On the Benefits of a Well-Rounded Education

A Vocabulary Lesson: Magic vs. Magick

Magic (no k) amazes.

 
Magic is one of the human race’s oldest institutions, older still than Paul Bunyan, Saint Nick, Young Earth creationism, or the yeti. Magic can be entertaining or terrifying, beloved or distrusted, but is just as undeniably a fundamental and tangible part of daily human life as the yeti.
 

Magic (no k) makes you laugh.

The uninitiated, then, may be a big confused by the difference between magic and magick, or even magicks, the latter spellings having gradually returned to the popular vernacular over the last several decades. The answer is fairly simple, believe it or not—serious practitioners of real magic(k) prefer to use the (k) to differentiate what they do from the kind of magic( ) that might better be described as stage magic or simply parlor tricks.

Magic, minus charisma,
looks like this.

 
Well-known acts like David Copperfield, Siegfried & Roy, Penn & Teller, or Criss Angel,¹
then, perform magic. Magic is an act (albeit a very skilled one), a deft mix of distraction, showmanship, sleight-of-hand, and misdirection that combine to give the impression that otherworldly powers are on display when really it’s all just humbug. The practitioners know that magic is fake, but when it’s done right, it can have a powerful effect on the imaginations of its witnesses.

Magick, unlike magic, is to be taken very, very seriously.

Magick, on the other hand, was described by noted British occultist Aleister Crowley as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” It can seem to the uninitiated to be mysterious, deadly serious, and sometimes dark, and while it’s exceedingly difficult to find credible witnesses to incidents of magick, it nevertheless has a powerful effect on the imaginations of its practitioners.

In other words, if it’s fake, but you can actually see it happening, that’s magic. If it’s 100% real, but totally made up: magick.

You wanna see magic? Pull my finger.

NOTES
1. Assuming any of these folks are still performing, that is. We don’t really pay much attention.

Drunk History

Bowling in the Dark does not condone public drunkenness, unless it’s educational. Or funny. Today we learn a lot about cell phones and tennis shoes, both of which existed, believe it or not, in 1804.

Drunk History Vol. 1 - Featuring Michael Cera from Drunk History     

Mangled English

Part 5 of a Potentially Infinite Series

As we understand it, sir, there are indeed other options, but we suspect that they wouldn’t interest you either.

Mangled English

Part 4 of a Potentially Infinite Series

 Please be quite what? Quite charming? Quite loud? Quite drunk, and singing
quite off-key in slurred German at two a.m.? Yeah, we can manage that.

And we shouldn’t even bother pointing out the redundancy of “surrounding neighbors.”

Mangled English

Part 3 of a Potentially Infinite Series

We’re pleased to see that these good folks are willing to look after their premise, and hope they’re just as willing to protect their conclusion.

 

 

You Have Died of Dysentery.

     

The Oregon Trail: making education depressing since 1974.

Mangled English

Part 2 of a Potentially Infinite Series

If you live in the right part of northern Colorado, once or twice you may well have driven past an establishment called Fantastic Cut’s, nestled away near that store that sells all the used sporting goods and the other place that’s full of all sorts of hobby crap and has been getting remodeled for the last fifty-six years. The sign outside of Fantastic Cut’s—which was established in 1998 by local entrepreneur “Fantastic” Ernie Cut¹—is easily recognizable, right down to its unfortunate apostrophe, to anybody familiar with Fantastic Sams, a chain of haircut salons with over 1,400 locations across the United States and Canada. 

Whether these two organizations are actually associated with one another, I don’t know and won’t bother to find out. They do, however, have one thing in common² in that their logos—probably their most noticeable and effective means of advertising—don’t tell us what they’re intended to.

I described that apostrophe as “unfortunate” because, as any snotty English graduate³ will tell you, apostrophes used in this way indicate possession,⁴ which means that you don’t have any way of knowing, from the sign, what kind of Cut one would receive from Mr. Cut at Fantastic Cut’s . . . but you sure do know who owns the place: the sign tells you that the store is owned by Fantastic Cut.

