away from doing that.) Given the Bush regime’s track record on nation-building, I really don’t want to see them make an even bigger mess in the Middle East. And there’s a much better way to facilitate regime change there.

Most Iranians aren’t very happy with their current theocratic government. They don’t like having their weblogs censored. So why not try a 21st century take on Radio Free Europe? Instead of spreading propaganda, Voice of America style, just smuggle cheap laptops (already localized to Farsi) across the border with wireless connections, and equipment for setting up camouflaged wireless links or getting satellite uplinks. (Low bandwidth is fine; they don’t need streaming video, though it could come in handy for verisimilitude.) Set up the laptops with everything a subversive thinker needs to get on the Net and meet up with fellow-thinkers to get organized, protected by encryption and anonymity. It shouldn’t be difficult to set up links over the border in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we can probably persuade some of Iran’s other neighbors to help out as well.

It’s just the sort of thing to severely annoy oppressive regimes, and it makes for much better propaganda for us. “We’re just smuggling them some freedom; they’ll know what to do with it.”

If substantial numbers of former New Orleans residents settle in distinct regions of other cities, will those be called “the Little Easy”? If people who don’t have the money to wait for New Orleans to be cleaned up and made habitable once again settle in sufficient numbers that they bring New Orleans culture to other cities, there might be some interesting second-order effects.

( I don’t often get dreams you can productize )

fitness!slave! — a reworking of yourself!fitness where Maya is clad in lingerie, wielding a whip, and giving stern orders. Same workout as yourself!fitness with more abuse.

darkside!fitness — the workout that supervillains use to start their day. Includes such exercises as Sucker Punches, Knee Gouges, forbidden yoga techniques including Crushing the Peasant, and the ever-popular Vader Press (which involves lifting up a mannequin by the throat).

I’d have a lot less yard work to do if we’d just reclassify the back yard from “lawn” to “meadow”.

There’s a tradition in introductions to new computer languages (which dates back to the original book on The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie, if not before) of writing a program that just prints Hello, world! Is anyone else in the habit of making theirs print Goodbye, cruel world! instead?

We already have metrics for the proximity of the end of the world from The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the Rapture Index, but I can’t find a Ragnarok Index that tells us how close we are to the Twilight of the Gods. Any Asatruars out there want to spread the idea around their community and see if someone starts one?

...I have to report that I’ve actually been exposed to enough of the memes present in the show that I don’t expect to become any weirder. (obsessivewoman and I would find ourselves commenting on the psychological warfare tactics used as episodes unfolded.) I suspect that much of the content of the show that I consider straightforward was new and groundbreaking back when the show was first airing.

weregamer, next time you’re over at Maine Coon Manor, remind me to show you the Miracleman story by Neil Gaiman (“Spy Story” in Miracleman: the Golden Age for you comics experts) that takes the same principle as the Village and turns it inside out.