Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I have now seen a sword-swallower do his schtick on stage, in front of a roomful of people, complete with "see, this is a real sword, no trick," discussions of how this works internally, and asking for an audience volunteer to help. ( cut for the squeamish )

Most people go to Coney Island for that sort of thing: I went to MIT, room 10-250.

I wasn't expecting to see sword-swallowing, but perhaps I should have been.

This was at the IgNobel Prize informal lectures, in which each of the winners gets five minutes to talk, more or less about their work, and then take up to three questions. One of the prizes this year was given, I think in anatomy, to a radiologist who decided to study the injury rate and patterns among sword-swallowers, after a literature search found him a single case report. He got to know people from the International Association of Sword-Swallowers; one of them was co-author on the paper, and came with him to the lecture. The radiologist showed us x-ray and PET pictures, and put up a slide that listed the basic results of his research, number three of which was "If must try: think again." Then they got to the questions, and this cheerful man explained why he'd started doing this, before demonstrating. I think this may have been the first public incidence of someone deliberately swallowing a pair of extra-long forceps.

That was the last of the lectures. Before that, we heard about a new source of artificial vanilla flavor. The researcher gave a very dry-sounding presentation, with very funny slides. She's not quite fluent in English, and in the question session it transpired that her translator isn't fluent in chemistry. (I declined the chance to try the special IgNobel Vanilla at Tosci's afterwards, sticking to their regular French vanilla for my hot fudge sundae.) An indexer wearing a large shirt that said "The Definite Article" talked about the different ways indexers attempt to handle "the": she's not only good, I think I may want to read her paper. (The vanillin will turn up in commerce, or not, whether or not I read the research.)

The audience volunteer for the sword-swallower's act was another of the prize-winners, a cheerful woman who has studied the mites, pseudo-scorpions, etc. that live in mattresses and carpets and such. She was mostly reassuring, noting that while mite allergies are an issue, the mites aren't going to bite people, and in fact will tend to move away from anyone sitting on the couch or lying in bed, because sweat moves away from the body toward cooler, dryer areas. One of the audience questions was about eyelash mites, and the researcher cheerfully discussed where they come from and that by age 25 almost everyone has some.

And there was the bird man. He's a curator at a museum in the Netherlands. A glass museum. All the glass walls mean lots of dead or stunned birds, which somehow led him to want a collection of famous dead birds. He showed us a slide of one that had been killed by a cricket ball at Lord's, preserved with the crickent ball, and an article about one he hadn't been able to obtain and have stuffed. He also took a minute to depict the sad case of the "McFlurry hedgehogs," animals that crawled into discarded cups to finish the ice cream and then got caught in the caps. He assured us that the packaging had already been changed in the UK, to enable innocent hedge pigs to eat ice cream safely, but Dutch hedgehogs are still at risk.

None of that is what he won an Ig for. The Ig is for a paper on the first documented case of homosexual necrophilia in ducks. In that incident, two mallards flew into the glass walls; one of them was killed, and the other showed that even a stunned mallard drake has one thing on his mind at that time of year. "First documented" because the act went on long enough that the researcher has photos to prove it. We don't know how long a mallard drake could continue having sex with a corpse, because after 75 minutes our not-so-intrepid researcher decided it was time to collect the corpse for his taxidermist and go home to lunch. The active partner was not collected, but lived to fly off in search of further partners.

I am vastly amused by today's xkcd cartoon, showing the electromagnetic spectrum in great detail, plus "other waves."

This may have something to do with the amount of time I've spent editing and proofreading lessons on the subject since February.

Some of the construction workers demolishing the Deutsche Bank building have walked off the job.

They are employed by the John Galt Co.

I would just like to note that Tropical Depression Epsilon Public Advisory 37 begins "...EPSILON WEAKENING RAPIDLY...THIS IS THE LAST ADVISORY...
...IT IS ABOUT TIME..."

I got to that point and laughed out loud. Yes, I'm weird.

Note that they had predicted it would turn into a remnant low by last weekend.

The Atlantic tropical hurricane season is officially over, which means (among other things) that they aren't issuing tropical weather outlooks, but I assume they will tell us if zeta turns up out there.

In addition to not dissipating when predicted, Epsilon holds the dubious record of the longest December Atlantic hurricane on record; fortunately, it never came near land.

[I posted a subset of this to an open thread on Making Light]

[This grew out of my comments on a post by calanthe_b.]

A lot of my sense of humor tends toward the silly, including puns and free-association. For example, misia just headed a comment on people who had added her to their friend's lists "how'd there get to be 212 of you?" I responded with a silly remark based on US area codes. One of the things I like about this kind of humor is that it doesn't seem to be based on, or involve, cruelty.

I think I have a slightly non-standard sense of humor, one that some people would consider defective (because it's different from theirs). Specifically, I find the "comedy" of embarrassment painful rather than funny; also, sometimes when I realize people are joking/teasing and try to joke back in the same vein, they say "I was joking" in a way that makes it clear that they thought I wasn't. This is irritating, because there's nothing I can do in this context that will be counted as acceptable: if I take them seriously, they say "I was joking" in ways that imply I'm doing something wrong, and if I don't take them seriously, they say "I was joking" in ways that imply I'm doing something wrong. It seems to be more acceptable to also be amused by things that the other person doesn't find funny than to not be amused by things that they choose to joke about in my presence. Part of that may be they don't even notice some of my obscurer silliness because they don't know the references (as I don't know some of theirs), but another part, I suspect, is that they can dismiss my obscure jokes as me being weird, but someone not getting their jokes (anyone's own jokes, including mine) can feel like a failure. After all, "s/he doesn't have a sense of humor" is, as Calanthe pointed out in her post, generally a condemnation, a statement that there's something wrong with the person, and "that's not funny" can be as painful as being told that you're hopelessly ignorant, badly dressed, or otherwise not eligible to be part of the social group in question.

That said, while I don't think it's a defect to not have a sense of humor, I don't think I'd be me without one. The person I'd be instead might be just as good a person, but she'd be different, I think more different than a me without my (intermittent, and I think below-norm) sex drive [something else calanthe_b talked about not having, in that post] would be. If I somehow woke up one day with a different sense of humor—say, a great liking for slapstick and no interest in wordplay—I'd also be a different person, but I might not find the difference as jarring. (This is, of course, an unlikely event and an untestable hypothesis.)

Also, I suspect that if I lost either of those characteristics, I'd wish for them back, because I'm used to those being aspects of myself. That is, I don't think they're essential to being human, but they may be essential to being redbird. I don't miss certain musical talents, or an interest in football or fashion, because they were never there in the first place. I do miss having eyes as good as they were when I was a child, but that's a measurable deficiency and a noticeable change: something that I remember having, using, and enjoying.