Fantastic Sams has a similar problem, except in reverse and compounded by inconsistency. Fantastic Sams was founded in 1974 in Memphis, Tennessee, by a guy named Sam Ross.⁵ Based on the nationwide success of his hair salon franchise, Sam was indeed fantastic, and was, before his recent death, almost certainly wealthy enough to buy a lifetime’s supply of proper punctuation.

Judging by the company’s website and the majority of official graphics, coupons, advertisements, and storefront snapshots found in a half-assed web search, however, that wonderfully appropriate apostrophe has been or is being phased out in favor of a mistake, for reasons we can’t quite figure out.

Top: Hooray! Bottom: You suck!

This suggests either the marketing or the accounting department determined that making the company look illiterate would be good press or a money-saver. The newer signs suggest that you go to Fantastic Sams to buy a fantastic Sam.⁶ What it doesn’t tell you is who owns the place, or after whom it’s named.

This isn’t the first time I’ve griped about dumb misuses of English, and it’s not likely to be the last. And the next time I get called a “Grammar Nazi”—an awfully offensive phrase, in my opinion—will not be my first. But before you chime in with the name-calling, please consider that I’m not criticizing people for failing to grasp something extremely complex, like aeronautical engineering or quantum physics, or some other field that requires years of experience and usually multiple advanced degrees.

Instead, I’m criticizing people for failing to grasp or refusing to care about a simple and direct concept that was first introduced to them in grade school. Concepts that are taught in grade school are introduced because grade schoolers can understand them. If you haven’t figured out something as a grown-up that you were taught when you were eight—tying your shoes, simple math, thorough wiping, how to eat with utensils, or the simplest and most fundamental rules of a language that you've been reading, writing, speaking, and hearing nearly every hour of every day for the vast majority of your life, shouldn’t you expect a little criticism?⁷

NOTES

1. All historical and biographical information made up on the spot.

2. In addition, that is, to providing haircuts, shampoos, and waxing; presumably stocking similar magazines; and having the same basic floorplans—so they actually have several things in common. But I’m not talking about any of the rest of these, because I can’t find a good reason to complain about them at the moment.

3. Like me.
4. Mathematically, when P = possession, P = Law x 0.9.
5. This part is actually true.
6. If you want to get technical—and I usually do—it suggests that you can buy multiple fantastic Sams. But it’s not implied anywhere that you need to buy more than one. And if you really need more than one, how fantastic can they really be? They’d have to call the place “Barely Adequate Sams.”
7. Yes.

Mangled English

Part 1 of a Potentially Infinite Series

“You don’t want to be a draft pick that should have did something but never did nothing.”

—John Wall, University of Kentucky basketball player

While we admire John Wall’s apparent dedication to living up to his lofty status as the first overall pick in 2010’s NBA draft, it bothers us a bit that one of the somethings that he clearly should have did was to pay better attention during English class—especially the parts that dealt with verb agreement and double negatives.

It bothers us more, though, that if John Wall has even a middling NBA career—and from what we’ve read, he’ll probably be a star—his fifteen to twenty years’ worth of newspaper quotes, postgame radio and TV interviews, and locker-room or mid-game Twitter postings¹ will likely allow him to have more of an impact on American English than all his dedicated, learned, and heartbroken English teachers (past, present, and future) put together.

Sigh.

We don’t follow college or professional basketball, so for all we know, Wall is a bright, erudite young man who’s merely gotten off to a rough start as an interviewee. We suppose it’s better to be optimistic than to wonder if  perhaps Wall’s never doing nothing is the best we can hope for.

NOTE

1. We realize that Twitter postings are generally referred to as “tweets,” but for the time being, we’re going to refuse to use that word. First of all, it’s a stupid word regardless of context—stupider even than “cuddle.” Second, Twitter may well be the most pointless and narcissistic activity in the history of the human race—even more so than blogging, although the competition is closer than we care to admit—and we don’t want to show it any inadvertent support by adopting its silly vocabulary.

Guam: The Tipping Timebomb of the Pacific

“I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace, that two are called a law firm, and that three or more become a Congress.”

—John Adams¹

The U.S. House of Representatives’ own Hank Johnson of Georgia recently staggered into the spotlight when, while speaking as part of the House Armed Services Committee, he announced his concerns about a possible military buildup on Guam, and its potential negative effects on that island’s stability.

Now, the influx of a large number of troops and their various support services and dependents would be a legitimate concern, if we were talking about potential environmental, economic, and sociological effects on an island as small as Guam—which is, as Johnson put it, only seven miles wide at its “least widest point.”²

Unfortunately, though, it’s not this environmental, economic, and sociological baloney that keeps Rep. Johnson up at night, but rather “[his] fear is that the whole island will become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.” If you’re the last person on Earth to hear about this story,³ see it for yourself below. The payoff starts at about 1:16, and please also note Admiral Robert Willard’s simple, gracefully respectful response, which is worthy of both admiration and praise:




Johnson’s office later released a statement—perhaps best defined as a nimble but ultimately failed salvage operation—claiming that the Representative was speaking metaphorically, that adding so many troops and dependents could bring the island past “a tipping point [that] would adversely affect the island’s fragile ecosystem and overburden its already overstressed infrastructure.”

I don’t claim to be the world’s greatest expert on the English language, but I’m an avid reader with an English degree and a more than passing familiarity with similes, metaphors, and symbolic use of words. And if Hank Johnson was speaking metaphorically about Guam capsizing, I will literally eat my hat.⁴

Whatever Hank Johnson’s politics are, I don’t care to know them. I don’t know whether his personal life is squeaky-clean and admirable or sordid and abominable, and as long as it doesn’t keep him from doing his job right, I’m not convinced it’s any of my business. What I do care about, though—what I feel is my business—is that he managed to get elected to one of the more exclusive and influential jobs in the country without knowing one of the fundamental differences between an island and a lily pad. That leads be to believe that there have to be other yawning chasms in his knowledge of how the world is put together, and that would affect how well he can do his job.

In case you’re not sure of the difference yourself, we at Bowling in the Dark paid famed director James Cameron $750,000 to create an interactive 3-D visual representation of the most relevant difference. Here is what he sent us:
 

Don’t get me wrong—I distinctly remember a time in my life where I genuinely believed that islands floated on top of the ocean. I recall thinking that the fundamental difference between Australia and, say, Hawaii or Guam was not its sheer size but that it did reach all the way to the bottom of the ocean, and other islands didn’t. I also remember learning that I was wrong about this—and at the time, I wasn’t a member of Congress. I was in grade school.

It seems fair to admit that there probably isn’t any regulation requiring public servants to know that islands are anchored to the ocean floor—but I figured it was the kind of thing that you just can’t not know, like how to breathe, or what word people use to describe a car.⁵ For Hank Johnson to be elected and to continue serving with such an apparent and embarrassing gap in his education is not just his failure or the American education system’s failure, but also a failure of voters to impose a reasonable standard on their elected officials.

(Incidentally, it has been suggested that at the time of his statement, Johnson may have been struggling with side effects caused by medication he’d been taking to treat Hepatitis C. However, according to Newsweek, Johnson had finished his treatments by the time of his Guam statement. So it appears that Johnson’s comments were not the result of an altered mental state caused by prescription drugs. We’re very happy about this, not only because we’re glad he’s feeling better, but also because, as the Newsweek article put it, “[we] may now resume mocking his Guam comments” without feeling like we’re mocking a man’s struggles with a very real illness.⁶)

There’s a saying that “every man rises to the level of his own incompetence,” and as if to illustrate this point, it was recently announced that Representative Hank Johnson not only remains on the House Armed Services Committee (among others), but also has been informed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi that he’s been added to the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. I don’t know a whole lot about the latter committee, but I’m pretty sure that the House Armed Services Committee is a fairly important one. If we’re going to keep giving this guy responsibilities, that’s fine, but shouldn’t we consider awarding him something with a little less impact, like, say, the House Committee on Teddy Bear and Hello Kitty Affairs?

It’s almost certainly unfair to judge people, politicians or otherwise, for only the most colossally stupid things they’ve said at their most profoundly embarrassing moments.⁷ So I admit that I may be a bit out of line for assuming that Representative Hank Johnson is a dumb guy, simply because he said something really, really stupid that was caught on video. Even smart people make mistakes, some of them very embarrassing, bad, naughty, and/or destructive.

But come on, can you really tell me that a smart person would make this kind of mistake? I don’t believe that. Is it too much to ask the voters in this country—specifically Georgia, in this case—to elect somebody with a basic grasp on how the world is put together? Is it too much to expect that if we’re going to hire people to run this country, wouldn’t it help if they were, you know, smart? God help us all if we continue to elect people just like us. Shouldn’t we be electing people that are smarter than people just like us?

NOTES

1. I haven’t been able (or even tried) to verify whether John Adams ever actually said or wrote this, but William Daniels said it as Adams in 1776—quite possibly the single best movie musical about the American Revolution made in the 1970s—and that’s good enough for me. Also, my apologies to any Bowling in the Dark readers who are disgraces, lawyers, or both.

2. A crack team of Bowling in the Dark linguists have been working around the clock for weeks to figure out just what this means. Results so far have been inconclusive.

3. In keeping with our theme of being well behind this times, this happened in late March and I’m just now getting around to commenting on it. So when I wrote that this happened “recently,” I’m speaking in cosmic terms, rather than in internet terms.

4. That is, I will literally eat a metaphorical hat. Metaphorically.

5. That word is “car.”

6. And we will. We sincerely wish him many long years of good health, but we just as sincerely hope that his surprising misunderstanding of extremely basic geology doesn’t reflect similar misunderstandings of other subjects important to our elected officials, such as law, physics, geography, math, the Constitution, or the theory of evolution. To name a few.
7. Although this hasn’t stopped folks from doing it to Dan Quayle and Al Gore for years now, even going to far as to give them credit for all sorts of stupid things they’d never said.

Some Guy’s Adventures Through the Pint Glass, Part 4

Day 4: Thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, “. . . I drank what?”

Nestled against an unforgiving shoulder of the Rocky Mountains is Golden, Colorado, home of the Colorado School of Mines, a nationally-renowned engineering school. The small but prestigious Mines is known for accepting a wide selection of gifted high school nerdlings, dorks, and brainiacs and transforming them—through the liberal application of heat, pressure, and homework—into shockingly successful paycheck magnets who have learned to design, build, test, demolish, or extract from the bosom of the Earth things that regular folks like you and me probably can’t even spell.

While you were doing kegstands, going shirtless in 5° weather to a football game, vomiting into your shoes (or somebody else’s), or showing up drunk, stoned, or naked to final exams, your contemporaries at the School of Mines were reading, computing, studying, stressing out, having minor emotional breakdowns, and then studying some more. Pressed to excel, the students at the Colorado School of Mines show a drive and motivation that matches their extreme intelligence, and this is why they’re out there earning bushels of money while the rest of us vegetate in front of the computer for hours on end, reading (or writing) pointless drivel² instead of checking the classified section for jobs.

. . . or at least that’s what they want you to believe, and by and large, the public has bought it. A closer look by a trained eye, however, reveals startling evidence to suggest that Mines students aren’t nearly as smart as they look:

First of all, they’ve freely chosen to live in a town that, on its best days, tends to smell like a frat-house carpet; 

Second, they voluntarily sequester themselves in an environment where the male-to-female ratio approaches roughly 1,732 to 1³;

Third—and most important—Mines students, on the relatively few times where they do relax (weekends, mostly, but also during E-Days, a traditional yearly celebration of drinking, games, and social interaction better described as the Orgy of Normalcy), all these alleged geniuses voluntarily and openly drink gallons upon gallons of

Coors Light, Coors Brewing Company, Golden, Colorado. 
 

It pains me to criticize any sort of alcoholic beverage, because they’re all very close to my heart, like beloved children that make me fall over and say rude things to strangers. And I realize that by criticizing Coors Light, I risk being savagely beaten by an angry mob of Orediggers swinging slide rules and graphing calculators, but I can’t help but tell the truth: this beer sucks.

Not only does Coors Light have an unfortunate tendency to taste like Windex⁴ when not sufficiently refrigerated, but also even its own advertising department makes it clear that even they don’t like the beer. Think about this: Coors Light, the “Silver Bullet,” is or recently was advertized as “the coldest-tasting beer in the world.” The coldest-tasting beer in the world. Seriously.

Look, people, cold is not a flavor. This is as dumb as calling it “the tallest-smelling beer in the world”—even if it’s true, it’s meaningless.

And beyond its coldness, you’ll rarely find flavor mentioned at all in Coors Light’s advertising. Instead, you’ll be told that the little mountains on each can will turn blue when the beer is cold. I can only assume that this was developed for beer drinkers with no nerve endings in their hands or tongues, because feeling a cold beer can is usually a good way of telling if it’s cold, and if that doesn’t work, actually drinking the beer generally does the trick.⁵

But that’s neither here nor there—more important is this: what does it tell you when the best selling point the marketing folks can find has to do with the can they put the beer in?

A: It tells you that this beer sucks (see above). If the packaging of your product is an actual selling point, you really ought to consider improving your product.

Don’t get me wrong, Coors Light isn’t poisonous or anything; I’ve had several drinks that were worse and not only lived through it, but probably became a better person for it. Coors Light is merely a colossal disappointment for somebody looking for a complex, flavorful beer. It’s certainly more than adequate as a chaser for that shot you’re going to regret in about forty-five minutes, or for washing down stronger drinks like unsweetened lemonade or lukewarm tap water. I don’t know how old you are, but no matter how young or healthy you are, you have only a finite number of drinks left to drink before you kick off. Make sure you make the right choice.

I’m afraid I have to give Coors Light my lowest rating yet: Three (3) snarling werewolves, one for each can of Silver Bullet that came out of the Beer Mystery Case.

For more of Some Guy’s Adventures through the Pint Glass, check here: Day 1  Day 2  Day 3  Day 4  Day 5  Day 6

NOTES
1. For example, I’ve never been able to spell “skyscraper” or “coal.”
2. Please note the proper spelling, drivel instead of dribble. As internet misspellings go, this one bugs me almost as much as “wallah” for “voilà.”
3. It could be argued that the skewed male-to-female ratio at the School of Mines does support the notion that the female students are pretty smart . . . but as women in Alaska like to say, the odds may be good, but the goods are odd.
4. Yes, I know what Windex tastes like. I suppose I’m going to get a lecture about this. What are you, my mother?
5. And if your tongue can’t tell you whether the beer is cold, what the hell does it matter what temperature it’s at anyway?

Some Guy’s Adventures through the Pint Glass, Part 2

Day two: Give me liberty, or give me drinks

The Research Department here at Bowling in the Dark recently completed an exhaustive cross-cultural national survey, compiling detailed information about average Americans’ familiarity with their nation’s history. We’ve learned that despite a significant emphasis on American history at all levels of public schooling, most Americans’ grasp of their own national origins can be disappointingly spotty.

For example, the following are some of the better-informed answers we received regarding a short list of prominent figures from the American Revolution:

George Washington: believed to have chopped down a cherry tree and then thrown it across the Potomac River, President Washington prevaricated before a Congressional inquiry into the subject, stating that “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘cherry’ is.”

Thomas Jefferson: In-depth research has shown that Thomas Jefferson may have slept with one of his slaves. A tiny community of pedantic nitpickers¹ said something about Jefferson writing something or other, holding some sort of office, and maybe hanging out with, like, French people or something, but honestly, we couldn’t find any real Americans who actually gave a crap. As the director of the Thomas Jefferson Institute explained, “Dude, he was having sex. That’s fucking awesome.”

John Paul Jones: Sea captain, scourge of the British Navy, and Led Zeppelin bassist, 1775–1980. Remarkably well-preserved for a 263-year-old.² When ordered by the captain of the HMS Serapis to keep the noise down, he famously replied, “I have not yet turned on my amp!”

Benjamin Franklin: a famous colonial inventor, writer, publisher, statesman, and amateur kite-flyer, Franklin was the first to prove the theory that, when electrocuted, the average American shits his pants in a most undignified manner. To hide his shame, Franklin moved to France, where became famous for wearing a fur cap.

Nathan Hale: Gave one single measly life to his country, and has spent the last two hundred fifty years dining out on it. “I regret that I blah blah blah something, something, whatever.” Why don’t you just shut up and pay your own bar tab once in a while, you big fat freeloader.

Abraham Lincoln: Despite being born more than three decades after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln is warmly remembered as a hero of the American Revolution. An experienced attorney and a splendid orator, Lincoln first gained renown for his spirited presidential debates against the 2'4" Stephen Douglas. The towering Lincoln, with a confident grasp of the issues at hand, a wealth of knowledge at his command, and a charmingly rustic delivery characteristic of his rural upbringing, crushed the diminutive Douglas in their final debate with a single blow from his massive, gnarled fist.

John Adams: Star of the movie musical 1776, this often-marginalized hero of the republic was reintroduced to the American public and a whole new generation of awestruck schoolchildren as the voice of a talking car.

Samuel Adams: the Beer Guy. Yep, that’s right, probably the most recognizable hero from the American Revolution—except, of course, for the dude that had sex—is Samuel Adams, the guy that makes that beer. Rather than delve into the complex and probably disappointing reasons why this is the case, or get into a tirade about the state of the American educational system,³ let’s just recognize this for what it is—a really convenient segue into discussing today’s beer selection:

Samuel Adams Coastal Wheat, Boston Beer Company, Boston, Massachusetts (or possibly Cincinnati, Ohio).

While I rarely refuse a wheat beer if one is offered to me, I don’t usually go out of my way to order them. I don’t generally mind the flavor, but something about their murkiness is off-putting. A clear drink (such as last installment’s Carlsberg) is trustworthy: you can tell there’s no disgusting little floaties in it. And a stout—Guinness, for example—is fine too, because frankly it could be filled with a handful of hammered little tadpoles swimming every which way, and I wouldn’t have any idea. So that’s fine. A wheat beer, on the other hand, seems actually designed to be hazy—as if it’s taunting me—and I’m not a big fan of that.⁴

Sam Adams’ Coastal Wheat did indeed come out of the bottle a touch cloudy, though not as much as I’d expected. I sensed a slightly fruity odor, and sure enough, a quick glance at the label confirmed that this is a “Wheat Ale brewed with Lemon Peel.” The label fails to explain, however, why the beer is brewed with the shittiest part of the lemon, the part that nobody ever, ever eats. I suspect that the Redcoats took all the genuinely edible parts of our colonial lemons, leaving stout patriots like Adams to throw whatever scraps they could find into their beer. We’re lucky the Boston Beer Company chose this recipe; research indicates that Samuel Adams had also developed brews that made use of fish heads, newsprint, and tea leaves dredged back out of Boston Harbor.

That said, though, Samuel Adams Coastal Wheat is a pretty good beer. It’s a refreshing break after a long day of whatever the hell it is I do all day. While I may not go out of my way to buy it for myself any time soon—in part because I still have almost 90% of the Mystery Case left—I certainly wouldn’t turn one down if it were offered to me.

Some Guy’s abitrary but indisputably accurate rating for Samuel Adams Coastal Wheat: Two (2) lanterns hanging in the steeple of the Old North Church.

For more of Some Guy’s Adventures through the Pint Glass, check here: Day 1  Day 2  Day 3  Day 4  Day 5  Day 6

NOTES
1. I think they described themselves as “historians,” whatever the hell that means.
2. He must be Haitian.
3. Or the possibility that I may have simply made up one or two of the above facts about our founding fathers, and the American public’s beliefs about them. It’s also possible that I made up the survey . . . and also our Research Department.
4. I drink pulp-free orange juice, too, which at least means I’m consistent. I don’t see any reason why you’d need or want to know what kind of orange juice I drink, though, which is why I’ve put it here in the footnotes. Don’t tell me you actually waste time reading the footnotes.